drain wire

Bad form to shatter dreams without offering some hope. There is one DIY project that will greatly improve any power cord, interconnect, or speaker cable: active shielding. 

Used by Synergistic Research for years, Active Shielding is a known method and easily implemented. Ordinary battery ground strap is a braided tube pressed flat. Squish the braid, round it out, slide it over your wire. Solder a wire at one end, run it back along the inside to the other. Solder a small cap and resistor in series with this wire. Attach a 30V DC power supply. Quality matters but any cheap wall wart will do for proof of concept. Later on you can upgrade that for a nice improvement. Slide another one of those fancy plastic braided sheath things over the outside so it looks pretty. Or not. Works the same either way. 

Plug it in. Be amazed, as this actually does work.

Mr. carbon, maybe you should hold onto your DIY cable. It might sound great once you purchase your new integrated, you never know.

The reason I bring this up is that I think I remember you mentioned in a previous thread you can’t hear any sonic differences when using different tubes in your integrated. Beyond strange to hear to those of us that a tube change yields a major sonic difference, i.e., tube rolling.  

I always laugh when cable companies sell their ideas. I was glad to have helped them 50 years ago when there weren’t any cable companies. Guess what, "THEY" (the cable companies) were in their garages making cables, learning what I learned 55 years ago from my father.. I make better cable than I would EVER buy from MOST of theses cable companies..

Why are mine better? I made them, no short cuts, and NO HOG WASH. I also look at what they sell, go where THEY buy it from and buy the same way. It ain’t rocket science, as a matter of fact, it is down right simple stuff being sold as some sort of MAGIC cable.. it is not.. BUT they are extremely expensive, BUT NOT, REPEAT NOT worth some of the prices being charged.

There is no such thing as a 5K cable, after you pay for it, THERE IS...
The same goes for all the other rip off pricing.. Somebody gets pay for somebody’s KID’S college tuition. MINE went to trade schools and learned a trade or two..

You see the guy that taught me worked for SAC (MMAG) a Military Maintenance, Advisory Group a sub set of S.A.C. When you deliver a bomb that causes EVERYTHING on an airplane to stop working. You better know about wiring and shielding... I learned there is a proper type of materials and a way to connect things properly and SECURE IT... That sums up the 1000 slaps in the back of my head for talking back..

Cables SHAKING at 5-7 mile up in the air, won’t work properly.. How do you talk to the guy in the BACK of the plane, through a WIRE, when all this interference is going on around you, AND understand them?

A cable from one end of a B-36 to the other is how long? That’s right there could be NO chaffing, cuts, or breaks, you mess up the cable you pull a new one and test.. A football field for ONE cable..

Stereo cable and a lot of the TECH came from JOE BLOW, the retired Master Mechanics and Electricians from the services around the WWII, Korea, Vietnam eras. No jobs, and a stereo in the house lead to two thing, a lot of tinkering and a lot of drinking... I just did the tinkering part, my father was NEVER out of work.. BUT the drinkin’ part... There were a lot of Ham operators back then too.. Smart cookies..

Do GREAT cables exist? YES. Do you have to pay someone else to make them? Maybe. I’m glad I don’t. Do they make a HUGE difference, OH HELL YES!!. I guess because I’ve always used good cables, I’ve never heard better, that would make me change to their cables..

I’m A/Bing a Ribbon cable that cost 110.00 usd against another ribbon cable that cost 13K. I’ll take the one for 110.00 with the terminal ends I changed to silver over red copper (so they said) 29.00 more..

Cable companies are in business to reliever you of your money, NO MORE. Some just leave their patrons with more in their pockets.. LOL
Others are so "Middle man America", they want to do one thing BUT MAKE YOU feel good about it.... 10-20k RCAs.. I just laugh to no end, an RCA that cost more than my 140.00 usd Ribbon Speaker ICs.. NEVER