Suppliers of DIY Power Cables and Electronic Audio products in Europe.

[Baldo]

I am looking for suppliers of products for DIY audio. Starting with power cables made for Hi End Audio kits.

I have looked at Audiophonics.fr but at the moment I am not particularly impressed with their customer service, (lets not go into that here!). Are there any suppliers in Europe that members here can recommend? Preferably those that have great products at reasonable prices. I have also looked at a couple of suppliers in the UK but Brexit screwed a few things up for them. Just means that I have eto buy the products for UK shipment and then bring them over to the continent by hand.

By Reasonable prices, I mean at prices that are not marked up just because they are for the Audiophile market. Some people seem to think that they can sell anything to Audiophiles as long as you have a nice believable story (Snake Oil). Selling a product that is available in some other market but just rebranded (Ie relabeled) for the Audiophile market and saying that the highs are crisper and the blacks so much blacker etc etc, to me is just snake oil sales.

Many thanks for any advice and guidance in advance.

 

[staticV3]

I am looking for suppliers of products for DIY audio. Starting with power cables made for Hi End Audio kits.

Preferably those that have great products at reasonable prices.

By Reasonable prices, I mean at prices that are not marked up just because they are for the Audiophile market.

But that's literally all that Hi-Fi power cables are.

The same underlying components found in common hardware store power cables, but dressed up and marked up to match audiophile purses.

Sure, sometimes brands will do "R&D" to come up with some elaborate construction which supposedly does something that common power cables can't.

Emphasis on supposedly though because it quite literally never does.

Your ears may think it does something but when actually recorded, the sound is always identical to a hardware store cable.

 

[SSS]

I am looking for suppliers of products for DIY audio. Starting with power cables made for Hi End Audio kits.

I have looked at Audiophonics.fr but at the moment I am not particularly impressed with their customer service, (lets not go into that here!). Are there any suppliers in Europe that members here can recommend? Preferably those that have great products at reasonable prices. I have also looked at a couple of suppliers in the UK but Brexit screwed a few things up for them. Just means that I have eto buy the products for UK shipment and then bring them over to the continent by hand.

By Reasonable prices, I mean at prices that are not marked up just because they are for the Audiophile market. Some people seem to think that they can sell anything to Audiophiles as long as you have a nice believable story (Snake Oil). Selling a product that is available in some other market but just rebranded (Ie relabeled) for the Audiophile market and saying that the highs are crisper and the blacks so much blacker etc etc, to me is just snake oil sales.

Many thanks for any advice and guidance in advance.

For cables and connectors like plugs and jacks you may look into the market for professionals. Power cords need anyway safety marks from CE and VDE in Germany. Therefore it is standard cables used. There are no audiophile power cables. If yes, then they look more technical or beautiful, but the current through them is the same. By the way, for non-electricients it is not allowed to build power cables by themselves according to regulation at least in Germany. I know of course that many do it anyway. But when somebody get hurt or electrocuted then you may in full trouble.

 

[Baldo]

Danke @SSS, there are many things that are not allowed in life. Sure it can be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing but as long as safety protocols are followed there will be no fires or electrocutions. I am only talking about mains current for hi-fi equipment so the 10A rail not the 30A rail used for the oven and cooker.

i need to replace my cables any way because some of them are from the UK and far too long so I thought I use this opportunity to get better quality cables. The outside would be just cosmetic, nylon sheath and heat shrink. It just looks neater and more tidy in my space. The sight of all that spagetti is rather unsightly. I just dont want to do any harm to my system. I would be happy to over engineer than under Engineer. And we are not talking huge sums of money any way.

 

[SSS]

Danke @SSS, there are many things that are not allowed in life. Sure it can be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing but as long as safety protocols are followed there will be no fires or electrocutions. I am only talking about mains current for hi-fi equipment so the 10A rail not the 30A rail used for the oven and cooker.

i need to replace my cables any way because some of them are from the UK and far too long so I thought I use this opportunity to get better quality cables. The outside would be just cosmetic, nylon sheath and heat shrink. It just looks neater and more tidy in my space. The sight of all that spagetti is rather unsightly. I just dont want to do any harm to my system. I would be happy to over engineer than under Engineer. And we are not talking huge sums of money any way.

You are right. The amount of money must not be high. And if you are experienced in electricity so no problem should arise. But here in ASR are also persons with none of this knowledge. So as an EE I must play and talk with safety aspects.

 

[Baldo]

You are right. The amount of money must not be high. And if you are experienced in electricity so no problem should arise. But here in ASR are also persons with none of this knowledge. So as an EE I must play and talk with safety aspects.

Danke. understood. It is the views of EEs that I really want to hear from becaue they know about the science of what makes sense and what does not.

I have expertise in fibre optics and I came across a fibre Optic cable that was Gold plated to improve the sound!!! I mean the signal was all light at that stage so gold plating had zero electrical effect. Such is this industry I suppose.

