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Using older cable in new system? Need advice...

Hi,

I'm in the process of refreshing a system that I originally bought in the mid to late 1980's and need some cabling advice.

I sold my Vandersteen 2C's on Audiogon and will likely replace them with either Quad 21L's or Totem Arro's. I have a SOTA Sapphire (currently being refurbished at SOTA) for analog and just purchased a Music Hall 25.2 CD player for digital. My amp is a PS Audio Elite Plus integrated with 70 watts/channel. I also have a Tandberg tuner.

My 20-year-old speaker cables are Monster Cable Powerline 2, which was "pretty good stuff" back in the day. Should I keep on using it? Is this something that deteriorates over time? Also, in my new, much smaller listening room, the lengths are way, way longer than I need... would I want to have this cabling resized at a dealer?

Thanks for any and all enlightenment you can offer!

Peace!
rebbi
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woodman
152 posts
 
A while back i was at a freinds house who had a decent set up albeit like 15-20 years old. Klipsch Heresys etc. I looked at their cables and mentioned that newer cables would help. They thought I was crazy. So later I took some newer ones I had used but replaced. After hooking them up they could not believe how much better it sounded. I made them a offer they couldn't refuse. Nuff said. As for speaker cables I have gone through several over the years. And am now using Anti Cables at $10 ft/pr. I replaced a set that retailed for over $800.
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chazro
635 posts
 
Original poster stated he was using old Monster cable, I think it's a no-brainer to recommend to upgrade to something newer and better. But...what if you're using what was considered to be an excellent cable back in the day, namely, MIT Music Hose?? I have a pair of DH Labs top of their line speaker cable in a bi-wired configuration. I was using them by themselves on my Spendor S100's which happen to have triple binding posts so I decided to throw in the MIT's (single-ended) solely to the woofers and use the DH for the mid and hi. All I can say is bass performance improved in EVERY way. But this thread got me to thinking about how highly rated cables from back in the day would be rated TODAY?
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philjolet
2,306 posts
 
Chazro
I have some Tera Pandora S ICs from the late 80s. These were top notch back then costing over $300. They still sound nice with a full tone and nice detail but my $380 Audio Note AN V cables easily are more open, detailed and revealing without some of the colorations the Tera has. If you wanted more of a full sound the Tera might be preferred to the AN V but otherwise the AN V easily betters it. BTW the AN V is the bottom model Audio Note offers for ICs...
mrtennis
3,295 posts
 
components do not know the difference between old and new cables. if you are satisfied with the performance of your stereo system, why change anything ?

if you have some concerns, experiment with cable and borrow cables from all sources accessible to you.
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