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Budget Audience Clone?

I borrowed a pair of Audience Conductor e speaker cables and they sound fantastic in my system. I have been using Canare 4s11 which sound very good for the price, warm and full and reasonable detailed with a slight softening of transients. The audience has brought everything up a couple notches, including separation, detail, bass tightness and air. My question is, are there any budget speaker cables that are sonically similar to audience? I know the conductor e is not super expensive, but there are other life priorities right now. I should also mention that I liked some of the things that Nordost Blue Heaven did for my system when I borrowed them, but I love everything that the Audience does.
clarinetmonster2
clarinetmonster2's avatar
clarinetmonster2 OP
201 posts
 
2channel8

thanks for the heads up - I'm following that auction to see where it ends up.

 Update: The Clear Day Cables are very very good and transparent but maybe not quite what I'm looking for. The Audience still has more snap to the sound with transients and a little more color in the midrange, in a good way. 

The JW Cryo Nova is very interesting and I'm not sure about it yet. Luckily I have more time with them. They made me aware of distortion on some Tidal tracks I wasn't aware of, so now I'm trying to figure out if it's something in the chain or the UMG Watermarks. ugh.

robert53
514 posts
 
Audience are excellent but expensive cables. I am using Cardas Neutral Reference cables which I purchased new from the Parts Connection cheap because they are no longer being made.  Different than Audience, but good. You can read reviews of the Neutral Reference, and one review compared them to the Audience cables, so you can read about their differences. The bottom line is you have to try them in your system to see if they work for you. They also need a lot of break in time to sound good.
clarinetmonster2's avatar
clarinetmonster2 OP
201 posts
 
robert53

thanks, 
I'll check those out. Update, I sent the Clear Day back (what a great guy Paul is. Super nice) He makes great cables for reasonable prices, just not exactly what I'm looking for. I also returned the Audience to the store I borrowed from. I think I'm keeping the JW Cryo Nova as I got to the bottom of the distortion issue. It was the NOS Philips tubes I rolled into my DAC. The orig tubes are back in and the system sounds amazing. The JW might not be the end game, but they are quite good and very engaging to listen to in my system. For $60 they are dirt cheap, so either way they are staying.
robert53
514 posts
 
Glad you solved the problem. I use tube gear and some nos tubes do produce slight distortion.
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