Solid core phono interconnect - Recommend Please

Naim products benefit greatly from using one of their external power supplies. Before I spend $1000 on a cable, I would put the money towards a PS. It should make a much bigger difference than the IC. For a cable, you can pick up a good used Audioquest solid core cable like a Jaguar or Columbia. I have both of those, as well as cables that are much more expensive, and they easily compete with, and sometimes outperform them. They're also a good match for Naim. A few years back, I went to demo a Naim CD player, and brought my old player and some AQ cables with me. After hearing my AQ cables on his Naim equipment, the dealer picked the line up the next day.

zd542, sorry I did not mention that I already use a Supercap power supply with my Naim Superline phonostage. All Naim phonostages need an external psu to boot, they do not have any power supply internally.

Having said that, which particular AQ IC would you recommend ?

Al, thanks for that bit of info. I do have couple of shielded ICs. The VDH MC501 and Mogami 2549. Both sound very smooth and musical but lack resolution and transparency. Is it true that shielded cable rob some amount of life and speed from the music ?

Is it true that shielded cable rob some amount of life and speed from the music ?

Shielding can raise the capacitance, which can decrease bandwidth and therefore speed (resolutIon) somewhat, but it also depends on the implementation. Kimber, for example, achieves high noise rejection while keeping capacitance low with their woven cable techniques. This is also true of Shunyata Research. A third way to shield is to have more space between the conductor and the shield, making for fatter cable.

You probably want to keep this cable's total capacitance at 100 pF or lower. AudioQuest manages to have solid conductors, shielding, and pretty low (sometimes very low) capacitance. Their Angel interconnect might be a good candidate, but I don't know its capacitance. Conductors are highly polished solid core silver, which has 8% more inherent conductivity than copper.

"Having said that, which particular AQ IC would you recommend ?"

Any of the copper IC's with the dbs system should work very well. There aren't huge differences between the newest models and some of the older ones, so if you are willing to go used, you can save a lot of money. I have Jaguar, Columbia, Panther and Colorado and all of them are pretty close in SQ. They just work in any application. If you're willing to take a chance, I also have some Cheetah. They're silver and don't always sound as good as copper. But when they do work, they sound great. So far, the only connections I use the Cheetah for are going from source components to a preamp, and from my TT to my phono preamp. But from my phono preamp to my preamp copper is better.

I wouldn't worry about the shielding. Just go by what sounds best.

03-21-15: Johnnyb53
Shielding can raise the capacitance, which can decrease bandwidth and therefore speed (resolution) somewhat, but it also depends on the implementation.... You probably want to keep this cable's total capacitance at 100 pF or lower.

I agree. I'll add that in addition to the design of the particular cable it also depends on the application. The effects and significance of cable capacitance will be very different in a LOMC phono application than in an application involving a high output MM cartridge, or in a line-level analog application. In the case of cables used between LOMC cartridges and phono stages, the significance of keeping cable capacitance low is explained by Lyra cartridge designer Jonathan Carr in his post dated 8-14-10 here. Basically, keeping cable capacitance low works in the direction of allowing lighter (higher value) resistive loading, while at the same time minimizing or avoiding adverse effects on phono stage sonics that might otherwise be a consequence of the lighter loading. The lighter loading in turn "will benefit dynamic range, resolution and transient impact."

I couldn't find any technical info on your Van den Hul cable. I would consider the Mogami to be medium capacitance, at around 26 pf/ft. While humble and inexpensive Blue Jeans LC-1, which is shielded, achieves 12.2 pf/ft, approximately the same value as one of the low capacitance cables Jonathan indicated in his post "resulted [for a 1.2 meter length] in greater flexibility in loading, a more natural tonal balance with better dynamics and resolution, and were a worthwhile upgrade." Which of course is not to say that there aren't other sonically significant differences between Blue Jeans and his or other low capacitance phono cables.

Good luck. Regards,
-- Al