Totally Free, Easy DIY Cable Lifters


Yesterday, I was reading about the benefits of getting cables off the floor. In my system, the ICs and speaker cables were already off the floor, but my power cords weren’t. I'm not what you'd call a handy guy, but I decided to see what I could do. The idea is to get the cables around 4” off the floor, so I cut  some strips of thick cardboard to size, and made notches to hold the cables. I put them in and…

Since this free, and so easy for anyone to try, I’m not even going to tell you what I heard (wouldn’t want to create any expectation bias 😉). Try it for yourself and post the results here. Depending on the cables, you will probably need 1 piece of cardboard every 2-3’.
tommylion
Having proven to myself the value of getting cables off the floor, with my homebrew elevators, I decided to try a set of Audioquest Fog Lifters. Wow, I did not expect such an improvement over the cardboard! Listening to some of my favorite music, yesterday after installing them, almost brought tears to my eyes.

If you haven’t already got your cables off the floor, try it with the cardboard. Once you hear the difference, I’d highly recommend looking into the Fog Lifters, or something similar.
That's how I started with this, free so try it, back in the 1990's. It worked, and so I kept at it looking for better. It is not the height. That has nothing to do with it. Experiment for yourself and see. It is primarily isolation. Notch your cardboard, stretch a rubber band across, lay the cable so it supports like a hammock or sling. Springs are tuned to load, and the rubber band functions as a spring. So experiment to get the right tension, not too tight so the cable bounces fast, not too weak to where it stretches the rubber band too much. This trick improved my already good Cable Elevators, a lot. They are so effective the last 2 demos I did people heard the difference removing just one. There are 4 per side. Just one on one side is a big enough difference to easily hear, in my system anyway.