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Hello, This is my first post to this forum, as I have just revived my interest in higher quality audio. This came about in an odd way. I recently remodeled my office to add more storage for my family. In doing this, my Alesis M1 studio monitors (fed by the sound card build into the gaming motherboard in my PC) could no longer fit in the room, at least not in an ideal listening position, so I had to start the search for something smaller, but I couldn't find anything that could be mounted to the wall that was less than 5 inches wide and had any chance of sounding good, so I decided to go another route. I started to researched headphones, which lead to suggestions for amps, which lead to suggestions for DACs... With a budge of about $800 I decided on the Schiit Jotunheim with the balanced DAC module, powering the Sennheiser HD600 headphones, and a balanced headphone cable from Custom Cans. I also purchased a USB cable from Schitt to connect the DAC to my PC. Once everything came in, I hooked it all up and was blown away by how much clearer things sounded. But there was a problem... my music mostly sounded like crap. Much of it was ripped from CD into my FLAC collection, but then I learned that it has a lot to do with the mastering and mixing process. I started to look for some new music to listen to and tried a variety of genre, finally settling on smooth jazz being my favorite. It's been about a month since my purchase and everything is starting to sound better. I don't have experience with this, and my ears are not trained, but the music just started to sound more open and full bodied if that makes any sense. After reading many posts about this subject, all of which seem to turn into arguments, I just want to say that I don't really care what it is that made it sound better, I'm just very happy that it does. So, that's where I'm at now, and I have a few questions that I've searched for without finding specific answers. I'm pretty handy, and I love DIY projects, so I decided to make my own headphone cables since the connectors to the HD600s on the Custom Cans wires are a bit too long; they hit my shoulders when I turn my head (other than that they are awesome). Many people choose to use the wires found in the Mogami Neglex 2534s so I went with those as a starting point. The question is, why do people only use the wires, and not the entire cable? The cable is designed to minimizes the things that would effect the analog audio signal, such as capacitance and inductance, and it has what looks like well thought out dielectric and shielding. It's also within the optimum wire diameter to reduce the skin effect. If headphones used speaker level signal strength, I would not be as concerned, but I think the relatively low signal strength over my required 7 foot run would benefit from keeping the cable together up to the point where it needs to split to each driver. I'm new to this and learning as I go, so I may have this all very wrong, please let me know. Is there a better wire I can use that would still produce an audible sound difference given the equipment I am currently using? I'm not looking for Teflon coated silver here... And finally, does anyone have any suggestions for high quality smooth jazz recordings and where I can get them? Thanks!
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