Strange Cable Experiment


I have an inexpensive UTurn Orbit turntable (Ortofon Blue cartridge). a cheap Cambridge Audio phono preamp on purpose. My main front end is CD's, so my real money has gone there (relatively speaking). Recently, through a unexpected complicated swap out deal, I've connected my phono stuff together with cables which retail for more than the components I've just mentioned. Previously they were linked by some low price Pangea RCAs. (Maybe $50 per pair). Now the interconnect between the turntable is the Mad Scientist Ultra Black ($399)and from the Phono pre the Tellurium Q Black II. ($500) And let me tell you...the leap in quality has been nothing short of mind blowing. This cheap rig seriously competes with my CD set up. No I can't believe my ears either. A very strange experiment indeed. But how? Why? Stupid transparent and vocals are ....scary real. I never would recommend doing this on purpose but the results are bewildering! Opinions?

allears4u

Strange? Not at all. It would be strange if the cables didn’t make a difference in a resolving system. No blind test needed. Although with those cataract glasses I bet Jason is an expert in blind testing. 

"Any change is perceived as positive in a majority of the times."

Despite this pronouncement from our resident "voice of doom", congratulations on your epiphany.

Makes a person wonder how often inexpensive gear gets bad reviews because it was tested with cheap interconnects.  I certainly wasn't using expensive interconnects with my first systems. 

I recently experimented with some $200 interconnects that were considerably less expensive than my Black Cat Silverstar 88.  I listened with the real expectation that the less expensive cables could be as good, or even better.  Alas, they aren't.  Very good cables for the money, but not better than the Black Cat.

I remember way back more than 30 years ago when I first started getting interseted in better gear and sound  I bought an M&K subwoofer as my first "better gear" purchase and at the time M&K had a very patient and polite telephone tech guy, Doug Osborne, who patiently took my barrage of phone calls with countless questions, and as we were discussing "better sound" I remember he asked me:  "Which do you think would sound better--a $500 CD  player using the cables that came with it, or a $200 CD player using $50 cables?"  Obviously it was intended to be a rhetorical question.

(To JasonBourne71) I totally respect your observation above. The mind is a funny thing. Since the blind experiment train has passed, I critically revisited more LP's and told myself it was mere placebo effect. I did discover some vinyl only sounded marginally better. Nuance. But some records, especially well recorded ones with vocals were profoundly better in many ways. Crappy recordings were still crappy, maybe even more annoying. The value of quality cables is camouflaged by the typical audiophile habit of creeping up product lines to hear only debatable improvements. Jumping from Pangea ($50) cables to $1000 cables exposes clearly  that some pricey cables do dramatically reveal more of what's in the media. Not just a different sound but more details, more musical, and engaging. As stated cables act as filters in a sense. Apparently cheap cables do more than their share of this filtering. Now I'm thinking where else I might be "strangling" my music!