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Inteligent high end cableing

Good grief.....I thought mating my electronics, speakers and budget was tough, but getting any consistancy with cableing advice seems impossible. I have recently acquired Proceed HPA3 amp (250/Ch), Proceed AVP pre-amp, Proceed PMDT DVD transport and will be linking them to either Watt Puppies 5.1 or to Revel Salons (there's a conversation right there). However, my real issue is what speaker cableing will match this setup. I can rationalize spending $40,000 on my system, but cannot get past $895 per foot for Audioquest top of the line. There's got to be a better 'mousetrap'. Any intelligent advice will be appreciated.
johngalt
brulee
564 posts
 
Tm12 mentioned coincident cables. About six months ago I bought a pair of coincident super eclipse speakers. I had kimber 1030 IC a pair of quattro fil IC and FMS nexus. In my system the 1030 and coincident sounded best. 1030 cost $1200. Coincident $300. Coincident speaker and PC cable are also excellent. Tm12 wasn't just talking. He did his homework. A friend of mine with Venture speakers Goldmun 36 transport and a million $ worth of other cables use's Coincident IC and speaker cable. My point is it's not just a good match with coincident speakers. Coincident cables is great stuff period. At it's price it's a must audition.
redkiwi
1,092 posts
 
Tm12 and Brulee are right on. The CST (Conicident) IC is amazing value, and better than everything that I have tried. HT is not even close. I tried the top of the line from a dozen name companies before the CST. I do not know about the speaker cable, but it is reported to be just as good as the interconnect. I use monoblocks, and back them right up to the speaker and use 6 inch links of Siltech, which essentially is like not having a speaker cable, given there is more, and lower quality, hook-up wire inside any speaker than I am using to connect from amp to speaker - so I am not about to thry the CST speaker cable.
emanes0e59
2 posts
 
Redkiwi's post re 6 inch spkr cables is intriguing, as I, too have monos close to speakers, but was warned both by Nordost and YBA to use 1.5m min length speaker cables because of some resonance issue! Is this a bunch of crap? Powered speakers certainly benefit from direct-connect, no? As it turns out I mounted my monos (Aleph 2s) UNDER my floorboards, so needed 2m to thread up the baseboards, anyway. Any thoughts on min length parameters?
redkiwi
1,092 posts
 
Emanse, I actually played around with various lengths of the cables I like (lots of time spent terminating cables). Even at lengths less than a meter, shorter still sounded better. So I tried 6 inches of 8TC (not my favourite cable), and it outperformed 30 inches of Wireworld Gold Eclipse. I tried a few better cables at 6 inch lengths and the result was very little difference between the cables (when the differences at 1m were substantial). I certainly did not experience any instability with any of the cables. My monos are tube, the speakers Martin Logan.
carl_eber
1,425 posts
 
Redkiwi, that is interesting. I'm thinking of making some short cables, to go along with the little 2A3 mono kit I'm going to buy (I noticed nobody replied to my thread about those). ARE YOU SAYING THAT 6 INCHES OF 8TC SOUNDED BETTER THAN GOLD ECLIPSE 3 speaker cable, or was it GOLD ECLIPSE??? Have you ever tried the thin banana connectors from Nordost or AQ? I'd like to use bananas on the speaker end, to be compatible with Maggies (when I use them). And if I could find silver ones, that'd be ideal.
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