 

[rank]

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What I miss about audiophonics is the forum, which means that I can no longer buy from them in the total unknown from a simple importer without any guarantee of even minimal quality.

 

[SSS]

Danke. understood. It is the views of EEs that I really want to hear from becaue they know about the science of what makes sense and what does not.

I have expertise in fibre optics and I came across a fibre Optic cable that was Gold plated to improve the sound!!! I mean the signal was all light at that stage so gold plating had zero electrical effect. Such is this industry I suppose.

Not experienced in optic fibres I thought that the outside of the fiber has an effect on the internal boundary reflections. Please light me up.

 

[Baldo]

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What I miss about audiophonics is the forum, which means that I can no longer buy from them in the total unknown from a simple importer without any guarantee of even minimal quality.

what does this mean mate? I understand that you miss the Audiophonics forum (never knew they had one. Bet my other post would not have gone down too well there either!!!).

What do you mean by the last bit of your post?

 

[Baldo]

Not experienced in optic fibres I thought that the outside of the fiber has an effect on the internal boundary reflections. Please light me up.

There are two types of glass in an optic fibre. The inner one is the one that carries the signal via total internal reflection. There is an other glass as well but that has a refractive index that is less than the inner one.

The main principle is just TIR but there are modes that can be transmitted in the outer dielctric. And then you have protective sheath to protect the glass inside. You can get into some complex Maths here. One of the main benefits of fibre optics is the massive bandwidth you get from jsut a small tin cable, I mean seriously massive compared to copper wire. Its so massive that you an have on demand Hi Res Video from point to point. however we dont have that in our homes because the last mile of installation is where the bottle neck is. I looked at the physics of their use for data communication where you have large distances to cover and need to take losses into acount.

Very detailed subject indeed.

Their use in Audio i sgreat but the issue arises not with the transmission but with the conversion from electronic signal to light signal. That is where the issues arise. The protocol for Toslink is not as good as the i2s protocol becasue of the way the signal is put together. I am sure that there are people who ar efar more knowledgeable than me who can help with this.

 

[SSS]

There are two types of glass in an optic fibre. The inner one is the one that carries the signal via total internal reflection. There is an other glass as well but that has a refractive index that is less than the inner one.

The main principle is just TIR but there are modes that can be transmitted in the outer dielctric. And then you have protective sheath to protect the glass inside. You can get into some complex Maths here. One of the main benefits of fibre optics is the massive bandwidth you get from jsut a small tin cable, I mean seriously massive compared to copper wire. Its so massive that you an have on demand Hi Res Video from point to point. however we dont have that in our homes because the last mile of installation is where the bottle neck is. I looked at the physics of their use for data communication where you have large distances to cover and need to take losses into acount.

Very detailed subject indeed.

Their use in Audio i sgreat but the issue arises not with the transmission but with the conversion from electronic signal to light signal. That is where the issues arise. The protocol for Toslink is not as good as the i2s protocol becasue of the way the signal is put together. I am sure that there are people who ar efar more knowledgeable than me who can help with this.

Danke. The conversion to light and back plus the data protocol must be good. What I think is that the reconstruction of the clock signal may be different in terms of reliability in different designs. It the protocol will detect errors and a retransmission of the data packet is possible it should be as good as TCP/IP.

 

[gwing]

Danke. The conversion to light and back plus the data protocol must be good. What I think is that the reconstruction of the clock signal may be different in terms of reliability in different designs. It the protocol will detect errors and a retransmission of the data packet is possible it should be as good as TCP/IP.

Just to clarify a bit: TCP/IP is a network software layer that handles the transmission/error detection/retransmission of data when errors occur. TCP/IP can be, and is, used with both optical and copper connections bringing the same reliability and buffering benefits to both. None of this has anything to do with the reconstruction of the clock signal which is done by the audio software sitting on top of tcp and relies on clock information embedded in the data itself rather than the timing of delivery or transmission by TCP/IP.

i.e. the network transmission has nothing to do with clock information or music timing, if it works it works 100%.

 

[rank]

what does this mean mate? I understand that you miss the Audiophonics forum (never knew they had one. Bet my other post would not have gone down too well there either!!!).

What do you mean by the last bit of your post?

The European brands Atoll and Audax have also deleted their forums (fora?) in the same democratic spirit. This is infinitely less serious because even if we have thus lost the in-depth work that has persisted over several years on the part of those involved, often fierce amateurs and compulsive engineers, these two brands sell FINISHED products. Electronics for the first (high quality) and speakers for the second (same). So we know what we are buying, measurements are provided etc.
There, as they sell many assembly parts (from the electrical socket to operational amps), not having an informed opinion from people who have actually assembled them is like buying on Ali express.

There are only a few ratings (0 to 5 stars, with or without some descriptions) left by visitors.

