Some Expensive items...

Gary W. Graley

Gary W. Graley

“Imagination is more important than knowledge"
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
Joined
Mar 2, 1999
Messages
27,330
Title should have read "Some Expensive items..." must be getting old?!?;)

With my thoughts moving more to home theater and stereo equipment, I've sold off a lot of my collection and directed my leather working funds towards improving the speakers/receiver/dvd player and now looking at some interconnect cables, amazing what prices these things have on them! Take a look at the first item on this Page here and keep in mind....it's JUST to connect up speakers to the sound source!!! ;)

G2

ps
looking for a Kimber Kable D60 interconnect wire myself...anyone having one available let me know...
 
I can only imagine what would happen if my husky puppy decided to use those as a chew toy!! ARGH!

In all seriousness, in order to "hear" any better sound quality from those cables, everything needs to be clear, clean and high quality sound and power. The cost of high-end audio is just insane in my book. If I had $30K lying around for just cables, I would look at buying real estate or other investments instead...not cables! LOL...

(check out the $250K projector:eek: :eek: :eek: )
 
Think of wires as a component. They do sound different. I've represented several high end wire companies over the years and will say that the quality of the wires and cables used does count towards the final performance of the system. In very high resolution systems, the wires can get quite expensive.

John

PS: If you can consider 30K in wire as an option, you've probably got your real estate needs taken care of already, IMHO.
 
Gary,

I fixed the thread title for you. ;)
 
Originally posted by K.V. Collucci
Gary,

I fixed the thread title for you. ;)
Click to expand...

Much thanks Ken!

And John, I'm finding out that cables are expensive! I need a nice solid Digital Coax cable to go between my dvd and receiver, looking at the Acoustic Research Pro II or a Monster 1000V...
G2
 
Sweet sasst molassy! It's gonna take a lot of sheath work to pay for those, buddy. I think we can tell who they are marketing to by this blurb from their "About Us" page:

Whether you are looking for basic control of your home in Palo Alto, a complete retrofit of your town home in Italy, or a fully integrated system for your new estate in Florida, Aurant does them all.
Click to expand...
 
Gary,

For high performance wires, look at MIT, Audioquest or Tara Labs. Maybe even Tributaries. but not Monster or AR. AR is now just an old favorite name now held by a nameless corporation. Wire is not their specialty. Monster is certainly in the wire business, and actually created the whole high performance wire category, but has become such a large marketing machine, that IMHO, there are better values available. I will toast Noel Lee (the Head Monster) for throwing a hell of a party. At CES two weeks ago he sponsored a free concert for 5000 people with Carlos Santana that I was able to attend.

John
 
You forgot to mention the thick acrylic plinth and the four adjustable feet.
That's got to be worth,what,10 bucks?

Sheesh,you know you are a redneck if;
Your speakers are connected with 10 cents a foot 12 gauge lamp cord.
 
If you wanna spend that amount of money on those cables you better have some great components and a great room to play it in...

If you've got lousy acoustics in the room then it won't matter...that extra 29000 you paid for the cables are just gonna go to waste....

But i'm thinking this is aimed at people who actually have theatres in their houses....
 
Take it from someone who has a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Science and the Sciences, this is all bunk. Ordinary copper wire will do just fine. The biggest thing you have to worry about is oxidation on the stripped ends. The solution: Each time you connect and disconnect, cut off an inch and strip fresh. Actual cost of this solution: One penny!

I like and use the Monster Cable brand wire for three reasons: First, it's not that much more expensive. Second, they use more strands which simply makes it more flexible and easier to handle. And, third, It's got heavier insulation so that when the vacuum cleaner grabs ahold of it, it's not so easily damaged. Everything else about it is bunk.

Wrapping a wire in carbon fiber is for one purpose: to reduce tribioelectric noise. Tribioelectric noise is noise introduced into a cable when the cable flexes and moves. Most speaker installations don't flex and move. Furthermore, tribioelectric noise is in the microvolts and at gigaohm impedances. The output of your amplifier is nominally twenty-five to fifty volts (UL get nervious if you exceed fifty volts), and four to eight ohms. If your sound system could benefit from a low-tribioelectric cable the place for it would be on your phonograph inputs or maybe your line-level signal inputs.

By the way, Gold on most consumer electrical cables makes them worse. Why? Because the layer of gold they apply is applied with a process called ion deposition. There is just barely enough gold there to give color. If you look at it under a powerful microscope, the gold layer is actually porus so it reduces the contact area. You'd be better off with a heavy coating of soft tin (which is what you get on the $1.98 K-Mart cables).

