Which Audio Interconnect would you recommend?

To Psychicanimal and Sean, please say more about staying away from silver. And Sean, do you have any specific recommendations for my particular system? Thanks!

With silver, your system better be tight and dialed in. Your vibration control, acoustics, power filtration must be right on. If solid state components are used, they must be non grainy, non fatiguing. I use silver ICs (Ridge Street Audio MSE) and silver plated copper speaker wire (Mil spec)in my 100% solid state system but everything is tuned & dialed in. I blew my main class A amp (Forté 4a) and am using my sub amps to drive my mini-monitors. Them Kenwood monoblocks are sounding fatiguing. The system is revealling the amp's weaknesses. It boils down to that...

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I will chime in with a bit of information. I purchased a HIGHLY regarded company's interconnects and speaker cables (all silver) and they just did not sound well. I called The Cable Company and spoke with them about the situation and they mentioned that my speakers (Meadowlark almost *always* sound better with a good copper or hybrid cable). I mentioned how odd that seemed, and they replied that certain companies with dynamic drivers that are a bit "slow" (I think that was the term used) almost *always* sound better with a copper or hybrid cable.

Why I am writing here is that they mentioned the B&W line as well as my Meadowlarks that typically perform much better without silver...

I have no personal experience, but thought I would pass it along, as there isn't much more frustrating to me personally than spending tons of money, hoping the sonics will improve, and having poor sound... to find out after the fact is was not a "recommended" selection to try in the first place. I don't know if their advice is correct in your situation or not, but they were spot on with mine.

Best of luck.

Keith, it's *you*, talking about $$$. I have something for you...get a hold of a Channel Islands passive preamp ($249) and compare it to your $4K Presence. You're going to cry...

From what i gathered from the original post, Coachp was looking for interconnects for his system AND a longer cable for his subwoofer. Rather than guess at what we are dealing with here and make "goofy" suggestions, can Coach please clarify this for all of us?

I would also suggest reading this thread about selecting an IC. There are a lot of different points of view and various levels of insight from a lot of respected Audiogon members there.

Other than that, when looking for an interconnect for your subwoofer, i would suggest the following:

1) Look for large gauge solid core copper conductors

2) The conductors should be arrayed in a mild twisted pair geometry

3) The jacket of the cable should be very soft and flexible. This doesn't mean that the entire cable will be soft and flexible though, just the jacket.

The reasons i make these suggestions are because you aren't worried about skin effect for a sub. As such, a heavier gauge wire will not encounter near as much signal loss by keeping the series resistance down to a minimum over the longer run. Solid core wires are much tigher on bass response too.

As far as the twisting goes, this helps reduce the susceptability of the cable from acting as a long wire antenna i.e. it reduces the chance for RFI to enter the system. On top of that, a mild twist produces very desirable electrical impedance traits for an interconnect i.e. both low inductance and low capacitance.

The soft, rubbery jacket will help to absorb some of the vibration that the slightly more rigid solid conductors will want to try and transfer from the subwoofer cabinet back into the Pre-Pro. Due to the length of this cable and the solid conductor / twisted geometry, it would also have more of a tendency to become microphonic i.e. sensitive to air-borne vibrations, which the soft jacket will help to reduce also.

If you can't find something like this, there's nothing stopping anyone from finding the raw cabling that they would like to use and making their own. Hope this helps and answers some questions. Sean
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