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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.

ryder

Showing 1 response by ghdprentice

ghdprentice
6,471 posts
 

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.

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