Interconnect downstream flow


My question revolves around interconnect prioritization. My bias would be to put the best interconnect from the souce, (CD player) to the pre-amnp and the lesser interconnect from the pre-amp to the amplifier. Obviously I can switch myself and listen but was looking for rationale as to why one placement would be be stonger than the other. I'd love to have the same cables all around but I have to build up one set at a time so in the meantime would be interested in where others place their strongest performing cable. In this case it's the Audience AU 24 and the Audience Maestro.

Thanks
Ag insider logo xs@2xmattkimb96
I can agree with all of the posts above.

However, and while this is not your situation, but my own, I have put my best interconnect between the preamp and amp.
My reasoning is that I listen primarily to two sources, my turntable and my CD player. (Actually, I actually have three more sources, if I count the lessor sources, being my SACD player, my CD burner and my tuner). Having multiple sources means that all are going through my best interconnect, rather than my second, or third best.

Good choice on the Audience AU24 btw. I use that between my CD player and my preamp. (I use a Cardas Golden Reference between my preamp and amp.)
Look at the output impedance of the various electronics. Put the "good" interconnect out of the electronics with the highest output impedance. For example, your solid state CD player might be 50 ohms, and your tube preamp 600 ohms. The preamp needs all the help it can get.
This thread comes up over and over and over and always the same responses. Contrary to the old UK brainwashed pro Linn/Naim magazines, putting the "BEST" anything at the front is NOT always the solution, in fact it rarely is with cables. It has nothing to do with what is lost or can not be recovered.

Eldartford's explanation might be why the link between my tube pre and power amps always makes the biggest difference by quite a large margin. I can put an NBS Statement between the pre (BAT 31SE) and amp (Wolcotts) and a $15 Belden between the Aesthetix Io phono stage and this works mighty well. If I swap the cables, I lose nearly all of the harmonic richness and incredible decays that the NBS between the pre and amp provides. Surprisingly enough, the NBS helps earlier in the chain, but ONLY after I get this one link "right". This may very well be a moot point for many SS based systems which lack much of this quality to begin with and/or also have much lower preamp output impedance.

So don't worry about the theories, or any other attempts at logic here; try this and learn what works best in your own system. ABall sums this up quite well here. I wish more people with extensive experience here would chime in.

John
Mr Dartford makes a good point about impedance matching and interconnects playing games with the sound and performance of the system. As such, one really has to experiment with what interconnect goes where. Some interconnects that one might think are "better" because they cost more and / or are located higher up in a product line may actually be poorer performers electrically. Same goes for speaker cables i.e. not all the more expensive models are necessarily better than all of the less expensive models. At least with speaker cables though, you don't have to guess where they go in the system : ) Sean
>
Wow...really getting a ton of good information but the last two post mentioning output impedence have really tweaked my interest level. Kurt, I don't have a phono but my current system does double for 2-channel & HT. Right wrong or indifferent I have been using the Au-24 as an output from the Ayre K-5x pre-amp to the amp and feed in the CD player,(Ayre CX-7) & surround Sound processor,(Cal Audio 2500) into the pre-amp with the "lesser" cables. The Cal's output impedance is 75 ohms, the pre-amps is 55 and I'm not sure what the CD's player is as its not listed on the manuals spec sheet. I'm close to 50/50 movies & CD playback. In order to come to a definative conclusion, (if there is such a thing) as to which cable to ultimately go with it would seem you'd need to invest in several pairs so you could have the same cable routed through the chain from source to amp. Hypothetically, If I were to get an upper end Cardas interconnect, and ran it from the CD player to the pre-amp and used the AU-24 from the pre-amp to amp & then vice versa...assuming I could detect a listening preference how would I know which cable I actually liked better? Logic tells me that I would not know the answer unless I ran two sets of AU-24 compared to two sets of Cardas compared to one of each, to see which configuration delivers the best performance from my current components. This means there would be four different listening combinations, two audience, two Cardas, Cardas from CD player, Audience from pre-amp, & Audience from CD player Cardas from pre-amp.