Ryder—I love that our posts are opposite! Perhaps I should send you my cables and you send me yours. Solve both our needs.
Cables to Add Brightness
I was just wondering which cables will bring the largest impact in adding brightness to the upper midrange and treble? Power cord, interconnects (XLR) or speaker cables.
Next, any recommendations? I am aware that silver plated copper or solid silver tend to do better than all copper. If this is true, what are the brightest sounding cables you have tried which managed to add more sparkle and treble extension to your system?
By the way, I am referring to all the good aspects of brightness ie. sweet, airy, 3-dimensional, tube-like glow and extended treble.
Not negative aspects of brightness such as brittle, hard, glassy or distorted type of treble which sounds like tin can.
I would appreciate any thoughts or experience.
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Nice systems you have. What interconnects / cables are you using now? I’ll take a guess not knowing your cabling now.
I am a bit confused by your choice of words. But you seemed to have carefully chosen them. To me sparkle is always a bad thing. Sparkle is not only a preponderance of treble but highly distorted treble. The kind of sound I heard when I was young or in an auditorium with the high frequency highly equalized up.
Let’s say you choose cables that are more tonally balanced towards the treble… or more detailed… they will not provide sparkle unless they are really poor quality. You have nice natural sounding components: Krell / Luxman. If you add really high quality cables like Transparent… you are likely to get more detail… but definitely no sparkle. You would need inexpensive solid silver. If you get sparkle it will come with fatigue and high frequency hash. Here is my best guess to walk the line and shift the tonal balance yet not suffer any detrimental effects. Power cord for amp: DHLabs or WireWorld Silver. Also speaker cables… same. These two things should provide the biggest bang for the buck. Then if that is doing what you want… do everything else. Assuming you really want a lot more treble and that “magical sparkle” then planar speakers or Magico with cooler solid state electronics. Or add supertweeters to your speakers. Ok… that is a a lot more than you asked for. |
My experience has been in order to get speakers to sound less bass forward/brighter to move them away from the walls. To increase bass/less bright move them closer to the walls. In order to have speakers to become clearer and more focused use an isolation platform like Isocousitics. I couldn't recommend a sure way for a cable to provide the results you want. |
Darwin cables. The link I provided takes you right to their Specials section. All the best, |
Silver will give you abit more air and detail but more neutral people forget the connectors ,rhodium is abit more neutral then gold plating silver also I prefer gold over copper, many company use cheap gold over brass , most IEC ,and connectors on equipment ,even. Most cheaper speakers use gold over brass connectors i replaced everything in my audio system that was not name brand copper iuse only WBT, and Furutech IEC , connectors and connectors for power cords, speakers WBT ,and all XLR,rca WBT. The system sounds at least 10% better just by upgrading all the connectors . Wireworld Eclipse use Silver over High purity Copper ,which is very respectable and 6-9s pureCopper ,great quality and value. |
Thanks for all responses. @lak current cables in the main system Acrolink 8N-A2080III Evo XLR interconnect
The Wireworld Silver Electra 7 power cord has just completed the burn in process and it sounds slightly more dynamic and brighter than the Elektra 7 which is a good thing. I’ve also installed the Platinum Starlight 8 into the system yesterday and didn’t hear any noticeable difference. Just today after about 10 hours, the sound has changed and opened up nicely. The treble now sounds lit and tube-like, full of energy. Piano sounds very nice. I’m not sure if it’s fully burned in but will swap the old USB cable (Tellurium Q Silver Ultra) back to the system sometime next week for a final judgment. As you can see, the new Wireworld cables were selected for their silver content, and I am glad that they are sounding the way I wanted it to be. Although I’m not expecting any big change or miracles with these new cables especially the USB cable, I am stunned, and happy.
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agree, seeing @ryder's system, it is very nice indeed i would add, to several who have commented that one should not use cables to alter tonality of one's system -- that sometimes we have a system that is excellent in many regards, works very well, pleases us mostly, but just needs a little touch treble boost or a slight mellowing of the edge... this is where cables can help -- i view them as 'last 1-2% adjusters' for a good system that is pretty much doing what we desire, kind of fine-tuning tools in the tool kit so to speak it happens, we have all been there... |
@jjss49 +10. How could that aspect of a cable's performance not be a factor in choosing between different brands and models? |
