2. cables
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Do you really need ultra expensive cables?

I was always told that you need to spend about 30-40% overall budget on cables to have good sounds. To some equiqment manufractures, that is not the case.

For those of you who visited McIntosh at HE 2003. What do you think about their Stereo set-up? Do you reallized that they spend less than 3% on cables? Not that they can't afford them. But their arguement was that if your equiqments are so nice, and so musical, why do you have to depends on cables to improve sounds. What do you think of that?

Thanks!
rodney01
ohlala
1,236 posts
 
I've owned $100 pair of Tributaries silver coated copper ICs. I found them to have good bandwidth, quality on par with PBJ, but very warm and slow to be quite forgiving. In resolution if nothing else, they were no match for AQ Ruby or my other more expensive ICs, at least in my crappy, cable-dependent system. I suppose most people's systems are pretty crappy too. Twl, do you think Tributaries would sound the same as Sistrum in your crappy system? There's a lot of overpriced cables, for sure, but there is better and not as good.
rcrump
427 posts
 
Cables are a necessary evil and I see way too many people spending big bucks on cables that would be better spent on a better CDP or speakers....10% is a good round number for wires....
twl
3,251 posts
 
Ohlala, I don't know for sure what the Tributaries would sound like in my system. I do know that the Sonoran sounds very neutral and detailed, without the unnatural warmth of some other cables I tried. As for the price, the Sonoran is not real cheap, but not real high either. I think it is a pretty good value for a cable.
ohlala
1,236 posts
 
Sorry, rhetorical question that has little to do with Tributaries specifically. Just take it as a minor compliment.
sean
6,231 posts
 
No need for ultra expensive cables. You just need well designed cables that use quality ingredients and proper assembly techniques. If you stick with low capacitance designs for interconnects, high capacitance designs for speaker cables and high capacitance designs for power cords, you'll be ahead in both time and money.

As a general rule, solid core conductors are preferred but some stranded designs can sound quite good also. Conductor shapes and geometries do come into play. One should avoid designs that suffer from skin effect, use low grade "lossy" dielectrics or mass quantities of any dielectric. All cables benefit from time spent on some type of a "cable burner". Cables that are "burned in" tend to sound better than an identical cable that hasn't been burned, even if the un-burned cable has hundreds of hours of actual in-system use. Sean
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