Is a captured good tonearm cable better than a high quality one DIN connection?

The problem with captured cables, they seldom do well in captivity.

In my younger more fanatical days, when I was borderline addicted to the odor of burning solder flux 😜, I did all that teo_audio described.....three different times with three different tone arm wires. Totally worth it! However, a PITA. In fairness, not nearly as difficult to do with an ET2 than with pivoting arms. I know audiophiles are often accused of using hyperbole, but the sonic improvements gained by the elimination of multiple solder joints, plugs and dissimilar cables in the signal path were not only very significant, but also different in nature compared to improvements gained by actual upgrades of gear. The purity of sound one gains by smoothing out the “bumps is the road” caused by cabling (not just in tone arms) is wonderful. At one point I had my system ENTIRELY hard wired with not a single plug or jack in sight except at the ends of power cables. I ruined a phono cartridge doing this and will never do THAT again; those days are over.

Good thing Frogman your gonna burn yourself. 

I once gutted a perfectly good Conrad Johnson preamp. Mounted the main board in a new chassis, the power supply in another chassis, eliminated all the switches except the selector switch and volume control,
and wired the whole thing with silver wire I got from Mark Levinson using the best switch, pot and RCA jacks I could find at the time. I was using Acoustats that had their own high voltage power amps. I suppose it sounded better for a while. But, is was not long before it was bested by a Threshold preamp. Then, the speakers were bested by a new model but the bass still sucked so I started up with sub woofers and on and on and on.  

It all boils down to my motto: the best connector is no connector. No matter how expensive a connector might be, no matter how elegant it may appear, and no matter what precious metal it is made of, you are better off getting rid of it.

@millercarbon,

I like cables that weren’t captured.