2. cables
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cheapest cable upgrade ever

I have recently been playing with a very cheap upgrade of signal carrying cables: Attach one or two 1.5V AAA batteries with the ‘-‘ pole in the direction of the signal’s source. Simple strapping on with electrical tape) suffices, no need to connect anything. The benefits are very audible. The weak electric field conditions the outer layer of the conductor to improve electron flow, resulting in a strong increase in transparency and dimensionality. This works particularly well on the digital cable going into the router and streamer as well as the speaker cables (on the latter ‘+’ alligns with plus and ‘-‘ with minus, i.e. two batteries per single post speaker.

At a minimum it is a low cost bit of fun

antigrunge2
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larry5729's avatar
larry5729
1,008 posts
 

Could you provide a photo?  I have no idea of what you are talking about.

canibefrank
406 posts
 

I put like 6 AAA on my XLR speaker connections and the sound became too bright and compressed. I can only deduce that doing so angers the Time-Space Continuum Gawds. I scaled back to only my AirPlulse A200 and the DAC input... 

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eworkflow
10 posts
 

Well, there is no conventional basis for this idea. For me, perhaps the fact that batteries contain a metal case. When placed close to the cable conducting a high-frequency signal creates a sort of ferrite-like choke that can have an effect on some high-frequency signals (including digital audio carrier range) and have a low-pass filter effect on them. As I think was mentioned before here, batteries are not static electricity devices (so there is no static electric field influence) nor they are creating any other field since there is no current flowing (except the one discharging disconnected batteries in time).

Regardless, I used (3) AAA batteries, and fixed them with a rubber band evenly around the end of a silver-conductor USB cable (which is typically considered the "harshest: sounding, so I could expect most of the sound "smoothing" mentioned here) with the polarity-oriented as advised here. In short, I had no audibly distinguishable result from it so far. I am almost afraid to mention here that in my setup I hear differences between almost all USB cables I try.

Please notice that this idea is interesting not because I can explain or discredit it, but because I have an interest in phenomena that exist which do not have a good explanation, at least for now. For now, let's face it. no conclusion can be achieved, not certainly here (except through a formal double-blind study). It's certainly worth mentioning that how batteries work is still being investigated today, including their mysterious self-oscillation property mentioned here, which may or may not have anything to do with this topic: Dynamical theory for the battery's electromotive force - Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (RSC Publishing)

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