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Principles of audiophile cable construction?

Over the last 2-3 years within the budget I could afford I have been tweaking my system to get the most I could out of sane expenditure. I've been pleased with Teflon cap upgrades, amassed quite a collection of 12AT7/12AU7 vacuum tubes in reaching the same conclusion as most that Telefunken is hard to beat. Now I'm turning my attention to cable upgrades and as I look at what's advertised its my impression that most of whats out there is snake oil technology or cable jewelry. Bear in mind that I'm jaded from having sold audio products in the 80's where it was common for a basic product to be a sound value and the upgraded products to be small tweaks sold at 10 times the additional manufacturer cost. Having a science and product development background I have some opinions on what should be guiding principles of cable design but am not familiar with any site that is a good reference. Ultimately I feel the audiophile cable industry needs the equivalent of an Internet RFC to protect audiophiles from the snake oil and jewelry cable products.

So a request for references: what good sites do you know where they provide competent information on what audiophiles agree on as guiding principles for audiophile quality interconnects?
128x128davide256
mofimadness's avatar
mofimadness
4,992 posts
 
There is an excellent article in the new issue of TAS (the absolute sound) on this very thing.

The author discusses design, geometry, construction, etc. I found it a very good read, although I already knew much of what was written.
sonic_genius
528 posts
 
There is No absolute reference, hence none of this matters. Try a brand of cables and if it improves the sound of your system, enjoy.
isochronism
2,893 posts
 
What Davide is asking for is a source of information which Mofimadness helped with. If one were to DIY or have specific cables made, how would you go about deciding on specific materials and choice of construction, etc?
davide256's avatar
davide256 OP
399 posts
 
thanks Mofimadness, I'll go find that article. I want better cables but I can't afford the route I went with tubes where I kept buying different ones until I found what worked best... cables are much more expensive than tubes. So I'd at least like to steer clear of those that conflict with known predictors of good performance
nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,885 posts
 
It might have been the article that Mofimadness referred to but if not, there is one that came out recently that concluded that conductors should be thick or you'll never get what the high end can offer. I found the exact opposite to be true, for me, so go figure.

Output impedance on amps have yet to be (and never will be) standardized, as well as speaker input impedances so no sinlge cable will sound the same in different set ups. Having said that, lots of systems come close or at least stay within the realms of sanity so cables have a good chance of letting you know how they 'might' sound in your system.

It's sites like this and some of the better review sites out there that have a larger sampling rate of equipment to test the cables with. With each and every change of equipment comes a new set of variables but there can be consensus.

All the best,
Nonoise
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