Cable auditioning and home trial

[richteer]

Last week, I mentioned in the Killer Amp thread that I was going to my local dealer to audition some cables, and maybe get some for a home trial. Mdabb asked me to share my expereinces here, so here goes. Fair warning: people who think that cables are cables should skip to the next thread; this isn't for you!

A bit of background: my current (two channel) system is very nice, but I have upgraditis. The speakers are the items that would probably benefit most from an upgrade, so they're firs on my list. But before I do that, I need to get my cable house in order.

Between my turntable and preamp I have a 1.5m pair of Nordost Frey interconnects, between my preamp and power amps I have a 2m self-made silver cable, and I have a 6m pair of QED speaker cables. The Nordost is very expensive, and the other two cost about $200 each (I got/made them years ago so I forget the exact amount). These two cables are a weak link in my system, which I wanted to sort out before I seriously looked at replacing my speakers.

So I went to my local dealer (the Hifi Attic in Vernon) to listen to some of their wares. They're a Nordost dealer, so I wanted to include that on my list. I don't usually listen to CD, but the "reference" system they had set up consisted of a Chord CD player and integrated amplifier, and some Reference 3A speakers (IIRC).

After listening to a track or two we switched out the interconnects. The new cable wasn't perfect, but sounded better to me. The dealer concurred, and I was surprised that the cable we liked was about $350 (compared to the ~$2k other cable). We switched cables again (going from balanced XLR connections to single ended RCAs), to some Nordost Frey.

Very very nice sound, although it was obvious that the Chord combo preferred to operate with balanced connections. Finally, we dropped in the interconnect I made. Frankly, it sounded like crap. So much so that I didn't even bother to finish the track. (we also played a bit with speaker cables. Although my cables were very wanting, the interconnects were by far the worst of the two.)

Because it was the Nordost stuff I was interested in (and my budget was undetermined), I asked to borrow the Frey, so that I could try it in my system at home (replacing my crappy home made interconnect). So I put the Frey into my system (between turntable and preamp), used my own slightly longer length of Frey between amps (using my own speaker cables), and started spinnin' some vinyl.

The improvement was fairly significant (with better speakers I'm sure the difference would have been even greater), especially at the frequncy extremes. Detail and soundstaging also improved; I was hooked!

Yesterday, having lived with the Frey for a week, I reluctantly returned them to the Hifi Attic. If I could afford the $7,500 investment a set of Frey interconnects and speakers would be, I'd probably go for them even though in the context of my current system they'd be a bit of an overkill. If a speaker upgrade wasn't just around the corner, I would go for it, but I think the funds would be better spent on new speakers.

What I'm going to do is go further down the Nordost range of cables (e.g., to Red Dawn or maybe Baldur), and use those for the time being, and put the rest of the money into a pair of speakers. Eventually, when the rest of the system is all set, I'll upgrade the cables to Frey--or I might even consider the obscenely expensive Valhalla. (The top-of-the-line Odin is beyond my means, no matter how much I try to kid myself!)

Hope this was an interesting read for my fellow audiophile forum members! I'll keep you posted when the upgrades happen!