cheapest cable upgrade ever


I have recently been playing with a very cheap upgrade of signal carrying cables: Attach one or two 1.5V AAA batteries with the ‘-‘ pole in the direction of the signal’s source. Simple strapping on with electrical tape) suffices, no need to connect anything. The benefits are very audible. The weak electric field conditions the outer layer of the conductor to improve electron flow, resulting in a strong increase in transparency and dimensionality. This works particularly well on the digital cable going into the router and streamer as well as the speaker cables (on the latter ‘+’ alligns with plus and ‘-‘ with minus, i.e. two batteries per single post speaker.

At a minimum it is a low cost bit of fun

antigrunge2

This actually sounds "reasonable" to me that this could work in some, but not all scenarios.  William E Low andl Richard Vandersteen have successfully marketed a similar (distant cousin?) concept for many years.  After I get a few things off my plate, I'd like to give it a try.  Who knows, antigrunge2 might inducted into Audio Hall of Fame for introducing this concept?

I also find it iinteresting that posts like things extract the worst behaviors from the Technomutants and Neadertweaks who hide in the bushes waiting to ambush those who don't agree with them.  They are terribly offended when someone doesn't ask their permission before experimenting with something new.  They rush onto the scene posing as superheros protecting us from psuedoscience.  But, I don't quite understand why they are so anxious to broadcast to the high end community that they have huge gaps in their knowledge base, and how little they actually know about high performance audio.  Maybe trying posting how smart they are on the quilting forum, or ingrown toenail forum?  I'll be they'd think they're really smart there.  Sorry, we're just not buying it.

It's called "intellectual humility".  Example:  "Hey, I tried this thing and it seemed to make my system sound better.  I'm not sure why it works, but I like it!"  Antigrunge2 has intellectual humility.  Give it a try sometime?

@ antigrunge2:  Thanks for the post.  It was a great representation of why we are here.

BTW, there are 6- and 12-Volt polarized batteries too. I may try them both.

ozzy

Just tried some 12 V polarized batteries on my usb cables and the sound became too compressed, so there is something to this idea.

Just not sure about the 1.5 V effectiveness at this time. (a couple of hours)

ozzy

@ozzy 

may I suggest you try 2 AAA’s on the ethernet to the streamer and the USB to the Dac? In my case it really worked