Silver cables - Great price!!

Gallaine..I forgot one thing! You are using Sergui's ETS cables, and I have found these less than impressive. Too bright for my tastes, but a good price when compared to comparable cables. Remeber ETS means something like enter the silver, they are the least expensive of his cable. I started with them, but then I took a chance on his Fineline cross wrapped. Unfortunately the difference is HUGE and immediately noticable!!!!! I say unfortunately because I was hoping the difference would be negligable so I could keep using the inexpensive ones!!! I still have the original ETS's I bought but don't use them on the main system ( about $40,000 worth of stero toys!) Oh well I thought, just picked up ONE MORE expensive habit...just gotta work harder!!!! Enjoy! Steve

Galliane, Just checked home grown's site again. They use 22g wire, similar to the light star audio cables that used to be on audigon. This in my opion is way too big. Remeber the signal you are transmitting is tiny so they wire can be extremely small and still carry the signal. The thin wire does make a big difference, no or minimal skin effect. Think about it, If you used say 00g wire do you think it would better or worsen the sound quality? Considering electrons have mass they probable demonstrate similar properties to the rheological characteristics seen in complex fluid dynamics. This effect makes the bass and treble frequencies travel in different areas of the wire if it's too large. Very thin wires make it much more difficult to allow this to happen. If it sounds crazy, just give the finelines a try. If you are unhappy I'm sure Sergui would take them back and send you a couple ETS cables to replace them. Though if your like me you will probably have a new expensive habit to keep up with!Take care! Steve

Monroemed. Kevin @ Homegrown emailed this evening and Gallaine's method of breaking in cables is sound and will work fine. Kevin also noted that there should be a significant improvement in the sound at around the 50 hour mark. Since everything is kind of on auto pilot right now, I think that I will run them the full 200 hours or seven more days. I really know nothing about the fine points of (or more importantly what's even possible with) the new interconnects (I took fifteen years off from this hobby). This is only the third pair that I will have heard at home and one of those pairs is from RS. If they sound good with my Castle/MF gear I will post next week. If they don't I expect that it will be due to the lighter LF of my current system and will then try something copper or carbon within my budget, whatever that is, I seem to have lost track at this point. Mapleshades also look interesting and affordable, but the endorsements are a little too orgasmic to take seriously. I thank everyone for their help.

There are a lot of new cable kids on the block. The latest thing is very thin diameter wire in the cables. I heard two cottage industry cables last year featuring tiny diameter wire. While they were nice in the midrange and treble, bass response was ABYSMAL(nonexistent?). I can't say for sure yet, because these new cables have not been weighed in on by enough of our great comrades to draw ultimate conclusions. But, the bass response issue worries me. We don't read anything regarding bass response in these new ads, do we? Why? Let's not further propagate the myth that silver cables are weak in the bass, just because we are not using the proper diameter wire. All cables are a compromise, I will choose the full audio spectrum for my cables. I do not yet say emphatically that this is the way these thin diameter cables sound, my opinions are only based on my limited experience. I look forward to the impressions of other people's experience regarding the issue I raise. I just don't want us to fall into the flavor of the month cable. Changing for change sake.

I am borrowing some XLO cables from a guy. I don't know much about them and it doesn't appear they have a Web site, but their coating is clear and the wire's I see within are thin, and they do not lack bass. If anyone knows more about these cables, please fill in the blanks. I am using XLO Reference Series Type 2.