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Do Silver Cables Hurt Bass?

Hi, I don't have any silver cables in my system, but I seem to remember reading silver cables do a great job in the highs and mids but fall short in the bass. In practice is this the case? Do silver speaker cables or interconnects hurt the bass? The only thing I can attribute to this is that siver cables tend to be a thinner gauge wire and thus do a worse job of transmitting bass information. What are other people experience?
dan2112
trelja
3,223 posts
 
Nedlabs_stereo, could you please give me your impressions of Van den Hull cables. I have no experience with them. What are the pluses/minuses. How do they compare to other cables. I've wondered about them since I heard they were graphite. Also wonder about the JPS Superconductors, with their unique metal use. Thanks!
brianmgrarcom
1,317 posts
 
Trelja, I use JPS cables and have been happy with them. The only negative I can say of *mine* is that they are the orginals, before they had flexible ends. JPS cables are very stiff and w/o the ends being flexible, it makes things very difficult!
carl_eber
1,425 posts
 
Not all silver cables are the same gauge, or use the same conductors, geometry, or purity of silver. As a general rule, no, they don't hurt the bass. IMO, as a general rule, they hurt the MIDRANGE. I'm trying Wireworld, Siltech, Purenote, Silversmith, Stealth, Sonic Horizon, and Vantage interconnects right now (comparing them to my AudioTruth Diamond, and MIT EVO). Not all of these borrowed ones are all silver, some are part silver/copper, silver/gold, or all gold. I may post a review of all of them, but it is likely that Audiogon will be blighting this forum from existence in the next few days, so I guess it'll be somewhere else.
trelja
3,223 posts
 
Brian, thank you for the response! What type of equipment do you find the JPS stuff is best with? What are you using? How do you compare them to others you've tried? What are the strengths/weaknesses? Thank you, again.
brianmgrarcom
1,317 posts
 
Wow, I cannot answer all those questions Telja. First of all, the JPS cables I bought are balanced, so I am limited as to where I can run them. I bought them because it was reported my amp and preamp were designed for balanced cables and would work best using them. Also, this may seem trivial, but the selector for CD is a balanced input, so, obviously, if I wanted to use the CD selection on the preamp, it had to be balanced. My equipment is: Meridian 557 amp, 502 preamp and 508.24 CD, I use JPS on these. I was using a MIT MI330 for preamp to amp and a MIT PC2 for CD to Preamp. There was a huge improvement when I changed, but that was over 2 1/2 years ago, I cannot tell you what all changed. You can go to www.jpslabs.com and they have some reprints of reviews. I also have a Nak. ZX-9 & CR-7a cassette deck and just picked up an old Sansui TU-717 tuner. These are the areas where I would like to make upgrades in interconnects.
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