2. cables
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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
antigrunge2 OP
1,346 posts
 

Dear all, on RCA, digital and ethernet: batteries close to the signal target with battery ‘-‘ to the source. On speakers: close to the speaker withsignal side with ‘-‘ to the amp, return with ‘-‘ to the speaker

ozzy's avatar
ozzy
7,230 posts
 

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

canibefrank
406 posts
 

my mid-fi has daily battles with stray electrons in my electrical system and these little buggers like to backfeed low voltage thru my Amazon USB cable that carries signa lfrom my MacBook Pro to my SU8 DAC, so I wasn't expecting much. I started by strapping on a battery, maybe dead I didn't check-  near the USB end that goes into my Re-Clocker on the SU8 DAC. hmmmm.... it does sound a bit more defined and separated... found another battery and velcro-ed that missing link to the speaker end of an XLR...hmmm.... by the way do these batteries have to be charged? ima gonna follow up on this...

krazy78
4 posts
 

I'm still a little confused on the orientation for the batteries (it seems like I'm not the only one).  If a key part of this tweak is to orient the weak electromagnetic field from the batteries to mirror the current flow in the signal cable shouldn't the Negative "-" terminal on the battery point towards the destination?  I thought that electrons have negative polarity and flow from - to +, However, for whatever reason way-back-in-the-day the labeling convention was established that depicted the flow as being + to  -, hence the markings on batteries today.  Can someone clear that up for me?

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