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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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In Reply to: Newbie DIY Interconnect Questions posted by yggahs on December 22, 2005 at 09:24:36:
DIY is great and if you can solder, ICs are quite easy.But I must tell you that the strongest impression I've ever found with cable changes was with the speaker cables. ICs tend to be more subtle than that. Power cords are somewhere in between.
First, Chris Ven Haus IS great to work with. His designs are terrific, including his speaker cable Cat 5 (but be aware of the amp capacitance issue there), whether or not you use his materials. I've recently started using his materials for power cords and found them relatively inexpensive and very very good! Chris' helical IC design is still considered a classic and excellent design, though I never made these myself.
Second, there are many IC designs, plus the issue of metals, how much metal, etc. You can make yourself nuts over this, but don't need to.
Soooo, my first IC experience was with Greg Weaver's Signal Tape design with ordinary RS copper wire wrap, 3M packing tape, and some RS gold RCAs. Really opened my eyes to what ICs could do. This is an easy job, BTW. If you have some silver wire in suitable gauge, that's the top of the line for this design. It's not the strongest nor the prettiest design, however.
After that I graduated to a high quality Silver Audio silver set and they were better than the above.
But the real revelations for ICs came when I tried out Joe Mazzaglia's Auricle Audio Design Encores (on Audiogon). Joe retails these for under $200 a 3' set, but actually offers them on auction occasionally too. His original Encores really brought out lots more detail than the Silver Audios, plus they eliminated a lot of digititis (think glassy piano on CD)! That was a real shock. Then I upgraded to his Encore Ka set and these are even better and smoother.
The lesson I learned from Joe's designs was that copper or silver both work differently in different systems, but simple designs and ESPECIALLY low metal mass terminations work best. That means that if you DIY you will want to consider something like the Bullets or some of the inexpensive RCAs without any extra metal jackets or bulk, or even the no-termination setups. You'll have to look all this up in the archives here.
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Follow Ups
- Some experience and some suggestions - bartc 06:17:37 12/24/05 (0)
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