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Price Isn't Always Indicitive of Quality or Performance

I had spent over $1000 on a Synergistic Research Cable.  The Atmosphere Level 1 level, to be exact. I was using this as my main source cable to my powered speakers. It was absolutely DE-MOL-ISHED by Lavricables' Grand line for a mere $500. It isn't that the SR cable wasn't good.  I was impressed with it and it was a major upgrade over their Foundation line and a phenomenal upgrade over Audioquest's Yosemite cable. 

SR and Lavricables use similar tech, but only Lavricables uses pure silver practically throughout.

Here is the over all make up of the $1000 SR Atmosphere cable:

4 conductors.
Conductor: Silver/Copper matrix.  Or....silver and copper wire twirled together. Purity unknown. Actual wire gauge unknown.
Dielectric: Teflon
Source Connector: gold plated copper, cryo treated and has graphene applied.
Speaker Connector: Silver plated silver, cryo treated and has graphene applied.
Has a silver-plated copper mesh as a floating shield.
Uses a Tesla Coil to burn the cable in (quantum tunneling) prior to shipping out.

Now...Lavricables' $500 cable:

4 conductors.
Conductor: 20 awg 6N pure silver. Each group is laminated separately in Teflon before being encased in Teflon dielectric insulation. Graphene is applied at key points through out the cable.  The cable was cryo treated.
Dielectric: Teflon
Source Connector: Trillium Copper plated with gold. Cryo treated and has graphene applied.
Speaker Connector: AECO ARP-4055 Pure Silver RCA Connectors. Cryo treated and has graphene applied.

The unbelievable sound quality from pure silver was so immense and powerful.  It was no longer like listening to music as it was more like experiencing the music.  The music was pushing into you.  Similar to going to a concert and having the music beat and play in your chest. There were songs that had distortion at either loud, high pitched, or at peak cacophony that I attributed to being part of the recording. The Lavricables proved that it was simply that the SR cable was incapable of reproducing those notes.  WHAT!?! I mean, how do you engineer a cable to fail at $1000? I guess so it doesn't out perform or come too close to your $10,000+ cables. In Lavricables, the Grand line is tops; there is nothing higher.  They pour *ALL* their knowledge, best materials and techniques in the Grand line.

I thought long about this and I think I figured it out. It isn't that Synergistic Research is necessarily trying to rip anyone off.  It's the cost of doing business in the United States.  Lavricables are located in Latvia. Synergistic Research and Audioquest are based out of California.  The average MSRP markup on goods in CA is 3000%. To compare, Texas's MSRP markup is 300%. So the cost of materials will be higher to make the same product in CA than it would in TX. Synergistic Research and respectively Audioquest, has to charge what they do to maintain living and operating out of CA. But in Latvia?  It is clear to me that the materials, tech and know how isn't that expensive there.  So it can be surmised that the cost of living and operating out of Latvia is less expensive, which means they can offer the highest grade product at a much lower cost than if the same cable were made here in the United States.

I am thinking of replacing *ALL* my cables. O_O

guakus

Showing 1 response by aubullience

aubullience
29 posts
 

Hi, old thread, but I came across it and seeing what guakus wrote, decided to respond to a couple points of his.

First - "I had spent over $1000 on a Synergistic Research Cable. The Atmosphere Level 1 level, to be exact. I was using this as my main source cable to my powered speakers. It was absolutely DE-MOL-ISHED by Lavricables’ Grand line for a mere $500." You’re entitled to your subjective descriptions, of course, but when I hear about one cable "demolishing" another, I tend to be skeptical. As others have responded here, such impressions are also system-dependent. And yes, I do buy and believe in the audible differences between audiophile cables- but those differences tend to be more subtle than that, IME, unless one of the cables is clearly awful in one’s system.

Second- "The average MSRP markup on goods in CA is 3000%. To compare, Texas’s MSRP markup is 300%." Umm, guakus, could you source those figures for me? It sounds like you’re just pulling those out of somewhere in you, I’ll leave the description at that. If those figures were true, then CA would be an absolutely uncompetitive state economically, instead of being the 5th largest economy in the world, more or less, if regarded as a distinct sovereign entity. Also, there wouldn’t be so many competitive audio brands in CA if that were so. So that figure seems countersensical- as does the one for Texas, but to a lesser degree.

When I hear random numbers like that, that sound absurd, and for which the sources are not provided, confidently bandied about, suddenly it’s hard to seriously regard any impressions or conjectures by the poster. I just get the sense that they either hold a crude bias against a certain place (such as CA) or are grasping for some superficial (and unverified) notion as an overarching explanation.

So please indicate here, if you see this, where you came up with those figures, so we don’t have to regard it as another simply crazy rando statement online, the kind that hemorrhages the credibility of the speaker/poster.

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