Long thread, I only tried to get the “flavor of it” by some skimming.
My story:
I’m now in the cables won’t add anything, but they can take away camp.
My system was run with various rca cables I had picked up over the years. Thrift stores, brick and mortar stores, online stores, etc.
Always sounded fine to me. Little “ssss” here and there, but its all vintage equipment so I felt it would only ever be so “quiet”. But I always had a lower reading on the left channel. For whatever you think if the absolute number they display, the trend was lower output on the left channel on my Sansui's wpc meters and a corresponding lower trend on the et70 vu meter I have in the system. Not a lot, but just enough to notice it one the needle gauges. I always just chalked it up to the dc offsets in the Sansui as the left channel was difficult to get set properly. Just very fussy and I ended up getting to a mean around the numbers stared in the service manual.
A few weeks ago I decided to redo all the interconnects. Mainly just for looks because I’m not planning to ever change anything again and as far as I could tell, everything was working as well as it could.
The cables I did DIY because I wanted custom lengths. I also wanted “affordable” because I needed to make a lot of them and being retired puts some “hard to ignore” budgetary limitations on you.
I ended up buying a couple packs of wbt “clones” and some “monoprice” mic wire on a bulk spool.
Set up and started measuring and soldering:
They certainly look impressive, but most of that wire thickness is rubber:
But 97.5% shielded and its all copper (ofc if you believe their claim) so it worked for me. Especially at the price they were asking for the spool.
When I got it all installed and hit power (cd source), it sounded a little different. Not as in the sound quality, but the left to right balance.
Watching the wpc and vu meter needles revealed they were now running even. Well, they did reflect the left/right choice of the sound engineer for the particular passage, but the overall left channel lower trend was gone.
About $320 bucks and my labor to make around 170 feet of rca interconnect cables and dead silent (or at least no increases I could notice). So thats somewhere around $1.90- 2 bucks a foot, if I don’t account for my time.
Even a small noise floor “hum” I had on one of the turntables was reduced to the point it was mostly inaudible.
Obviously, even though the removed cables metered fine, I had introduced some defect or imbalance somehow with all the various brands and types of interconnects.
Hence, I still don’t believe cables can add anything to the sound (expensive or not), but I do think they can ”take away” if you’re not careful with the installation of them.
Expensive rca cables? Nope, don’t need any of that thank-you-very-much.
