In the late 90's I purchased a pair of Paradigm Active 20 speakers from Definitive Audio. Prior to buying I purchased a 3 meter pair of MIT interconnects from Audio Advisor. Regular retail price was $700 and they were on sale for 50% off. Hooked every thing up and waited a month for a full burn in. Wasn't satisfied. I thought, whats going on here? So I decided to try the Paradigm stock interconnects that came with the speakers. They were twenty feet long and looked really, really cheap like you find in a department store. They cost $20 a pair. I switched them out and was blown away. The sound from those 20's suddenly sounded, rich, full, very sweet top end and the bass sharpened up to complete focus. I called Paradigm and spoke to an engineer and asked why the sound difference? He said the MIT's are not a match since they are a high impedance/capacitance cable and it has nothing to with the price. He mentioned the impedance/capacitance value numbers vary with different brands. He said you should always talk to the engineers at the amp/preamp companies, and ask which cable values would best match their components. Once you get the specs, go to a local electronic supply house, the one's that sell cables to TV station's and radio station's. Give the measurements to the salesperson to find a match and your good to go.
MIT? Massachusetts Institute of Technology? How prestigious is that? Oh right, MIT cables actually has nothing to do with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - amazing how many audio buffs I've talked to over the years who thought there was a connection.
There are four things paramount in good cables - low capacitance, low inductance, low resistance and a quality connection. Still the best coating according to industry standards (whether signal or data transfer) is a thin layer of PTFE or Polyethylene, with shielding (only if necessary) in locations of high EMI/RFI or when near an unshielded transformer.
I do not believe that all cables sound alike - some cheep, poorly made cables, assembled with poor conductors and cheep connectors, sound bad and some very expensive cables sound even worse.
Uber expensive cables (usually of dubious, design, fraught with outrageous, unfounded claims) play to the egos of those who believe that they alone have super-human hearing that demands something extraordinary or simply have more money than technical understanding or good sense......IMO.....Jim
My story is a bit like kymanor1 except with a different cable manufacturer. The system I have now started, for the most part, in 1991 - 1992 with the amps, pre-amp and speakers remaining the same . I too tried many cables from lending libraries, friends and others with an occasional stop along the way until I had Straightwire Maestro speaker cables and interconnects in the system. When I changed CD/SACD players they loaned me some to try and I wound up with Virtuoso silver for the CD and most recently Expressivo for the streamer. Great people. Let your ears be your guide.
Hello, like many of you I have tried dozens of different cables over the past 30 years. My audio system has evolved from cheap department store components into expensive hi-end equipment that I have today. With that the best cables, IC, speaker, and power I have ever had in 30 plus years, MIT. The higher end stuff they make at MIT is fantastic, sound is amazing, and are always in recommended components. Cutting the box open on the $75 cable only proves that you have a $75 cable. You really “do” get what you pay for. Call MIT, great people there and will talk to you and help with any questions.
atdavid if you are really interested in learning more about Teo Audio there is a very long thread here about it. Anyway I kind of like the idea of the "tuning bullets" that Synergistic has come up with.Tuning the cables to be warmer or cooler sounding instead of replacing them if they didn't work well with a new component.Interesting concept, but my bank account says nope.
I hope by confrontation hack jobs you don’t mean my post which asked you to clarify how you can ignore the intrinsic properties of cables, molecular level fluid conductors or not, such as resistance, inductance, capacitance which are critical to the impedance and hence matching. I am not asking you to reveal any secrets in construction, etc. This is basic stuff with regard to parasitic resistance, inductance, and capacitance that will apply no matter the transport methods of electrons. Even superconductors experience impedance and skin effects (actually worse skin effects).
There was no anger in my post, nor are my thought patterns set in stone, so if you would like to communicate on my above paragraph, that would be helpful. You gave a lot of reasons why people will not understand your cable, but you did not give reasons why you can ignore basic parasitic properties that cannot be avoided and lead to the parameters for impedance which you claim your cables solve at least to some level.
Read up on the conductivity of conductive molecular level fluids.
You might get somewhere. You might be reading for a while, though.....
An interesting point is that even Wikipedia tells you that it falls under the umbrella of QED.
Interestingly enough, that is a recent change in the understanding of the physics of it. It is still evolving.
But wait..there’s more. And more.....
I can’t really respond to confrontational hack jabs like that above post, as there is no good answer to angry when it is set in stone.
To put the shoe on the other foot, tell me why wire is better? Or that somehow wire is perfect as conductors go? where and how does wire ’fall down’?
all of that at the molecular level, please, in layman’s terms.
One had better be up on conductivity at the molecular level, and what is in the texts is pretty darned primitive ( decades old in most cases) compared to what is understood at the leading edges of it...
And if lets say, I did understand it quite well, could it even be translated to commonspeak, at all? And, in such a case, is there any one on the other end of the line.... that is ready to ’get it’?
Do I explain is successfully to one in a crowd of 100 and get stabbed to death as a charlatan by the other 99?
And, when I do that, how many patents do I throw away to those who are silently listening and have the intellectual chops to see it for what it is? Do I end up like Oliver Lodge and get cheated out of a fortune?
I’m telling people it is there, and that it is real and it is superior in some important, fundamental ways. For sane, thinking people... that is more than enough.
atdavid: TEO Audio products defy physics and rely on a ’vibe’
The right interconnects are the ones that sound correct in the system. Cost, geometry and materials are for nought if the parameters sum negatively with other system faults.
