The Myth of Expensive Cables
Headline: Use 12 Gauge Magnet Wire instead of expensive Speaker Cables.
I’ve spent too much time in retail to completely believe the saying “You get what you pay for”, especially if it relates to electronics and accessories. ”We’ll make the margin on this product with accessories” is heard over and over in merchandising meetings, so my skepticism runs pretty deep.
There are limits – I can absolutely tell the difference between a reasonably built analog cable and thin and shoddy “thrown in the box” interconnect. If a digital cable like HDMI or TOSLINK works at all, it will generally deliver whatever digital content it’s carrying flawlessly. Fancy shielding and cabling as thick as your thumb just don’t do anything for digital signal quality.
A while ago I bought a bunch of entry level Transparent Audio cables with some new components. They seemed like a decent value with gold plated connectors (no oxidation, which does make a difference) and reasonable shielding. They sound fine, and I suppose they made me feel better about connecting a fairly expensive DVD player to a nice amplifier and speakers. Once they were hooked up I forgot about them.
A recent equipment upgrade got me thinking about whether better cabling would make a difference. I stopped by my favorite audiophile shop and talked with them about interconnects, and at their suggestion took home a “Moderately” (read: hideously) priced pair of RCA cables for between my DVD player and Preamp. I have to say that these cables were beautifully made with lots of great craftsman touches – lacquered metal insulators and stress relief bushings, locking RCA plugs, etc. Hooked everything up, and sat down to listen to a few recordings I know extremely well. They sounded fantastic! Then, just for the sake of comparison I swapped out the new deluxe cables with the old and relatively inexpensive ones. THEY sounded fantastic. As a matter of fact, they sounded identical.
This led to an afternoon of listening to 30 second clips of music over and over again: Listen to the segment 5 times with one set of cables, then listen to the same segment 5 times with another set of cables. Repeat until your wife thinks you’ve lost your marbles. Couldn’t tell any difference. A good friend came by for dinner and I hauled him up to do a seriously abbreviated version of the test. He couldn’t tell any difference.
I was now in full skeptic mode. I started scouring the internet for articles on cable dynamics. I’ll save you the effort – here’s the best thing I found:
Roger Russel’s tome on Speaker Wire
It’s worth a read if you’re interested in the gory details, but the high level summary is “Expensive Cables are Bull: use 12 Gauge lamp cord or Romex”. You need a certain amount of copper to handle the current and minimize impedance and capacitance.
It probably does make sense is to have a Twisted Pair of conductors, especially since the cables exist in a reasonably noisy RF environment with lots of high output electronics and digital sources nearby. This may be overkill, but the physics makes sense to reduce interference and crosstalk. This is very hard to do with Romex or Lamp Cord.
With that in mind I started looking around for solid copper wire, preferably oxygen free, with some kind of light insulator on it. There are a number of sources out there, but after doing a ton of digging I finally found a company called AntiCables that produces pre-made runs of 12 gauge copper wire with nice spades for termination and color coded polarity indicators. You can add a DIY twist to a pair of these and get a more manageable run as well as limiting interference.
To get a sense for the baseline of the system I did another 30 second repeat session with my old cables, and then swapped them out for the new 5′ runs of AntiCables. To be fair, this wasn’t a completely apples to apples test since I was able to bi-amp my speaker with the AntiCables but not with my original Transparent Audio speaker cables. Fair or not, I was completely blown away by the new cabling…by far the biggest “Bang for Buck” upgrade in audio ever.
It’s very straightforward to build equivalent cables yourself with “Magnet Wire” copper wire and spades. I suspect you could get the price down to under a dollar a foot, while the AntiCables come in at $10/ft. By the time I sourced all the parts and tools and built a few prototypes I’d have spent the better part of a day and ended up with expensive tools I’d hardly ever use, and most of the wire I located was sold in 100′ rolls, leaving me with about 80′ of extra wire. In that light the pre-made version was a bargain.
I’ve read some very positive reviews of AntiCables Interconnects, but I have not yet tried them. Maybe later.
