Cables, Interconnects and More Cables???


I am trying to upgrade my system cables on a limited budget and I'm curious where the best overall values are into todays market. I have an Ah! Tjoeb CD Player into a Rotel RA-971 preamp into a Rotel RB-981 power amp driving B&W 603's and a B&W ASW 2000 sub. I have been using older Audioquest cables and its time to upgrade. Whats the word?
dcaseyb
I'm no towel expert, so I guess I'd let my ears decide. Whichever one makes the least noise would suffice. I guess that would rule out a burlap bag...
Sam: RS flat braided ribbon 14AWG MegaCable is far from generic. It's pretty cool stuff and astonishingly different from bellwire or lampcord. Maybe if they branded it Radio Shacque...hmmm. Carl: that burlap makes nice grillcloth! :-)
Rock, out of curiousity, what other cables have you directly compared to RS megacable? This would give us some perspective of where you are coming from, also do you work for Radio Shack, hehehe.....regards Sam
Sam until recently I was oogling Kimber 4TC/8TC. 30 years ago ordinary lampcord seemed to do the trick. Ten years ago I went to original Monster cable, mainly because I thought it looked cool and I'd heard thicker was better. I recently cut some of it clear through near the soldered termination. The cross section of the strands was quite tarnished. That convinced me that new wire will outperform old stuff ten times out of ten, no matter how cleverly it was designed or marketed. Adding this experience to a perusal of the Belden and HAVE catalogs suggested that $10 each spades and arcane dialectrics have little place in professional electronics. This only increases my reluctance to spend the big bucks for a lot of hoo-ha. For the time being at least, I'm completely satisfied with the sound I'm getting and simply can't imagine how it could get any better. I listen to mostly acoustic music. The tonality is right, the imaging is great, it even sounds real from the next room haha. Let's face it. Somebody's biting the bullet if RS can sell eight gold plated spades for $5 and Kimber wants $40. Who's kidding who?
You'll never know till you try. Not all cables even use metal conductors, some use carbon fibre, and will sound consistent for eons. In general, specialty cable manufacturers make quality products, and take care to slow the oxidation process. Silver oxide even conducts electricity, where copper oxide doesn't..........Anyway, "Rock", you aren't alone. Most folks think all of this audiophile stuff is "hooha", mostly because they don't care about music enough to play it on anything other than a clock radio or boombox. Doesn't mean they know something we don't, it means quite the opposite. Food for thought....