AudioQuest Wind High-end Cable Review

[SIY]

Don't know if this has been discussed before, but for the engineers out there, is there any technical reason to prefer stranded twisted wire core to a solid core for audio use (interconnects not speaker wires) or vice versa?

Yes- flexibility and durability.

 

[Chrispy]

I don't believe for a minute that cables don't make an audible difference in a high-quality system. That does not mean that there aren't snake oil prices for products that perform the same or worse as much lower-priced products. However, to think that different geometries, wire thickness, insulation, composition and overall assembly does not affect sound, is just plain wrong. Does using a certain cable mean it will get your system closer to musical reality? No, the illusive reality itself is very subjective, but I do not think this cable review is even close in giving us the full story.

I believe Stereophile's recent experiment is the closest I've read about documenting cable differences...
https://www.stereophile.com/content/what-difference-wire-makes

I'm now prepared for the onslaught of people telling me a coat hanger is just as good or only marginally worse.

Thanks for the humor

 

[Francis Vaughan]

Cotton insulated solid core, twisted, no sheilding.

You can be sure that you could offer these for $200 a pair and with appropriate flowery woo they would sell. Cotton, got to be good. Natural innit?

 

[jsrtheta]

OOOps.. Somebody over at AudioQuest is going to have a rough day tomorrow.

I doubt AudioQuest will even know about this. And if they do, I really doubt they'll care.

Obviously, having been exposed repeatedly for the charlatans they are, their bottom line has suffered little.

Fraudsters are rarely deterred by exposure. Nor is their profit margin.

 

[wwenze]

You can be sure that you could offer these for $200 a pair and with appropriate flowery woo they would sell. Cotton, got to be good. Natural innit?

Needs to be a special kind of cotton that grows on sheep

 

[Phorize]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the AudioQuest Wind RCA "PSS Silver" cable. The sample I have was kindly donated by a member and costs US $2,300 in the 1 meter configuration. No, that is not a typo. It is over two thousand dollars for a pair.

The cable comes in a rather cheap carrying case. What is that about? Are you going to carry this to your friend's house to show off? Or store the cable in it until the right romantic moment to pop it out to use with your system?

The cable itself has the look of "high-end" cables:

View attachment 89759

As you see it also has their "DBS" (Dielectric Bias System) which puts a static DC voltage along one wire in the cable. I have tested the DBS to have no effect in my previous Audioquest Victoria Cable review. I will take another shot at it here in a different way.

Usually these cables have a death grip on the RCA connectors but not these. They would hold on but softly and no more than any generic cable. Given their heavy weight though, I wish there was more holding power. You can see part of the reason for this is the super thin outer RCA ring:

View attachment 89761

Back to the weight, the inclusion of the DBS battery pack makes these cantilever even more. Be sure to have super sturdy RCA connectors on your gear before you use these. Or else, invest extra in cable lifters because you physically need them here.

AudioQuest Wind Audio Measurements
These cables can go three different ways: do nothing, do something good, or make things worse. Let's start with our usual dashboard to see if we can get quick indication of any of these options. But first, let's test our setup with a generic 1 meter cable I got for free in a DVD player I think some 20 years ago. It is a single cable (i.e. not stereo pair) like the Wind:

View attachment 89762

Bless my $28,000 Audio Precision APx555 for generating such a clean signal and ability to measure it just the same. Combined noise and distortion are below -121 dB at 2 volts output. The spectrum of distortion and noise goes down to whopping -160 dB courtesy of signal processing (FFT process gain). The only thing visible at this low level is mains AC leakage to the tune of -145 dB.

Now let's switch to Audioquest Wind with the same setup:

View attachment 89763

Overall numbers remain the same but I see that the mains leakage has gone up 7 to 8 dB. And now we see its third harmonic at 180 Hz as well which we did not see before. Put a pin in this for now and we will come back to it.

