Affordable cables

millercarbon, the fact is that you have convinced yourself that all home brewed cables are failures based on one persons botched attempts. Your message to all DIYers is you are doing them a favor telling them to give up before they have started and just accept your message of ultimate failure. Every company that makes cables originally started with one person coming up with the idea and developing the project.

Well, no. Every time I tell that story its made perfectly clear this was anything but a one-off botched attempt, as you put it. The guy spent, sorry but since you missed it earlier I'm gonna shout, DECADES building COUNTLESS cables in his basement lab. This was his best, his One Cable, his Precious. The best he ever did. But his whole system was chock full of DIY cables. Only time music actually gave me a headache, his system with the DIY cables everywhere.

Oh and also, I tried a few myself. Dismal failures all. Pathetic. When I score I score, and this, wasn't even a rim shot. I have yet to hear the DIY cable no matter how great come anywhere even close to cheap pro wire.

These stories are not made up by the way. They're years in experience in the making. The exact opposite of blowing smoke, you know, like "every company originally started..." Have you met even ONE of these guys? Which one?

Wait, I got a better one: how is this even slightly controversial? Just assume, for the sake of argument, it really is possible to assemble some off the shelf parts and get truly outstanding performance. Your DIY cable, (sorry, laughing, hard to type) so secret you found it on the interweb (right?) anyone can do it, and its so awesomely better than anything else, and for cheap, and yet there's all these guys making obscene profits too dumb to figure out they can make even more building your DIY, slapping a fancy sticker with a name on it? There's a ton of em Would they not be doing this? So where are they? Oh and also at the same time the pro's would be testing and tweaking and finding trick ways to take all those same parts up a whole level, just so they can sell for even more. Leaving your regular old DIY in the dust.

Its one, or its the other. Notice nowhere in there is the scenario where the DIY really is good. Because they never are. Sorry. You got to at least pick a semi-defensible position to have any chance at all here. And this ain't it.

As for beating the SR drum, go to their classified pages here on A’gon and you will see 100’s of ads by their dealers, no need to plug their rather astronomically priced (recognizing they are not alone in their pricing) Nano quantum products.

Uh oh. What Freudian's call a slip.

My simple diy ic`s are cheap but I can guarantee that you`ll never find anything better

If true then why aren’t you selling them for $10k per meter, instead of being a nobody nobody ever heard of before? I mean seriously, "never better" if even merely better than all but the best three you’d be an inter web sensation. Even if merely better than anything under $1k, wouldn’t be true but at least someone might think maybe might be at least halfway plausible.

Now if instead of blowing smoke you want to stoke up your credibility you might try something no one could argue with. Something like, "For only a couple hundred dollars worth of soldering iron and solder and flux and a couple hundred dollars more of RCAs and wire and shrink wrap my DIY design will let you build in only a day or so an interconnect so good you could spend $50 and only be twice as good."

If true this would actually be an achievement. One of the most experienced cable DIYers here, Erik, sometimes manages to build a pair that are only off by about 2 dB R to L. Yeah. DIY is that good. I guarantee it.

DIY cables always look good on paper. I even got sucked into it for a while myself. One audio bud devoted decades- not years, decades- building every idea and material, tearing down and copying, reverse-engineering, you name it. After all that his finest most proud achievement was blown away by some random old SR cable pulled from my used cable drawer and costing less when new than he paid just in parts to build his masterpiece. Not just my opinion either, he heard it himself. And was crushed. Not disappointed. Crushed.

There’s a lot of things in audio very much open to question. This ain’t one of em.

We all know and can't dispute that SR and other uber expensive cables can do magic with your systems however most of us aspiring audiophiles simply can't afford them. 

Ted Denney is a victim of his own success. Thirty plus years building the worlds greatest wires and all it seems to have gotten him, well aside from a pretty darn nice lifestyle, is an undeserved rep for making astronomically expensive wire.

When the truth is SR is the value leader. You answered your own question: find the $100 SR! 

I started out in the 90's comparing all kinds of wire. Cardas, Wireworld, Audioquest, whole bunch of them. All across the price ranges. Been doing so off and on ever since. Started with a whole bunch of SR Looking Glass. Then Resolution Reference. CTS. Now Atmosphere. The hardest part about it is in your price range people tend not to think its even worth selling, on account of shipping becomes such a big part of the transaction. Or the selection would be huge. Because they sure sold a ton of it.

So basically SR makes it really simple: but the newest generation you can afford. No one else has such a long history of consistency across models and years but you can sure do this with SR. Interconnect, speaker cable, power cord, does not matter, same thing.

One thing, Active Shielding. Such a significant improvement that for years all their best used Active Shielding. A lot of guys don't want the extra cables and outlets. But its a great opportunity if you can find some, because unlike all other cables these can be hugely upgraded by replacing the diodes and caps and cheap circuit board in the AS power supply, either yourself or having Michael Spallone do it. 

Speaking of DIY, when it comes to cables, don't waste your time. Sorry to offend those who think otherwise, they are what we un-PC types call "wrong". Been there, done that, wasted time and money, and heard lots who wasted even more. Whatever some DIYer wants you to spend on parts, spend it on any cable- not even SR, just any throw a dart at it cable- it will trounce the DIY. And the SR even more so.