2. cables
  3. 178187-149317

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
tksteingraber's avatar
tksteingraber
642 posts
 

@antigrunge2  Thank you for sharing this suggestion.  Ok mind blown again…I tried this tweak on my main system and got similar results that I got on my second system prior.  Better bass, clarity and definition.  

Placed battery pairs on the following:

Ethernet cable from router to FMC (2 batteries)

Ethernet cable from FMC feeding my Bricasti M5 network streamer  (2 batteries)

USB cable from M5 to my DAC (2 batteries)

Speaker wires both + and - (8 batteries)

Interconnects from DAC to amp (4 batteries)

Not really able to determine which batteries make the most impact 

but the sum of all batteries definitely improves the SQ.  All batteries are staying in place.  Crazy simple inexpensive tweak…much appreciated!

jerryg123's avatar
jerryg123
3,429 posts
 

@ozzy I have fiber also and tried it to no avail. Even tried on the modem input…nothing. 
 

I think some of us will roll donuts on this tweak. Works for some but not all. 

pedroeb
493 posts
 

When you say you added multiple batteries, were they connected so they produced a higher voltage; for example, 8 x 1.5v = 12v.

 

aolmrd1241
1,042 posts
 

I just tried 16 AAA’s total on my speaker bi wire pairs... 8 per side...have to report that that many batteries closed in the sound way to much...Back to 8 total and it sounds like I posted earlier. More does not necessarily mean better.

aolmrd1241
1,042 posts
 
antigrunge2...

How do you orientate the batteries + and -  terminals on rca interconnects?  Is it the same way as the speaker cables?

Thanks...Mark

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