Does Upgrading Cables Actually SAVE You Money?

thedudeabides said:

The Mapleshade "Clifford Jordan / Live at Ethels" is a must have live recorded jazz based CD. Great music and great sound.

Despite his quirkiness and unconventional approaches, Pierre does have his followers for very good reasons.

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Although my long time favorite of the series is "Masters from Different Worlds" Clifford Jordan and Ran Blake, the CD you refer is really the most famous. I learned about it through FI, the short duration Highend magazine that was published between 1996-1999. As far as I remember Fred Kaplan produced "Masters from Different Worlds"

? http://mapleshaderecords.com/catalog.php

* Pierre said that wires touching surfaces like carpets, nylon, acrylic, vinyl, plastic, linoleum, etc., is no good. ...Wood floors are ok.

witchdoctor said:

Great, please post your thoughts about the new cables after you have had some time with them.

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The 2 Challenger 3V power cables arrived on Wednesday and were installed along with some other mainly cable upgrades. An Audience AU 24SE power cable for the Audience AR8. an Apollo earth cable for the Scarlatti clock, 2 Challenger earth cables for the Entreq Athena rack, an additional Silver Tellus ground box and a Phonosophie 13 amp gold fuse for the AU 24SE power cable.So a significant upgrade!
Was it worth it? You bet it was. Some improvement still to come I am sure but after a couple of days the benefits are readily apparent. I can't say what has done what because they all went in together so this report deals with the overall benefits.
The term music emerging from an inky black background often features in reviews and my system seemed to score well in that regard but since the upgrades the inky black background is a deep space one. Major difference from what it was and a big improvement.
Bass sound quality similarly very much better. Stronger, more defined, really clean and organic with matching improvements to mid and high frequencies.
The music projects out more in front of the speakers and the soundstage is both deeper and wider..
Vocals are clearer and the words much more clearly defined,
Only played it with CD and FM tuner so far but will play some vinyl in the next day or two.
So yes a really significant improvement and money well spent

witchdoctor, I thought you might be interested reading this: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...ounding-device&p=392513&viewfull=1#post392513 ? from post #787
That is of course if you didn't already.

By the way, I saw your thread on cables @ the other audio forum. ...Sorry about the outcome.

Cheers,

witchdoctor said:

Sounds nice. What are the Challenger Earth cables for the Entreq Athena rack? I switched the fuses on my power conditioner and was surprised by the improvement they made.

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Thanks
I don't want to seem as if I'm lazy or dodging the question but can I suggest you have a look at the website Entreq.com which will give you a better picture short of a quite long post from me which will probably not be as informative.
Feel free to come back to me thereafter and I'll be very happy to answer any questions you may have
Their products do come up for sale used on Audiogon and Canadian Audiomart from time to time

witchdoctor said:

Look's interesting, I see they have garnered a lot of awards.

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I am glad that was helpful
I have found that their products are very good and do improve sound quality.
Stillpoints are the US distributor but unless it has changed recently they were only doing the ground boxes and earth cables and the power and signal cables were not available for home trial on a no cost buy or return basis.
I believe Entreq will let you try the power and i/c cables provided you pay the return shipping if you decide not to buy.
Entreq does have the advantage that you can start modestly and upgrade/extend on an incremental basis but obviously the decision has to be yours.
I'm happy to give any further info/advice and the Entreq threads have a lot of posts from other users and from critics.

witchdoctor said:

Paradigm Shift

I have traditionally thought about building a home entertainment system by choosing speakers first, amplification that suits the speakers second, a pre-amp that matches well with the amp third, and then a source that has nice SQ and is makes it easy to access my media. I then choose cables and power cables last.

Would it be a better idea to do the opposite? Get a good wall socket and ground first, followed by a power conditioner and all of your cables. Connect a good source, pre-amp and amp and THEN audition speakers that provide a good synergy with your system?

Once your components and power are in place then begin treating the room?

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Ideally, you'd want to test components using auxiliary gear (cables, power) that do not have an effect on the speakers and components so you can judge them fairly. But I think speakers and amp will always be the first choices as speakers need to match the room and the listeners personal preferences, and amps need to match the speakers.