To go after testing impact of DBS, I thought I reverse the cable. Whatever it is about, should get totally screwed up since the battery is supposed to be at one end of the cable:

View attachment 89764

Not a thing changes. We are going to depth of noise and distortion analysis that is so many orders of magnitude lower than our hearing that it is not funny. Yet there is no effect whatsoever. Clearly the DBS circuit is doing nothing here as the "designers" say it does.

One of the most audible thing in audio is frequency response. You don't need golden ears to hear differences when frequency response changes. Often give a free pass to people using such cables and hearing differences that there must have been filters in them that changed the frequency response. So let's measure that with super high precision and high bandwidth:

View attachment 89765

I usually run this test with ± 5 dB vertical axis. Here, I have gone to ±1 dB and there is still no difference between no cable, 1 meter generic cable and Audioquest Wind. Bandwidth of the test is also expanded to 200 kHz and yet there is still no difference.

Now let's measure the noise that exists in the system with the cable hooked up but nothing driving it:
View attachment 89766

We see that the AudioQuest Wind (red) clearly has higher mains noise. So I thought of a way to test susceptibility to mains noise by taking an AC transformer (from a desktop DAC), plugging it in and then holding it next to the cable. Note that there is no electrical connection between the transformer and the cable. The transformer is simply being held by the cable to allow coupling into the cable. This is what happened:

View attachment 89767

Wow! The generic cable in blue picked up a bit more noise but look at the AudioQuest Wind in solid red. It is picking up huge amount of mains noise relative to our generic cable! Stunning how high-end cables are sold with the impression that they reduce noise and such and yet this cable is clearly much more susceptible to interference than free cable.

What is amazing about this is a bullet in the product feature list from AudioQuest:

View attachment 89769

It is easy to accomplish 100% shield coverage? So why do we not have it here? And what noise dissipation?

AudioQuest Wind Cable Listening Test
I hooked up my RME ADI-2 FS DAC V2 to a Topping A90 high-performance headphone amplifier alternatively using the Audioquest Wind and Generic able. The output of the A90 drove my Ether CX headphone. I could not detect a difference between the two in this limited testing. Mind you, there was more air when listening to the Wind. But then my wife who was in the kitchen informed me that the dogs had left the patio door open and whether I was OK if she closed it. Once she did, the air factor disappeared.

Conclusions
You know, it is one thing to sell a cable for a lot more money that does nothing extra. It is entirely another matter when the cable actually screws up the signal much worse than a free cable as the AudioQuest Wind seems to be doing here. Whether it is the outer RCA connector that is not gripping properly, the construction of the cable, or both, clearly the basic job of doing no harm is not followed. A bit of measuring like I did would have shown problems like this to them. But of course they did not bother. They imagined a bunch of problems, created imagined solutions to them, and started to sell the product with unverified claims as I quoted.

So please folks, I don't care which audio camp you are in. Ask manufacturers to demonstrate what the benefits they advertise. They say they lower noise? Ask them to show before and after measurements. We know how to measure noise. If we don't, how do they know they reduced noise at all?

Anyway, of course I cannot recommend the AudioQuest Wind cable in any form or fashion.

-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

The garden is struggling to keep producing despite the near freezing cold snap. Picked a few oversized Kohlrabi. Second year I have planted them but have had no chance to even taste them!
View attachment 89771

The cucumbers are mostly from the greenhouse. As is the last bit of Basil from one of the pots which we put in our salad last night. Have a dozen or so more which have their last harvest now. They were great all summer. Produced a ton which we froze as pesto. You cut the tops off and they shoot up three new branches!

Could use some kind donations as always: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

I bet the sales double just because ASR doesn’t like it

 

[solderdude]

Just think about how recordings could improve when studios were only investing in this type of cables (needs to be balanced)
When even on playback the audible benefits are great, just imagine what it could do at the recording side.

 

[Blumlein 88]

At an industry demo it was demonstrated that ADSL worked fine over a pair of razor wires.

