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may i know your favore audio cable to connect your dac to you amply? avoid please copper 99.9 cables


gaia

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The cables I use for critical components range in price from $300-$600 which I can recommend — but you want cheap cables. No inexpensive cables I’ve tried were competitive, sorry. 

 

You can take a chance with Chinese OCC cables, those are often under $100. Check out China hi-fi and AliExpress. I think Pangea has some Cardas copper cables that are affordable. Check out the Supra LoRad cables too.

 

AFAIK the best copper conductors are Japanese OCC and Cardas copper. Also when it comes to power cables, the connectors are very important. Names to look for are Furutech and Oyaide, although you probably won’t see those on legit Chinese cables.

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6 hours ago, gaia said:

hi

I use very exansive cable to connect my cd player to my amply and my amply to the speakers ,i really spent a lot

i 'm talking about the best cheap cable to connect a smartphone or laptop with integrated audio card

 

i would like to know about this cheap cable (that avoid noise) could sound worse than normal cable (noisy) ?

i know it's a silly question

thanks

 

Sorry I misunderstood your question.

 

What your looking for, optimally, are thick gauge OCC conductors (copper or silver) with high-quality plugs and Teflon or air dielectric. As far as I know only China (supposedly) offers all that for cheap. But, I found a few cable builders on eBay who makes good cables which don’t suck for well under $100:

 

Amplifier Surgery: an outfit in Australia that makes silver conductor cables. Directionally controlled. Thin and stiff, uses twisting for noise rejection. These guys make all sorts of special format cables like 3.5mm to RCA, RCA to XLR, phono, etc.

 

World’s Best Cables: they use pro cable stock (Ie, Belden) and decent connectors. Directionally controlled. Pro cables are well insulated, flexible, and properly constructed.

 

Of course there’s Blue Jeans in the quality pro cable category — you get better construction quality for a higher price, but sonically they’re no better.

 

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8 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Audio interconnect cables have no effect on sound quality. The cheapest (perhaps from Amazon or other sources like mycablemart.com) and the worlds most expensive (such as Nordost Valhalla II) sound exactly alike.

 

This is misinformation. Even if you don’t believe in anything that can’t be measured objectively and even if you discount indirect factors like vibration control, there are objective, measurable aspects of an interconnect cable that does impact sound. Inductance, capacitance, etc. There’s a reason why virtually all high-end cable manufacturers moved to OCC copper. There’s a reason why manufacturers go to such lengths to make air dielectric cables.

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11 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

gaia - what country are you in?

 

get the Mogami Gold if easily available - they are well built

 

you can ignore those arguing that expensive cable sound better until they can produce some valid listening tests - most of them are candidates for a Darwin Award and play silly games ;]

 

What was the result of your last listening test?

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I don’t want to denigrate @gmgraves knowledge of cable physics because it’s way higher than mine.

 

But, here’s the thing — there’s an audible difference between interconnects. Not always with every cable /system, but differences do exist. For example, I auditioned some Anti-Cables 6.2 (thier highest model) RCAs, and fresh out of the box they were noticeably WORSE than my old pro cable with heavy gold-plated connectors. After burning in they improved and sounded IDENTICAL to my old cables. I tried hard and listened carefully to find a difference and if there was one it was so mild it may have just been in my head. So, back they went.

 

In another case, an Audio Sensability Statement XLR set clearly out-performed my Amazon-sourced Cables Matters set.

 

My experience is just a tiny data point in a huge ocean of cable experiences. There’s dozens of high end cable manufacturers, they appear in literally every show room, and they are reviewed both professionally and by end users all over the Internet. There’s a point of intersection between the physics of signal propagation over cables and the perception of sound that’s still not well understood.

 

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2 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

 

You think there's an audible difference. but I'll guarantee you that in a properly set-up and executed DBT, those audible differences will evaporate like morning dew in the desert. The phenomenon is caused by a combination of expectational and confirmation bias. Your brain is delivering the listening result that it believes you want. Remember, your ears are not dispassionate instruments. There is no hearing function without the brain and the brain continuously colors every sense. Unfortunately, we humans cannot easily control our brain's tendency to alter reality. That's why bias free testing procedures must be developed to separate sensory bias from reality.

In the audio hobby, it's really not that important. One should do whatever it takes to cause them to to enjoy their systems more. If that's a belief that cables can improve the sound of one's system, then so be it. 

 

I only brought up the reality of cable sound from a physics standpoint because the OP seemed to not have much money to spend on cables and I wanted to reassure him that his inability (or unwillingness) to spend a small fortune on boutique cables will not relegate him audio purgatory. That many accurate, fine sounding systems (including my own) exist without a single high-priced boutique brand interconnect in it anywhere. 

 

Of course, a properly executed DBT takes far more resources than anyone can be reasonably expected to have. So, suggesting that DBTs evaporate differences between cables as if that is a common and expected outcome is misinformation.

 

Why did my expectation bias make a cable costing hundreds of dollars sound WORSE than some pair of $40 cables I dug up from the basement? Why did it improve over time to sounding no different? Of course you don't know, because the premise of "expectation bias" in relation to audio is at best a not well understood phenomena. Why is it that when some guy at Harman makes blog post about an experiment he did many years ago the result proves an immutable fact of reality forever?

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  • 4 weeks later...
15 minutes ago, bigbob said:

I would love to agree, that these Nordost Valhalla speaker ribbons sound the same as the Monster Cable speaker wire that looked like lamp cord.

 

I appreciate the expertise of @gmgraves and his astute observations about the physics of wire, cable and interconnects.

 

I do not suffer from "I just spent$7800 on speaker cables, they better damn sound better"-syndrome because they were a gift. I have zero financial interest. I am using a Denon AVR-2805 and a pair of Large Advent Loudspeakers (particle board with vinyl wood covering). I also received the XOT crossover transducers. All three came as a unit, I just provided an electrical outlet and the Advents.

 

Call it psychometric imaging or some other meaningless buzz word, but I have never heard music with such clarity from these speakers. I can hear a difference.

 

There is no wizardry from Audiophile reviews to cause bias because before I heard these speaker ribbons on my Advents, I would have agreed--that wire is a conductor, and nothing more. I can not say that any longer without a degree of mendacity.

 

Speaker cables make a significant difference, more so than any other cable in a system. In fact I believe most anyone could benefit from upgrading their speaker cables. I have cheap Amazon cables, good Blue Jeans 10 Whites with the heavy locking bananas and Audio Sensibility Statements -- the Audio Sensibilities aren't anything special just OCC copper, Teflon dialectic, shielded and dampened, and they blow away the Blue Jeans.

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