The issue with using any old cables and not doing AC power conditioning first is any old cable is going to tend to be warm and unresolving and untreated AC power adds grain and glare. So you can't hear the full potential of the gear and it's likely you'll select based on balancing out the warm nature of the cables, and because of the cables you won't be able to identify components that add their own harshness, glare, etc. The result of doing this, then trying to add neutral cables later is the neutral cables will then expose problems that the warmer cables kept hidden. Then the person blames the cable, saying it sounds unnatural when the truth is it's not the cable, it's other problems. So you can recognize this and deal with the problems or put the warm cables back in to hide the problems and now you have a system that isn't as resolving as it could be, which takes away from it's ability to engage the listener.

The problems with this approach is most people have no idea what to look for in a cable and the market is crowded with options, most of which are not very neutral. And you can't test cables without a system in the first place. It would take someone with some experience to be able to select neutral cables, good AC distribution, etc. before they assemble a system.

Interconnect cables are often a bottleneck and smooth out huge amounts of detail, and speaker cables that work well for the amp/speaker interface are sometimes difficult to find.

witchdoctor said:

That is the point of why I started this thread, that people keep upgrading components when the actual issue is often hidden by low grade cables.


It's sometimes easier to shop for other gear (the watts are listed on a receiver along with the features) or a speaker (sensitivity, frequency range, is listed etc). Where do you start the process shopping for a neutral cable? The specs aren't generally published and if they were, how does a neutral cable measure and what should a consumer be looking for? If my speakers are 4 ohms right away it helps me shop for a matching amp for example. I have had to learn just by reading reviews and trying new cables. I hear about different types of copper, silver, gold plated interconnects, etc. How do you know where to begin shopping for neutral? You are right, this is a big problem and I think it's why so many people are skeptical about different types of cables. Any thoughts?

In my home theater system the biggest bottle neck was the digital cable. Everything flows down stream from there and unless you get that right how can you hear what is actually coming from your source? So many people are using really bad optical cables these days and they spend $$$ on new processors and DAC's looking for an upgrade they will never really get 100% because of the bottle neck from the source to the DAC or processor.

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Yup, digital cables are often a problem, plastic optical cables aren't good and coax S/PDIF or AES/EBU cables are uniformly bad. I offer a litz-type S/PDIF which has been preferred over every other S/PDIF cable it's ever been compared to.

As far as what's a neutral cable and how to figure out what's what, I have no good ideas but it is a problem. I have some customers that look at the materials and connectors I use and know what they are getting, these people are usually very experienced and generally have a good idea of what my cables will sound like before they buy them. But this is rare and most people don't know what they are shopping for, I assume it's word of mouth and reviews that prompt people to consider certain cables.

What I'd say is that UPOCC silver is the best commonly available conductor material we have available, my OCC silver/gold alloy is even better of course ...but not exactly common. I've heard good copper IC cables like $5k+ Jorma are excellent cables but still not close to the resolution of UPOCC silver. Generally, if you have copper IC cables you can do much better but UPOCC silver is the only type of silver wire that does not introduce other problems and pure silver tends to be a bit lightweight on timbre, so some would say not natural sounding and I'd agree. Some compensate by using large gauges, Wireworld and Siltech use 17g UPOCC silver for their totl IC cables which is huge overkill. I add some gold, which produces a very realistic timbre compared to pure silver but it cost a lot more than pure UPOCC silver, which is already exceptionally expensive.

What's even worse is people who think cables should be tone controls, this is a really bad idea! While ultimately "synergy" is most important, synergy doesn't apply to truly neutral components, they will work well in any system. My DD cable using Duelund silver is purposly "voiced" (it's the only one I have that is not as neutral as possible) and the results are unpredictable, love-it/hate-it kind of cable. OTOH, my D4 is exceptionally neutral and works in every system it's tried in. The only people that may not love it are folks that want a very warm sound.

witchdoctor said:

As far as what's a neutral cable and how to figure out what's what, I have no good ideas but it is a problem.

OK, what if we start with 3 things, measurements, materials, and connectors.
Let's use easily obtained measurements for speakers as a starting point.

http://www.stereophile.com/content/goldenear-technology-triton-one-loudspeaker-measurements

and here is a competitor at the same price point:

http://www.stereophile.com/content/revel-performa3-f208-loudspeaker-measurements

Based on these measurements can anyone share which speaker they think would be more neutral? My guess would be the second one. Has anyone actually compared both?

If these principles would work for a speaker, wouldn't they work for a cable?

I totally agree that neutral is the way to go.

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Because the way way that cables affect sound is beyond the ken of we mere mortals