cheapest cable upgrade ever


I have recently been playing with a very cheap upgrade of signal carrying cables: Attach one or two 1.5V AAA batteries with the ‘-‘ pole in the direction of the signal’s source. Simple strapping on with electrical tape) suffices, no need to connect anything. The benefits are very audible. The weak electric field conditions the outer layer of the conductor to improve electron flow, resulting in a strong increase in transparency and dimensionality. This works particularly well on the digital cable going into the router and streamer as well as the speaker cables (on the latter ‘+’ alligns with plus and ‘-‘ with minus, i.e. two batteries per single post speaker.

At a minimum it is a low cost bit of fun

antigrunge2

Showing 11 responses by ozzy

So, I just reversed the batteries. Now I have the negative end of the battery facing towards the input. In this direction, I (think) I can detect a bit more articulation (but still not quite sure).

So, I guess try it in both directions?

ozzy

I’m always game to experimenting with creative ideas.

Just so I understand for a speaker cable, I place one AAA on the positive wire with the positive battery side pointing toward the speaker connector binding post and the other AAA uses the negative end on the negative speaker wire pointing toward the speaker - binding post?

ozzy

Just tried it on my Townshend F1 speaker cables and I'm sorry to say I heard no improvement.

ozzy

It’s not a solid core. They use what they call fractal wire. But it does contain a Zobel type network inside the ends.

ozzy

BTW, there are 6- and 12-Volt polarized batteries too. I may try them both.

ozzy

Just tried some 12 V polarized batteries on my usb cables and the sound became too compressed, so there is something to this idea.

Just not sure about the 1.5 V effectiveness at this time. (a couple of hours)

ozzy

antigrunge2,

"@ozzy

may I suggest you try 2 AAA’s on the ethernet to the streamer and the USB to the Dac? In my case it really worked"

My Dac is the Lumin X1 in which I use Fiber cable to it from a EtherRegen. Do you think it will have any effect on Fiber cable? I may try it anyway.

I do have a very short ethernet cable from my router to the EtherRegen and a usb from my external hard drive to the Lumin, so I’ll try them there also.

ozzy

pedroeb,

It looks like mine is going in the opposite direction, that is, the positive pointing in the direction of the signal flow. It seems like that should be the correct way.

ozzy

I have tried them in every way imaginable and sometimes I thought that I might have heard an improvement. But, in the end, I decided to remove them all.

And I am a big time tweaker! Thanks for the challenge, anyway.

ozzy