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An interconnect story

Posted by Bold Eagle (A) on April 30, 2007 at 19:18:57

The Boston A70's I reported on a few days ago had a short life with me. Plucked bass in the lower ranges made one woofer buzz, and besides that, they did not compare at all well to the Advents. They got swapped for a Rotel RCD-955AX CD player.

I really like my RCD-971 and wanted a second good CD player, so I tried the 955AX. Once I got it home, I hooked the 955 up to another input on the NAD and dug out a pair of matched CD's. (this is the interesting part)

The two sounded very similar, but not identical, the 955 being a little lower in level in some ranges and having slightly more sibilent highs. It then dawned on me that the interconnects I was using for the comparison were not the same. I had a 12" pair on the 971 and a 1 meter pair of a higher capacitance design on the 955. I dug out a set of 1/2 meter DiskWasher Gold-ens low capacitance cables and tried again. Now the two players sounded 100% identical.

I had the same experience 5 years ago with a different model of NAD and a Sony CDP-XA1ES series player. Going from the same kind of 1 meter, 100 pF IC to a 12", 28 pF low capacitance DIY made a dramatic difference. Same effect, too; the highs got a lot smoother and cleaner. On the Sony the highs were unlistenably shrill with the 1 meter cable. Nothing subtle about it. Frequency response measurements showed nothing.

Part of the issue (I think) is the rather high input capacitance on the NAD preamp, around 400 pF. Still, if you work out the reactance of 500 pF at 10 kHz, it's around 30,000 ohms. So there should not be any loading effects. Besides, if the capacitance acted to load down the CD player's output, the highs ought to get softer, not brighter. So something else is at work here.

Oh yes, the 1 meter IC's are Tara Labs Prism 3 at 100 pF. The 12" IC was made from a a cut down Radio Shack Gold extension cable (male on one end female on the other) which had 54 pF capacitance at a 3 foot length. I added Radio Shack gold plated plugs and made 2 of the 12" IC's from the longer one. The DiskWasher 1/2 meter IC's measure 34 pF.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd certainly welcome them.

Jerry

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