True Confessions

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George Sallit

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As some of you know I am a cable believer and have got into lively discussions about them. Recently I warned someone about buying 'the £10 dream' cheap professional cables.

I had bought a set of Maplins specials in fetching blue and red and tried them in my McIntosh set up and they were not good...but they did have the positive of an even frequency response.

So I decided to try them with my 'summer' amps the Nuforce 9s. And what do you know...they were the best? :D

I put in the Virtual Dynamics (£750), they are an explicit cable and with explicit amps it all got too much. Then in goes the Audionote silvers (£300) and everything got messy and out of focus. OK now the balanced cables..in goes the Transparent Music (£290) and it was all flat with no high frequency but still the best sounding so far. Then the Maplins specials:

There is that flat overall response, the bass is evenly balanced and powerful and the top end was present but not over-stated.
With the MC2275 valves the bass was flabby and slow, the top end disappeared and it was dynamically flat.

With the Nuforces the bass can become over tight and the top end over-stated with ill matched cables.

Is it the case the NFs are actually flat and the Maplins cable is an honest cable or is this an example of horses for courses??

BUT...this result surprised me a lot...
 
Well... as people say, you can use cable to tune your system... I guess in your case, your system is tuned by default... or is easy to tune... ;)

How I wish I could do the same in my system and reap the same rewards... it would save me a bucket! :)

Jack
 
well on the plus side ive been using Gale XL-315 speaker cable for years, and i find that it works superbly with pretty much anything i attach it to. In some systems ive found it sounds considerably better to my ears than more expensive offerings from chord, van den hul and kimber.

At £2 a metre its pretty darn cheap, and its the first thing i go for when i set up a new system, as its pretty neutral and just lets me know whats going on. Cant say fairer than that.

The only cable to really show it up in my system is the kimber 8TC that i now use. It actually sounds very similar in tonality, as the kimber is also a fairly well balanced cable, but the kimber brings a bit more air, more space and better soundstaging. Theres a sense when going back to the gale that you've just taken a little bit of the sparkle away. DIfficult to detect in isolation.

I guess what im saying (and saying slowly) is that bargains do exist, and its not always the most expensive thing that sounds best. Sometimes a cable fit for purpose is just that, perfectly fit to do the job you want it to.
 
yes - I started out with Gale xl315 upto van den hul the wind mk11 and back to van damme (3 quid a meter?) and they've all basically sounded the same...
 
"BUT...this result surprised me a lot..."

I've had a similar experience so not so surprised. It confirms for me that cables for whatever reason do sound different but especially it is about synergy with other bits of kit. This I really do believe in and has been brought home to me lately when I decided to down size but try and retain if not improve quality of listening (something I think I have achieved). But again swapping the connectors around really highlighted how different they could sound. One surprise for me was deciding I rather liked single ended - to date been an balanced fan - I'm going to try some Kimber in place of my more expensive Goertz and see what happens here - but definitely swapping around lengths and types of interconnects showed that in my experience not any old wire will do as some will have it- but also that not necessarily does very expensive wire do any better either.

Still a cable believer though - just a question of what/which - exit in a hurry.
 
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oh dear the naysayers will be down on you like a ton of bricks ..that you profane their sacred word
 

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