Concerning at best one product out of 50. It must be said that they have stock!
And very rarely unfavorable. If I read about a schuko from Shenzen, actually unmountable (the screws cannot be tightened without breaking the all-plastic casing).
But often we cannot know if the commentator is the buyer...

 

[SSS]

Just to clarify a bit: TCP/IP is a network software layer that handles the transmission/error detection/retransmission of data when errors occur. TCP/IP can be, and is, used with both optical and copper connections bringing the same reliability and buffering benefits to both. None of this has anything to do with the reconstruction of the clock signal which is done by the audio software sitting on top of tcp and relies on clock information embedded in the data itself rather than the timing of delivery or transmission by TCP/IP.

i.e. the network transmission has nothing to do with clock information or music timing, if it works it works 100%.

Right. I mentioned TCP/IP only as an analogy for a reliable data transmission. If an optical connection would be bidirectional then in an audio data stream error recovery could be done. But I assume that audio optical transmission is oneway and the receiver has to do all the work with clock regeneration. If the eyepattern of the bits are fuzzy when transmission is bad so clock regeneration can fail and thus the audio too.

 

[gwing]

Right. I mentioned TCP/IP only as an analogy for a reliable data transmission. If an optical connection would be bidirectional then in an audio data stream error recovery could be done. But I assume that audio optical transmission is oneway and the receiver has to do all the work with clock regeneration. If the eyepattern of the bits are fuzzy when transmission is bad so clock regeneration can fail and thus the audio too.

If we are talking TCP/IP network protocols for our optical transmission, e.g. ethernet over optical cable, then the connection is bi-directional - it has to be to support TCP/IP as that is a bi-directional protocol which does a lot of back and forth chatting with quite complex and resilient mechanisms handling flow control and error recovery. Both copper and optical connections work identically in this respect.

The audio SPDIF protocol is completely different, I'm no expert on this but my understanding is that , whether copper or optical, it is a simple one-way protocol not even implementing flow control or error detection/retransmission.

 

[SSS]

If we are talking TCP/IP network protocols for our optical transmission, e.g. ethernet over optical cable, then the connection is bi-directional - it has to be to support TCP/IP as that is a bi-directional protocol which does a lot of back and forth chatting with quite complex and resilient mechanisms handling flow control and error recovery. Both copper and optical connections work identically in this respect.

The audio SPDIF protocol is completely different, I'm no expert on this but my understanding is that , whether copper or optical, it is a simple one-way protocol not even implementing flow control or error detection/retransmission.

Had a view at the SPDIF spec and it is just unidirectional and thus no flow control.

 

[voodooless]

Toslink will basically work over any old bit of transparent plastic. It’s so simpel that none of the special properties of any of the real fiber cable are really relevant. So you will rarely find any toslink cables that use glass. Only for lover distances it will yield some advantages.

The protocol for Toslink is not as good as the i2s protocol becasue of the way the signal is put together.

That is a nonsensical argumentation. These two protocols serve completely different purposes. You cannot transport I2S over a single wire, and it’s not meant to be used outside of devices. That some manufacturers think it’s a good idea anyway, doesn’t mean it really is. Spdif is excellent at wat is does.

 

[Baldo]

What is the purpose of the i2S protocol? My understanding (from someone explaining it on Youtube) was that the way the data is sent via this protocol is less prone to errors.

Sure Toslink will work with any bit of plastic, I just said glass because thats what fibre optics were/are made of. I agree that the properties of any glass/plastic cable are not really relevant, especially over the relatively short distances that we are talking about in our systems.

My understanding was that the issue with Toslink is not the fibre optic cable but the conversation from electronic to optical and then back from optical to electronic at the other end. Correct me if I am wrong or misinformed.

 

[voodooless]

What is the purpose of the i2S protocol? My understanding (from someone explaining it on Youtube) was that the way the data is sent via this protocol is less prone to errors.

Wiki is your friend:

I2S is an electrical serial bus interface standard used for connecting digital audio devices together. It is used to communicate PCM audio data between integrated circuits in an electronic device

As such, it relies on short signal lines and does indeed not have and robustness built in. And for that purpose, that is perfectly fine.

My understanding was that the issue with Toslink is not the fibre optic cable but the conversation from electronic to optical and then back from optical to electronic at the other end. Correct me if I am wrong or misinformed.

What would be the exact issue?

 

[Baldo]

What would be the exact issue?

I'd have to find the youTube link to answer this one, to go into the details behind exactly why. So leave that with me for now.

However, if you are going to do a conversion of Electronic-optial-Electronic the conversion will never be perfect and there will be errors introduced at each conversion. Now it is certainly possible that those errors could be small enough will not to be obviously audible but errors are still there.

Don't we want to get from the digital data in the file to the DAC chip, to do it s work of converting this into an analogue signal, as cleanly as possible without introducing errors?

I have only recently heard about i2S and not everyone is using it, so I am keen to learn and understand a bit more about it.