Cables, Interconnects and More Cables???

Sam: RS flat braided ribbon 14AWG MegaCable is far from generic. It's pretty cool stuff and astonishingly different from bellwire or lampcord. Maybe if they branded it Radio Shacque...hmmm. Carl: that burlap makes nice grillcloth! :-)

Rock, out of curiousity, what other cables have you directly compared to RS megacable? This would give us some perspective of where you are coming from, also do you work for Radio Shack, hehehe.....regards Sam

Sam until recently I was oogling Kimber 4TC/8TC. 30 years ago ordinary lampcord seemed to do the trick. Ten years ago I went to original Monster cable, mainly because I thought it looked cool and I'd heard thicker was better. I recently cut some of it clear through near the soldered termination. The cross section of the strands was quite tarnished. That convinced me that new wire will outperform old stuff ten times out of ten, no matter how cleverly it was designed or marketed. Adding this experience to a perusal of the Belden and HAVE catalogs suggested that $10 each spades and arcane dialectrics have little place in professional electronics. This only increases my reluctance to spend the big bucks for a lot of hoo-ha. For the time being at least, I'm completely satisfied with the sound I'm getting and simply can't imagine how it could get any better. I listen to mostly acoustic music. The tonality is right, the imaging is great, it even sounds real from the next room haha. Let's face it. Somebody's biting the bullet if RS can sell eight gold plated spades for $5 and Kimber wants $40. Who's kidding who?

You'll never know till you try. Not all cables even use metal conductors, some use carbon fibre, and will sound consistent for eons. In general, specialty cable manufacturers make quality products, and take care to slow the oxidation process. Silver oxide even conducts electricity, where copper oxide doesn't..........Anyway, "Rock", you aren't alone. Most folks think all of this audiophile stuff is "hooha", mostly because they don't care about music enough to play it on anything other than a clock radio or boombox. Doesn't mean they know something we don't, it means quite the opposite. Food for thought....

THE FINAL WORD.... Believe it or not I had the "cheap" RS stuff on my system before I bought the Audioquest cables. And for the vast majority of the “unmusical and they like it that way” public these are EXCELLENT cables. They are at least a vast improvement over many other so called audio cables - many costing much more mula. I moved to the Audioquest cables and was satisfied with the "slight - but noticeable" increase in sound quality - even with the exponential price increase. But - since all of the hoopla on this thread and after doing much more research on my own - guess what I finally bought.... I went to AudioAdvisor and could not resist the great deal they were giving on MIT Terminator 2. I bought interconnects and speaker cables and I have conscientiously been burning them in for the last 200 hours straight (my wife hates me now but I still have another 200 hours to go). I think (and that is all that really matters) that they have given my system a tremendous jump in overall sound quality. I am already hearing things in my Vinyl and CD’s that I have never heard before. So… I came…. I posted…. I listened…. I researched…. I laughed…. I responded… And then I bought the Terminator 2’s.. And I am happy…. Nuff said…