This is a review and detailed measurements of the AudioQuest GO-4 speaker cable. It is on kind loan from a member and costs about US $599.
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The attached dongle is a 72 volt battery supply that feeds an unterminated wire the length of the cable. Different terminations can be ordered. Here are the company advertisement about the cable:
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And this interesting note about terminations:
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They are certainly dull looking but in addition, they have already tarnished/oxidized:
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I slid my meter over the terminations and whenever it hit an oxidized spot, it would add about 0.1 ohm of resistance! Both the spade and banana ends had this problem. Not good.
Testing of this cable was challenging due to one end being the spade terminal. I could not mate that easily to my analyzer for the typical measurements I run. Still, I managed to squeeze good data from it.
Comparisons are made against a non-name 12 gauge cable from Amazon with typical banana plugs. Cost is probably $20.
Audioquest GO-4 Measurements
I started by make wideband frequency response measurements as high as my analyzer can go (200 kHz):
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The cable makes no changes to the response even if we zoom to ±1 dB vertical scale (zoomed inset). This is better than the response of any amplifier you connect to it. As expected.
For next two tests, I connected the Topping PA5 amplifier through the test cables and then to my standard dummy load. Here is our power sweep:
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The generic cable is a hair better but that may be because of easier termination and lack of oxidation. It is tiny and negligible difference so we can put it aside and conclude that the AQ GO-4 cable didn't bring anything to the party on noise or distortion.
Above test is at 1 kHz. We can expand that to 32 tones at varying frequencies:
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Results are identical as far as noise and intermodulation distortion.
EDIT: for extensive evaluation and test of the DBS, see the review of their
Victoria cable:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...t-victoria-audio-cable-with-dbs-review.14683/
Conclusions
I know many of you could have predicted these results but it is always good to have solid data to back it. Whether we check for tonality using frequency response or real life amplifier driving a load, noise and distortion remain the same with GO-4 cable compared to generic. What is not the same is the degradation of the terminations on the cable. This is a fail and simply not acceptable in a premium cable.
I can't recommend the AudioQuest GO-4 speaker cable. Use a generic cable and put the rest of the money toward good music.
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