I don,t Understand ????

Tswhitsel, that was a beautiful essay. I think and hope you are right. If so, it solves alot of problems for me. I have printed this out and pinned it up near my computer. Any time I am tempted from now on, to venture forth on another 'cablequest', I shall read your essay a few times over. Soon, if I am lucky, I won't even make an attempt, your essay will have me so well trained. If this works, I am not sure I can ever repay you. My gratitude will be enormous. Just imagine the savings in the first 6 months alone. . .

Thanks, your friend forever.
Chris

Guys, don't you think there's something underlying behind all this? It seems like everyone thinks that the audio manufacturers are "gouging" everyone, and that everyone knows someone that knows someone that can make his own cables for $.50 and wow do they sound good. If that were the case why do we buy these high-end amps, CD players, and even cables? Because they sound great! We love shopping for price but ultimately don't we buy with our ears? We cannot blame a manufacturer like Synergistic for not offering a "free" service on a thick cable, so they make a separate pair -for the audiophile to hawk on AudioGon and make a profit?!? Everyone knows everything makes a difference, from the termination technique to the spades used and the solder involved - why does everyone think it's so easy? I have had great success with Synergistic and I even took advantage of their trade in program and got 80% back for my used cables - pretty generous. I have always had great service from them; and I realize that they're not a non-profit organiation. I'll go back to them because I love their product and had good service. Let's not take things out of context, and lighten up.

Hey guys..I am a cost analyst for a semiconductor and let me lay this out for you. Based on Brieve's post and his estimated time to cut/terminate/solder of about 30 minutes, I am assuming that Synergistic would take about the same amount of time or even less, but less assume 30 minutes for simplicity purpose. Let's also assume that the materials will cost ~$100 to be a little exagerated (solder, new terminations, and etc.). This leaves $2500 ($2600-$100) as labor. If you do the math, this means that who's ever is assembling the cables makes about $5000 per hour ($2500/.5 hr). This is outrageous if you ask me!! I am starting to think the Synergistic high cost is more of a deterant and its put in place perhaps to influence you to buy new cables rather than reworking old ones. What do you folks think?

To put some substance behind my anger(as someone put it). I worked for a Wire and Cable company where we sold speciality cables to the Automotive, Steel, Hi Temp. cables you name it. Many of the cables where of specail design, exotic materials like Teflon, ERP, Hypolon, Silica, Silicon ect. And I have been through most parts of the Wire making process. And guess what just like everyone else someone made are cable for us to are spec's. There are only a handful of wire and cable manf. AIW, BIW, Royal, Carol, Alcatel and a few others. I could buy 14 gauge Teflon insulated conductor and cable jacketing MIlitary Spec'd for 7.00 a ft from my competitor if I ran out. When Teflon was extremely expensive a few years ago. (The boys at Dupont know we like Teflon Cable and they stick it to us) Now if you goto XLO technical paper on Cable and pricing, they say 6N copper is 200 times more expensive as reg. wire. And Teflon is really really expensive too. But they forget howmuch copper and insulation is in a 1 meter interconnect? an Ounce or 2? the rest is filler, mica, glass? We had cable made for us penny's on the dollar. To put it in prespective.

Have you seen the Designer's Reference? It's a firehose! No wonder they want a lot to reterminate. This is not your your average Radio Shack zip wire, it's about the thickness of all 4 of your fingers on one hand together or bigger. I've listened to this cable and it blew my socks off! But with a new baby on the way the $3600 was out of my league for the moment. If you really want to talk about expensive, check out the new Transparent speaker wire at a mere $23,500, or anything Transparent for that matter. I own all SR and to me it sounds better than any other cable I tried, including thin zip cable :> If you saw the Designer's Reference you'd not want to do it yourself.