High Fidelity Cables?


I’ve noticed for the past week or so, that my favorite cable manufacturer, High Fidelity Cables, is closed due to Covid.  Anyone know anything more?

louisl

I have 3 of their products and they scoop out the upper bass and midrange- the classic wow it sounds clearer- but only at first. Very amusical. They do not offer auditions or trials or refunds or credit. That did not express much confidence that people would like their products. Oh and playing a DEmadnetizing disc weekly makes my system sound better so what do we want with magnets?/

jeff4598

The magnets make my system sound great and after years of use no loss of sound quality.

It is a shame they went out of business but in my opinion it was an unsustainable business model.  If there were one thing in audio that was a sure bet for sonic improvement it was HFC products, no matter the gizmo or how many you already had.  Other products in audio, not so much.  Some are improvements, some make little difference, and some even make the sound worse.  I hope that once the dust clears Rick develops a new business but also hope that pricing is a little more sane.

I have 3 of their products and they scoop out the upper bass and midrange- the classic wow it sounds clearer- but only at first. Very amusical. They do not offer auditions or trials or refunds or credit. That did not express much confidence that people would like their products. Oh and playing a DEmadnetizing disc weekly makes my system sound better so what do we want with magnets?/

That is exactly what one would expect a magnetic addition/integration to a conductive pathway, to do. It is part why the rest of the industry avoided it for the past 30 plus years. Audio fanatics and cable manufactures have been playing with adding magnets in various ways, to audio cables, for literally decades. They all ended up letting it go. Too ’fi’ and not enough musicality. Different is not automatically better, it can be -- just... different.

This part of my complaint about how so many people in the realm of audio, have been training their ears, er, not as well as they could have. Where if you take a group of Class A rated ’revealing’ rated gear... and make an audio sytem out of all of them together, you get horrific screech and a surreal level of ’unlistenability’.

There is a side of audio where people seek detail for the sake of detail and it can be totally out of realistic context and be the ruination of a high fidelity attempt. I am guilty of this at times, like we all are. It’s part of the human male hearing design/utility pattern. The problem arises when one piece is not truly neutral and revealing, and then it multiplies from there like a series of badly arranged equalizers, cascaded. We can end up with a system that is neutral in complex measurement but half the components are obscuring dark haze...which is then filled in with falsified detail from noisy smearing components. Ouch!

Happens all the time, but such systems end up having very narrow windows of acceptability in the music they can satisfyingly play. That's the big clue, where the window of dynamics and music choices and the even sounding varied volume levels -- are narrow, and small.

I don’t exempt myself from it, it is just a thing we have to really really watch for. I found that I had to, finally, go in and deal with each individual component, down the characteristics of the noise factors emergent from the substrate, alloys, and so on. Termination complexities in a resistor, physical shape/displacement regarding field integration and propagation, thermal aspects in it’s entire complex envelope of concerns, or a solder’s molecular noise levels, and much much more.

Just to try and find a way to get it all as right as possible.

Arranging a good high fidelity system is no simple task, if one is aiming high. Many false paths will be part of the journey, as that is the way the world works.

 

The irony of Mr. Teo's post is his cables sound really good, more natural, with magnetic adapters.