If you're worried about the resistance or impedance of your speaker cables, don't shell out for special, oxygen-free cables, instead slurge another penny-a-foot on the next higher wire guage. Problem solved.

And if you're worried about skin-effect, take it from an engineer and physicist: Don't. Skin-effect (the tendency of electrons to prefer to travel closer to the surface of a wire rather than in the core) is frequency-dependant and not appreciable below a megahertz. Your ear can not hear frequencies above about 22KHz even if you have perfect hearing. There is evidence that humans can have a non-audible perception of frequencies up to about 100KHz. That's still an order of magnitude below where skin-effect even begins to be apprecible.

As I say, I like the Monster brand cable because it's not much more expensive and it's nicely made. But heavy-guage lamp cord will be just fine otherwise.

It's all bunk. You recongize knife-bunk, the knife guaranteed to never get dull, made of a super-secret unobtanium alloy, specially developed for the US Navy Seals. Well, this is just audio electronics bunk. But bunk is bunk. Recognize it and don't fall for it.
 
I agree with Gollnick. The whole "mystery cable" thing is bogus. Buy a decent quality cable and call it quits. You can gain a 10,000% greater change in sound quality by moving your speakers an inch in any direction.

I got into high-end audio 15 years ago. I went through putting green magic marker on the edges of my CDs to polishing the CDs with magic fluid. I bought exotic cables and expensive DA converters. It's all bogus. As long as you have a decent CD player, a good preamp, a powerful enough amp to drive your speakers, and a good pair of speakers, there isn't much more. All that's left is a change in speakers (with appropriate amp to match) and room acoustics.

If audiophiles spent nearly as much time and money on the room as they did on the cables and other nonsense, they'd have much better sound. If you want to play with room acoustics at all, shoot me an email. I think I still have some nifty test CDs on the shelf. A good test CD and a Radio Shack decibel meter can really help solve some nasty problems.
 
GEEEEEEZ!!!...And people say Sebenzas are expensive! :eek:
That makes me glad that I'm not into the more complex audio stuff. I'm more than pleased with my Bose Acoustic Wave. :cool:

Paul
 
There used to be a guy on the sound-off circuits (or maybe it was a demo car) that had all these silver connectors/wires here's a taste, including power wires like 2 guage from the battery, 4 gauge from the blocks to the amps, etc.
Been several years, but IIRC, the speaker and power wires for the system were in excess of $100k.
Buzz is definitely right about the room. Same goes for a car.
Monster Cable is about as high end as I get, personally.
 
Gary,

Chuck is absolutely right - all the overpriced "audiophile" cable is nothing more than snake oil. I've been an audio engineer for 20 years, and I sold and installed sound systems full time for 10 of those. I can tell you that, while cheap-ass radio shack cable is indeed audibly inferior, inexpensive professional grade cable is indistinguishable from any of the "hooey" brands by even the most supposedly "golden" ears. Put it this way; if that cable were actually any better, wouldn't the studios where the music you listen to was recorded use it? They don't. They use standard bulk cable from Belden, Alden or Canare. And bulk connectors from Switchcraft or Neutrik.

Go to a pro audio (sound reinforcement; not hi-fi) dealer or good music store with measurements and tell them what you need. They'll custom make you cables for a tiny fraction of what the hi-fi stores will rape you for. If you have any trouble finding someone locally, email me and I'll do it for you. And it won't cost you $30,000.

In the next few weeks I'm installing a sound system in a church with over 40 microphone channels, separate house and monitor mixers, 12 monitor outputs - literally thousands of feet of wire. Since they already own the equipment and I'm not doing the rigging, the total bill including labor and wire will only be around $6K.

As for people that pay that and more for one interconnect; well, Barnum was right.

Cheers,
Joe
 
Hehehe… Yeah. Green magic marker. When CDs first became the norm in high-end audio, there was a plethora of magic CD treatments. One was a special green magic marker that you coated the very edge of the CD with. It was supposed to absorb ambient laser light. What a crock.

I even still have some CDs with those special Monster Cable weight rings. The weight rings were plastic stickers that you stuck to the top outside rims of your CDs. The stickers were supposed to absorb excess vibration while spinning and enhance centrifugal force.

I can’t tell you how many magic CD polishes I tried, guarantees to tame those nasty digital violin concertos.

So what is everybody running for stereo equipment, if you don’t mind me asking? I haven’t bought anything in quite a while now. Anyway, here’s what I’ve got. I’m not sure of all the model numbers, as I’m typing this at work.

