Audioquest DC cables - why are there almost no high end DC cables?

Sorry to say, but...

Connectors, cable types, and lengths... are not standardized in custom umbilicals. Nor will they ever be standardized. Each design is not truly unique but unique enough that there is no potential for any form of commonality to emerge.

Demand would be spotty at best. If commonality emerged, it would be for maybe a few hundred pieces and maybe only 20-30 of them might desire a custom umbilical, without having the given manufacturer of said gear get upset about it and decline warranty.

It’s not a hole in the market.... it’s a money losing trap, if one was to try and become a ’king’ of it.

The best that can be done is to have an intelligent mind and skillset build a new cable for the given piece, from what cable types, brands, and constructional aspects -which is available for such uses and desired for the application at hand. Even then, such attempts and their overall results.....would be a crap shoot.

Designing and issuing specific 'dc' wire would not be financially effective.

The reality is that quite a few audiophile wire types are perfectly suited for such application, IF their skins have the appropriate markings for such use, or as issued in their officially published specifications. 

The next point is that some companies don’t want you to be changing umbilical as the resultant sonic changes can make the individual happy..but can then be sold onward and ---misrepresent the product to the next potential buyer.

In that point, the given manufacturer can rightly take exception to such changes.

Eg, the odd speaker manufacturer, to avoid this problem, makes potted (sealed in epoxy) crossovers and single wire termination only on their speakers.

Just so the customer, who may be suffering from extremes of audio nervosa and tweak mania, can’t make changes that take the sonic result of the speaker..out of the area which the designer and builder of the speaker intended.

why is this issue of misrepresentation a problem?

Well, we are all different in our hearing and thus systems and build. All things sonic, felt, seen, and so on, are individual in their input and internal interpretation. Naming can be fairly consistent but that is the only part that is even remotely consistent and in consensus: The language of descriptors. that’s it.

To the point that the same cable, the exact same cable we may be selling, is considered by different people, in different systems to be harsh, slow, fast, etched, screechy, beguiling, incredible, spacious, 3D, bass heavy, bass light, lacking in detail, extremes in micro detail, all polar extremes that you can imagine, as descriptors from people. All of the same cable. From excellent to crap, to best to bad, all the same cable. Literally the same cable.


One’s given messing with an umbilical (or any other cable or component, for that matter) can be detrimental to the representation of the gear to other people in other systems.

There is some meandering toward a consensus in expected results, but it is marginal, at best, in the long view.

Since we all have individual aspects of internalizing sound signatures, it (consensus) will generally be marginal at best. Otherwise this business and forum would not exist. The solution and the problem are wholly intertwined and inextricable from one another. Pretty well for as long as humans are going to exist.