Like this? It sure would stop the cat from messing with your wire.

 

[scott wurcer]

Like this? It sure would stop the cat from messing with your wire.
View attachment 90291

Razor wire is typically deployed with lifters that must be the secret.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Just think about how recordings could improve when studios were only investing in this type of cables (needs to be balanced)
When even on playback the audible benefits are great, just imagine what it could do at the recording side.

This reminds me of a video by Keith Johnson of Reference recordings talking about wire. He was saying even the basic audiophile wire was so much better than he used in recording. I did a full stop...........................WHAT? Okay, so you are pushing expensive wire, sell expensive wire, and note you don't use it for the highly acclaimed Reference recordings? How can that possibly make sense? If a few feet upon playback was so terribly important wouldn't hundreds of feet he used during recording be far, far more important?

Later in the video he came back around and addressed it. Told what he used, that he used hundreds of feet for it, and that it actually wasn't a problem because he had variable input impedance on his custom mic preamps and matching that to cable eliminated any issues. I did another full stop............so we can't do the same thing on the shorter wire in our home systems or we actually don't need to. Oh, I also recognized his wire, it was a wire in my business used for long runs of instrumentation signals. Balanced, well shielded, supple, slick so not to snag or get snagged on things. But it was an instrumentation wire a bit more expensive than bulk microphone cable, but not much.

It was an amazing performance by someone by then comfortable lying completely to you, knowing he was doing so, and thinking his unsophisticated audience wouldn't know the difference anyway.

 

[GimeDsp]

Wow, just wow. I bought a 3.3 ft evergreen but that cable was just $50. I may have overpaid but atleast it wasn't a huge amount.
It's too bad companies can't just say
"We sell a cable that is built better and looks better than others".
Too bad they have to rip people off. do they beleive their own lies?

 

[GimeDsp]

I doubt AudioQuest will even know about this. And if they do, I really doubt they'll care.

Obviously, having been exposed repeatedly for the charlatans they are, their bottom line has suffered little.

Fraudsters are rarely deterred by exposure. Nor is their profit margin.

They are to busy rolling around in cash.

 

[Universal Cereal Bus]

do they beleive their own lies?

Of course not. The first rule of dealing drugs is: don't use your own product.

What forum am I on again?

 

[Frank Dernie]

This reminds me of a video by Keith Johnson of Reference recordings talking about wire. He was saying even the basic audiophile wire was so much better than he used in recording. I did a full stop...........................WHAT? Okay, so you are pushing expensive wire, sell expensive wire, and note you don't use it for the highly acclaimed Reference recordings? How can that possibly make sense? If a few feet upon playback was so terribly important wouldn't hundreds of feet he used during recording be far, far more important?

Later in the video he came back around and addressed it. Told what he used, that he used hundreds of feet for it, and that it actually wasn't a problem because he had variable input impedance on his custom mic preamps and matching that to cable eliminated any issues. I did another full stop............so we can't do the same thing on the shorter wire in our home systems or we actually don't need to. Oh, I also recognized his wire, it was a wire in my business used for long runs of instrumentation signals. Balanced, well shielded, supple, slick so not to snag or get snagged on things. But it was an instrumentation wire a bit more expensive than bulk microphone cable, but not much.

It was an amazing performance by someone by then comfortable lying completely to you, knowing he was doing so, and thinking his unsophisticated audience wouldn't know the difference anyway.