1. Audio Alchemy CD Transport and DA Converter – Rock solid and reasonably priced.

2. Cary Audio hybrid tube/solid state pre-amp – Tubes may not be all that accurate, but I do love the sound of them.

3. B&K ST202 Plus Amp – Tons of cajones.

4. Vandersteen 2CI speakers – I got these for a song after somebody vandalized my Thiel CS-2.1s. I never much liked the sound of the Vanderscreams until I moved into my new house this past spring. My new listening room is as if it were designed for playing the Vandersteens.

5. My speaker cables are made from Radio Shack RG58U coax cable and custom terminated with copper spade lugs, biwired to the Vandersteens.

6. Interconnects are all low line Audioquest.

As far as my new listening room goes, it’s located in the basement of my house. The concrete walls really help to reduce miscellaneous vibrations. The concrete has a layer of insulation and then a drywall along the top and paneling along the bottom. Some very low pile carpeting covers the floor. The room has a drop ceiling which I thought would be a problem, but has turned out to be a blessing. Those ceiling panels really seem to absorb sound, keeping certain frequencies from loading up too badly.

After all the furniture had been moved into the room, I broke out my test CDs and decibel meter. I ran test tones at varying frequencies and recorded the measurements from certain spots in the room. Then I just moved things around a little until most of the large decibel spikes were eliminated. The tough part was positioning the speakers to eliminate those nasty frequency spikes, while still retaining some semblance of a sound stage.
 
Like i said...those $30000 cables are for those people who have proper cinemas in their homes...then they can say to their guests how much they spent just on the cables...

People who have too much money....

They don't know anything about these things...so if they can afford it they'll just buy the most expensive stuff there is...those audio companies thrive on these sort of people...

Gollnick, do you know how much it costs to make one of those $30000 cables? I'm interested in finding out how much the company profits from these cables...
 
First I'm gonna don my Nomex underwear. Now that that's done, I'm going to solidly disagree with both Chuck and VideoJoe. Wire does make a difference. There is more to coherently reproducing sound than can be predicted by measuring capacitance, resistance, impedance etc.. I'm not an engineer, but I've been dealing with this stuff for over 20 years on a day to day basis and there most certainly are differences. If you want to prove it to yourself, go buy several different sets from a dealer with a liberal return policy and listen for yourself. You might find some of the differences to be subtle, or not worth the money, to you. But I'd bet, you will hear that there are differences. VideJoe even said that cheap Rat shack wire sounds bad, so he does believe that there are differences, but like many studio guys, has bought into the idea that as long as you're not using junk, everything will be fine. Just buy a roll of Canare or Mogami and be done with it. If it makes no difference, why even spend the money to even go that far? As far as the comment about none of the studios using better cables, that's just not true. While it is true that there's plenty of low budget studios around that are just cheap (and sleazy, hey, it is the record industry). There are also some who listen and care about the sound of their final product. Call the psople at LucasArts. They heartily endorse and use MIT cables. I've been in some of the studios at Capitol in Hollywood where they were using better stuff as well.

To try to compare wiring a church to setting up a good home hifi is a completely unrealistic comparison. The goals are completely different. In large venue sound reinforcement, no attention is paid at all to the soundstage presentation, harmonic structure or flat frequency response. Most sound rigs for that kind of application don't reproduce much over 12K because a tweeter that will deliver every last detail isn't sturdy enough to live ling in an environment where a microphone occasionally gets dropped and the sound system has to overcome the ambient noise of hundreds of people and fill a 100,000 cubic feet of airspace. Pro sound and home hifi are two different worlds. It's like comparing sports cars to big rigs. They both have wheels and motors, but that's about where the similarities end.

While I mentioned above that I'm not an engineer, I have had several customers over the years who were, and in fact true rocket scientists. When I still worked in retail, I have loaned out cables for in home (away from salesman) auditions hundreds of times. I had a few of the rocket scientists (guys working on satelite communications)take cables into their labs to measure them after listening to the differences. Then after running them on HP waveform analyzers and the like, end up buying $300.00 per meter interconnects, even after admitting that they couldn't measure any differences, but that they could hear a difference.

Like any hobby, when you get into the extreme reaches of the high end, the prices are astronomical, and the differences sometimes subtle, but it's all about what floats your particular boat. My best recommendation is find a dealer who will allow in home comparisons and judge for yourself.

John
 
It comes down to your ear education. It takes a few years to educate yourself for good sound. And once you've done it to yourself, there's no going back.

Phil
 
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