OT: RE: copper

[Graham Wignall]

>To me it seems the only explanation is: most audiophiles (and writers of
>those mags) have NO clue about electronics. They don't open up their boxes.
>And the manufacturers make you pay $$$ for everything they left out.

Well, FWIW, a few year ago I was quite heavily into hi-fi, and it was around the time that the 'interconnect' market started to go nuts. Not having money to burn, I bought a bunch of stuff: the thinest, cheapest solid core bellwire I could find, the heaviest solid core cooker cable I could get (like 6mm2 or bigger), and the largest multi-strand I could get. I then made them up into speaker cable sets...

Then the experimenting began:

Subjectively, the thin bellwire had a very weak bass
The multi-core (about the size of a set of car jump leads!) had a very rich bass, but the treble sort of got lost in the mix
The heavy solid core was a good all rounder.

The (first) best setup I found was the "jump leads" in parallel with the bellwire.
Then, on a whim, I removed the crossovers from the speakers, put them in separate enclosures and hardwired them to the back of the amp. I then ran two pairs to each speaker - "jump leads" for the bass and bellwire for the treble - even better.

Now, for no good reason, I have the same setup, but with four cores of solid copper (55 Amp cooker cable), and it sounds pretty cool.

The really stupid bit was when the industry started saying that cables were directional!. S'easy to test - just swap the ends round: and, yes there was a marginal difference. It probably has more to do with the fact you've reseated the connectors, and in doing so, wiped off a film of oxidation, but what the hell...

The moral of the story: cables do matter (think of the current your amp is trying to push out, and you realise why thin bellwire sounds crap), but only the truly dumb pay big bucks. You can have a weekend of fun playing your favourite music really loud and swapping cables around for only a few bucks. Get an aerosol of paint, spray the cable a funny colour, put some nice gold plated 4mm jacks on the end and tell your gullible friends they're hand made nonobtanium specials @ $6,000 per foot...