I got off the cable merry-go-round a long time ago. Began upgrading parts and lowering AC noise. It was easy for me because of repairing components, I could hear the different parts to see if there were any improvements and was able to compare them to what I owned. Recently heard the impact of the Plitron toroidal choke. It did create a much blacker background that the Hammond choke I was using, etc.
If you are commenting on all of this stuff, look inside your components and tell me the parts quality versus the price. Most parts are pretty low grade for the amount of money you pay. There is a manufacturer that uses filters with their speakers. MSRP $1300 but inside $128 in parts like WIMA capacitors and cheap resistors. Time to learn how to do this stuff for yourselves.
Because what you will find, there really are cables out there that are
so freakishly good they defy any reasonable explanation. Get some
Synergistic Research Element CTS, but not unless and until you are ready
to have your world rocked. Then when you’ve been amazed by them for a
few weeks send their Active Shielding power supplies off to Michael
Spallone to have their diodes and caps upgraded. Seems like boxes on cables are Band-Aids; as in weren't designed right in the first place Be interesting to compare them vs WireWorlds on WireWorlds Cable Comparatorhttps://www.wireworldcable.com/
I had a similar experience with MIT interconnects..... I had a bad one and swapped it out with a pair of Nordost Blue Heaven. Night and day, it was like I pulled a blanket off my speakers. Crack one of those "Terminator" boxes open and you will find a 20 cent resistor and a 50 cent cap.
I swapped out my tuner , preamp to amp , and DAC with cables that do not have a "network" and I am hearing tons of high frequency information that was robbed with the MIT. FWIW I had a Transparent Link II that I cracked open the box and it was pretty pathetic what's inside. I took the other Link and put it between my sub DSP and sub and it attenuated the output.... so it seems they are not a pure conduit for the music.
Unless the MIT cable was specifically designed to have high impedance and roll off the highs, which is completely possible, then the highs should not be affected and the bass not at all. TV and Radio stations will tend to buy from specialty distributors, so this advice seems odd. Most could not tell you the capacitance of their cables I suspect.
Teo_Audio, just looked at your website after reading your point and it is not making sense to me. Impedance matching is a factor of matching source impedance and load impedance to the cables. That would be a factor of unit resistance, unit inductance, and unit capacitance, the latter being a factor of conductor distance, shape and dielectric, inductance primarily spacing and material, and unit resistance obviously exclusive to the conductor. With load impedances 20-100K ohms, matching is near impossible if not impossible as connectors to match that do not exist. Ditto on the source impedance but at least close. Your cables if I am reading this have a liquid at room temperature conductive, it looks to be pretty much the same as what is in a thermometer? That would conduct significantly poorer than a copper or silver conductor, or even that material when solid. That resistance would increase impedance a bit in cable, but I don’t see how that would make a change significant enough for cable matching. Can you shed more light on that?
Back in the 80's, Corey Greenberg, reviewer for Stereophile, took a hacksaw and cut the box open longways on a MIT cable, and their wasn't much inside the box, don't recall the detail's, but his impression wasn't that great.
MIT used to sell speaker cables with whatever was in those boxes(resistors?) customized to work with your specific equipment.They may still make them.That still doesn't guarantee they would sound good though. The fact is you can take several cables from different manufacturers that will measure exactly the same on test equipment but each one will sound different.There's many different theories as to why but nobody really knows for sure.
Yes well this all sounds very reasonable and believable. Who knows there may even be a bit of truth buried in there somewhere. But from my 30 years listening and comparing and reading everything I’ve been able to get my hands on though I’d have to say BS.
If it was this simple there wouldn’t be so many crap cables out there. Companies like MIT, or at least the people who sell them, would be telling you all about it. For 2 reasons: one, because it gives them a really strong selling point, and two, it would dramatically increase customer satisfaction and repeat business and cut returns and deserters to other brands. So however good it sounds its utter BS.
The list of reasons/theories/engineering/electrical/physical designs that have been touted over the years to make one thing or another sound good is so long and so discredited that long ago- twenty years ago at least- I quit even paying attention. NOT ONE of them has ever held up. Whatever has at one point in time seemed to matter has ALWAYS in the fullness of time proven to be BS. Hard to appreciate if you haven’t been following this for 30 years like I have. But its true.
Far from what you think audiozen what your experience demonstrates to me, yet again, is there’s expensive stuff out there with people paying big money for what not only does not sound better than crap, but actually sounds worse than crap. Crap being the one you think sounds good.
Because what you will find, there really are cables out there that are so freakishly good they defy any reasonable explanation. Get some Synergistic Research Element CTS, but not unless and until you are ready to have your world rocked. Then when you’ve been amazed by them for a few weeks send their Active Shielding power supplies off to Michael Spallone to have their diodes and caps upgraded. Be even more amazed at how such a simple inexpensive tweak just dropped the noise floor, threw the sound stage deeper and wider, corrected tonal and timbral imbalances you thought were already gone, and blew micro and macro dynamics out the roof.
Then try and tell yourself this is all because of, what did you say? Oh yeah, capacitance.
Probably for the reason that most speaker lines are passive, not active. And as a whole, the high end industry is one big money machine, and the cable companies and retailers will always take full advantage of those high profit margins.
If this is so critical, why don't speaker makers put this info on the back of their speakers? They just don't give-a-darn if you use the wrong cables and their speakers sound like crap?
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