RCA interconnect recommendation

I've been suckered into expensive cables, but not anymore. The question needs to be asked, are they better or is it just hype and one-upmanship with a massive dose of subliminal stimulus?

Who can blame the manufacturers for tapping into a targeted market with marketing designed to bamboozle the gullible.

@pedroeb kind of a funny subject
do you think car sales are any different and yet we all seem to "mostly" navigate thru that nonsense.
I'll stick to engineering is engineering

Lots of advice, some good some, well pure nonsense.

Price has nothing to do with performance.  Learn why something sounds the way it does first then you can make informed decisions.

What transforms one system does not always transform another system.  We recently build speakers cables - one system the improvement was probably the biggest improvement I have ever heard from a cable.  In our main system there was improvement but no where near the extent of the other system.

Budget Digital Cable - Audio Envy about $150 - better digital cable Jorma MSRP around $1K.

Audio Tekne makes some nice 500 strand Litz copper ICs.  Look for them used.

Hapy Listening.

Cables are the worst bang for buck in the system. If you feel the need to spend much more money, you would do much better to upgrade a component.

That said, cables do sound subtley different. Since you already have cabling that works, I suggest that you try before you buy. Make every new cable prove itself. If the difference isn’t clearly audible, then put the money into a fund for a component upgrade.

Or, DIY. You can get perfectly acceptable RCA connectors made by Switchcarft from Digikey for $5 or so, which are reasonably close to WBT or ETI at several times the price. You can also buy very good cabling from Mogami or Canare, professional microphone cable, for $1 a foot. The sheilding on both of these is excellent, and is necessary if you live in a microwave-rich environment.

The only exotics I use are cartrdige-to-phono. The rest are Canare Starquad microphone cable with ETI RCA’s, which serves an ESL system with a higher end Koetsu as source.

IMO. YMMV.

Take a look at Hapa cables. I bought a Breathe Copper and a Quiescence Copper with the upgraded connectors for my system which is quite frugal compared to most here, but holy crap did it make a huge difference in clarity without any harshness. On paper it would seem a waste of money but hearing the difference first hand it is amazing the difference, and it's an upgrade that will last. Well worth a look.