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Audioquest Rocket 44 speaker cable. Any good??

I read a short review in Stereophile from 2011 about the Audioquest Rocket 33 speaker cable. Has anyone tried it or the next step up the Rocket 44. If so, is this cable competitive with more expensive wire, or at least as good as the Audio Art SC-5SE or the Kimber Kable TC-12 ???
sunnyjim
oldcar63
140 posts
 
This might be some help. Keep in mind cables generally are system dependent. That said there are usually sonic traits to specific cables. I have tried many speaker cables in my system, of those I had the 44s and the 12tc. What I recall compared to the 12tc the 44s had a bit more mid clarity but did not sound natural overall. The 12tc sounded more natural with a fuller bottom but I felt the mids were somewhat veiled and muted. For a low cost cable the 2 that stood out of many were the audience conductor and jps labs super conductor fx . Best
b_limo's avatar
b_limo
829 posts
 
For me, in my system, the rocket 44's had good mids and that was it. Kind of dull, not detailed, weak bass. Wouldn't pay $200 for them, that's for sure. I've got a 7 foot pair. If you're interested, I'd let them go for $50.
hawk7627's avatar
hawk7627
1 posts
 
I'm interested?!
213runnin
562 posts
 
Sorry to bring back an old thread, but I recently acquired a pair of the rocket 44 in a 7’ biwire arrangement.  Initially they sounded very good but quickly(within a few hours of play time) became kind of dull with little detail.

To which one would ask, why would a company design cables to sound like this?  And the answer is, they don’t.  The cables need to be broken in!!  I now have about 27 hours on them and using the same speakers, same music, same room and same volume levels, the highs are back and detail giving an airy sound stage.  

The difference is striking, and all it took was running the system for a few hours a day for a week.  I checked the audioquest site, and they suggest it may take about 200 hours to fully break in.  This is about half of what Morrow Audios cables take to break in, but it does take time.

Break in is real, if you have a decent system you owe it to yourself to get the best sound out of it.
schubert
4,867 posts
 
I had some Rocket  88's and they were NO match whatsoever to the Audio-Art Sc5e I now have . IMO you'd have  to go over 2k easy to beat .
No flaws , excels in harmonics and stage , coherent from the very bottom
to the very top . Not cheap, but one of the best value for money items in audio.
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