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Re: Bottleheader's Favorite Speaker Wires and IC's (DIY or 'store bought')?

I've had a LOT of different wire in my system.(AQ, XLO, Kimber, MIT, Cardas, Tara etc) For a long time I was using AQ crystal ICs and F88 for speaker wire. F88 was (and still is) one of the best speaker wires I ever tried, but nobody else seemed to think so. (AQ never advertised it) Its a ribbon cable design of 20g OFC long grain copper at around $5 a foot, MUCH better than type4 or type6 but still not too expensive.

Then I found out about Hiwire. Made by a guy in his garrage it didn't have very wide distribution (mostly in the Bay Area), but sounds awesome. I wound up with a full set of hiwire ICs and speaker cables. It wasn't cheap ($400 for ICS, $900 for speaker), but sounded better than anything else I had heard. I never liked silver in either IC or speaker.

Since getting into Bottlehead stuff I've been trying various DIY ICS and speaker cables. I tried several different CAT5 and they were quite good, not quite as good as the Hiwire, but MUCH cheaper and almost as good. Then I tried the twisted pair of Docs 18g magnet wire. WOW, this is GOOD. For my system now this is better than the Hiwire or CAT5. I'm still using the Hiwire ICS.

I met Allen Wright at VSAC and spent quite a while talking with him about cables, I was really impressed with what he has to say about the subject. I'm in the process of putting together a couple of his IC designs, from what I heard at the show I think these are going to be the best yet.

John S.


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  • Re: Bottleheader's Favorite Speaker Wires and IC's (DIY or 'store bought')? - John Swenson 11:15:57 02/26/04 (0)


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