I had 2 systems for a while when working in France.
One at home with Spectral electronics and one in France with 2 Krell KSA200b s driving active Apogee Divas.
I rather liked the Spectral, the Krells overheated the room so when I came back home I was going to sell the Krells and buy another Spectral amp for the Divas.
I wrote to Spectral asking if the DMA180 would be fine driving the Divas and got an incredibly snooty and condescending reply telling me active speakers were bad.
I sold all my Spectral kit as well as the hot-hot-hot Krell and did a 2 year trek around France and the UK to find speakers I would be happy with so I didn't need a welding plant for an amp.
Excellent way to lose this customer.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I had 2 systems for a while when working in France.
One at home with Spectral electronics and one in France with 2 Krell KSA200b s driving active Apogee Divas.
I rather liked the Spectral, the Krells overheated the room so when I came back home I was going to sell the Krells and buy another Spectral amp for the Divas.
I wrote to Spectral asking if the DMA180 would be fine driving the Divas and got an incredibly snooty and condescending reply telling me active speakers were bad.
I sold all my Spectral kit as well as the hot-hot-hot Krell and did a 2 year trek around France and the UK to find speakers I would be happy with so I didn't need a welding plant for an amp.
Excellent way to lose this customer.

Yeah Johnson and was it Rick Fryer. Demian Martin who designed their early gear was a good guy though. Spectral had the speil for why they had such wide bandwidth. Martin said it was for altogether different reasons he designed them that way. I did love their amps and preamps.

A friend had those Divas. Used the large Classe amps with them. And the Symo cable.

 

[CDMC]

I had 2 systems for a while when working in France.
One at home with Spectral electronics and one in France with 2 Krell KSA200b s driving active Apogee Divas.
I rather liked the Spectral, the Krells overheated the room so when I came back home I was going to sell the Krells and buy another Spectral amp for the Divas.
I wrote to Spectral asking if the DMA180 would be fine driving the Divas and got an incredibly snooty and condescending reply telling me active speakers were bad.
I sold all my Spectral kit as well as the hot-hot-hot Krell and did a 2 year trek around France and the UK to find speakers I would be happy with so I didn't need a welding plant for an amp.
Excellent way to lose this customer.

Good thing you sold them. Last I saw they were no longer responding to their customers and left those with no avenue to fix their broken amps as there were no schematics available.

 

[BrokenEnglishGuy]

Audioquest in every country is throwing his money and his snake oil XD

 

[ahofer]

Good thing you sold them. Last I saw they were no longer responding to their customers and left those with no avenue to fix their broken amps as there were no schematics available.

I had a spectral pre-amp I bought second-hand in the 1980s. It was noisier than a bad tube amp. The dealer insisted there was nothing wrong with it. I never looked at their gear again.
When I was shopping for speakers in 2018, a dealer (who wanted me to upgrade to a spectral amp) insisted I had to be wrong about the pre-amp. I never understood why they go kamikaze on their irrational beliefs. Is it inward apologetics?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/beware-inward-apologetics.html

 

[MattHooper]

The conundrum posed to High End Cable Believers is this:

If expensive, modern high end cables are necessary to reveal and transmit the sonic riches of a recording, how did all that glorious sonic information get there in the first place?

The the recordings audiophiles listen to - even standard classic "reference tracks" - were recorded with miles of bog standard audio cable. Much of which had been through rough times.

This means that every single time an audiophile throws in his new high end cable and marvels as the sonic purity and quality of sound, he is by default hearing the quality of sound captured and produced by cheaper run-of-the-mill cabling used for the recording. It doesn't matter if you put Nordost's most absurdly expensive cables in your system. The logic is inescapable: it can only reveal that the original non-audiophile cables used for the recording were up to the task of transmitting that very sonic information.

It's just a weird bit of inescapable logic that cable lovers never seem to contemplate when they fall for all this "We make our cables from unobtanium" marketing stuff.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I had a spectral pre-amp I bought second-hand in the 1980s. It was noisier than a bad tube amp. The dealer insisted there was nothing wrong with it. I never looked at their gear again.
When I was shopping for speakers in 2018, a dealer (who wanted me to upgrade to a spectral amp) insisted I had to be wrong about the pre-amp. I never understood why they go kamikaze on their irrational beliefs. Is it inward apologetics?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/beware-inward-apologetics.html

If you had a noisy Spectral pre it was definitely sick. I've had hands on a few. None were noisy.