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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: dakiom DIY interconnect recepie posted by Gerado on February 1, 2007 at 14:25:05:
Their DIY approach focuses on one single parameter, and ignores all others.The DIY cables they propose all have a common theme: use el cheapo wires, but insert an inductor in line with the cable. Some add a cap to ground, for additional filtering.
These are all intended to act as RF filters (although some may act as antenna's if not properly installed/located!) and filter RFI from the audio components. While this can be beneficial if you have severe RFI problems, and the only way to get the system to work is to take stringent measures to battle the RFI, in the vast majority of cases, the approach will be overkill, and the introduction of that much inductance in all the system's cables WILL adversely affect the transient response and "air" of a system.
In almost ALL cases, the higher performance cable designs strive to minimize cable inductance and/or capacitance, provide either inherent or added shielding from RFI, in order to achieve higher sonic performance.
The Dakiom website does preface the whole idea with the fact that a lot of consumer audio components do not have adequate RFI protection, and in this sense they have a point: most equipment is NOT optimized to exclude RFI.
But to do so would often involve additional costs, costs which the average consumer would be loath to pay, expecially when not everyone would need such levels of RFI immunity/resistance.This kind of argument on their part is similar to saying that "All properly designed equipment sounds alike", but in that kind of context, properly designed often implies near SOTA design and performance, because the SOTA components are the only ones to APPROACH the ideal that some folks feel should be the norm. Not everyone can afford to buy SOTA equipment, thus we have mid-fi equipment, and low end equipment, all of which involve compromises of some sort or another.
Often, these compromises involve less than SOTA capability in RFI immunity, which is not too surprising, given that only 10-15% or less of the consumers out there have significant issues with overt RFI.So for those of us living in the real world, we recognize that audio components that are less than SOTA involve compromises, and we allow for that in our selection process. We also would want to strive for a superior basic performance with any audio component, including audio cables, rather than to use one component as a band-aid for another.
In other words, I am recommending that folks NOT hamstring their cables in order to try and 'fix' the rest of the system, but rather, try to make (or buy) the best performing cables you can afford, and work on making the rest of the system better as well, and that would include addressing RFI immunity issues, AC power line filtering, etc.BTW, many of the esoteric aftermarket AC power cords include some sort of RFI filtering that does not add a significant amount of inductance, thus preserving the power cord's transient current delivery.
Jon Risch
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Follow Ups
- Lousy band-aid - Jon Risch 08:15:15 02/03/07 (1)
- Re: Lousy band-aid - Gerado 20:00:39 02/03/07 (0)
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