Audioquest Cables for Calming treble

James,

Check out www.audience-av.com. You can purchase the Conductor Series or their Maestro Series in your price range if not below. I have an Audience Conductor Cord for my iPod which sounds Awesome.

The best sounding AQ stuff is their Perfect Surface Silver which is just priced too high in my oppinion. I would not classify the CV-6 as having a warm or laid back character either. The Volcano I was using used the same PSC+ conductors. When I hooked up the Audience, everything moved back much further behind the speakers and had a more liquid and relaxed sound.

Check out the Audience Stuff, You will not be disapointed.

Good Luck.

Chris

I'm a big fan of Audience and Acoustic Zen as well.

They have the attributes I think you're looking for and don't sacrifice detail, soundstaging or dynamics in a significant manner. In fact I think they excel in those areas as well. The AZ Matrix Ref II interconnects are very full sounding, relatively detailed and very smooth. The AZ Hologram II speaker cables have similar characteristics. The AZ Silver Ref II share the same Acoustic Zen smoothness but in a silver design, so they are more revealing and project a very good soundstage.

I'm currently in the process of breaking in a pair of Ridge Street Audio Poiema speaker cables, and these seem to share many of the same positive traits as the Acoustic Zen and Audience speaker cables.

Good luck.

People seem to be swaying you away from Audioquest, which is certainly fine. I use Acoustic Zen as well (speaker cables), and would certainly consider them a viable option. That aside I do have one AQ Python cable that I think is quite OK and wanted to mention that the older Audioquest Opal cables are pretty cheap on the used market and would probably fit your agenda. I listened to an Opal interconnect that I borrowed from a dealer some time back and remember liking them quite a bit, even though I did not end up purchasing them. Good luck with your search.

Perhaps one day, cables would be discussed here for what they are in generic form. Basically, the above conversion is about the sound of solid core copper and mono crystal stranded copper with the variable of dielectric/terminations. Learn the sound of metals/dielectrics/terminations and save yourself lots of time-money.

OK Reb1208, I, for one, would like to hear a more technical explanation of why various cables sound the way they do. Could you give a description of the sound of various metals/dielectrics/terminations that you are familiar with? Also, what about geometry and shielding effects?