sti-04!!

I know all about AV Forums but i cant be bothered trawling through all the threads on there.

So what do you guys recommend ?

Cheers

wrx-kris

what speakers/amp?

sti-04!!

Looking at the onkyo 805 & M&K Speakers cant remember the right model number at the moment.

douglasb

Tel is the resident hifi expert. I can't recommend any specific speaker cables, however I found that spending money on the CD/amp interconnects made a much bigger difference to the sound than upgrading the speaker cables.

Have you already done this?

sarasquares

iTrader: (1)

i use the Monster Cable stuff, no noise interference at all, had mine for about 3 years now. was a bit expensive but it does the job

Welcome to Monster®

monster cable - Cables - Buy at the best price on Kelkoo UK

sti-04!!

Squaresy, i personally think monster stuff is overpriced to be honest but thanks for your opinion.

sti-04!!

I am just starting to plan the HC room, so any advise would be ideal. Its being started end of july. Budget isnt exactly what i had in mind but none the less, i want to get the basics correct as i dont want to be ripping down plasterboard or punches holes in it to replace cabling.

Any links to these interconnects ?

sarasquares

iTrader: (1)

i was expensive when i first got it, thought it might be cheaper now

i got the plug set (power center) as well, at the time cost me around £100, i think its half that now

kbsub

I have QED Micro for the living room , however if you have a dedicated H.C. room (lucky git ) You might want to go for QED Silver Anniversary

NeilT

I used to work at QED so got lots of cables to try out - tried most of them out, Qudos, Qudos Micro, Qudos 4x4 and also their interconnects.. Amazing what a difference a decent cable made on a high end system.

Favourite was Silver 12 - expensive thought, wouldnt personally pay that for any cable!

Qudos original is what I've got my dedicated cinema room wired with now - good stuff at around £2 per m

Neil

sti-04!!

Thanks that sounds ideal

I think i need around 30 to 35 metres if i go 5.1 but i might future proof for 7.1 while i am at it.

Thanks again.

alcazar

iTrader: (2)

Another vote for QED silver anniversary.

Alcazar

RAJ27

Yep QED rocks!

RobJenks

I made my own speacker cable from solid core co-axial.
The key is to use the shielding from the - neg to the core of the + positive and likewise from the shielding from the + positive to the core of the - neg.
A bit of soldering is required and some shrink wrap to insulate the soldered connections.
The results are excellent.

hades

One problem is the length of cable you want. Generally I feel if you can afford it you generally won't go wrong with Nordost, but 35m of even their cheapest cable is going to be silly money. QED silver anniversary at say £4/meter (a lot more for bi-wire) is still not cheap, but might be a decent compromise. At not very much more money, I'd seriously consider the Chord Company Carnival Silver Plus - personally I like the style of sound you get from Chord co's products.

Be aware that different cables suit different setups better. My hi fii speakers run Nordost Blue Heaven (rev 2) which actually sounded better with my set up than Nordost Red Dawn (rev 2), despite Red Dawn being the more pricey. The moral of the story? If you can try a few different cables with your amp / speakers, do so as certain cables just sound good with certain bits of kit and not so much with others. The silver anniversary cable allegedly can sound over-bright with some kit, but I can't claim personal experience of this either way.

Some amps will hate the capacitive load of Rob's suggested home made co-ax cable, and using it at decent volumes would almost certainly physically damage one or two amps I've encountered, so try it with care! A standard cheap but OK job is twin and earth mains cable (1mm or 1.5mm is plenty), which gives IMHO better results than plain QED 79 strand and you can buy it for peanuts.

douglasb

Sorry, but I've no idea what they were. It was just something that was at a reasonable price in Richer Sounds.

Just after I bought them, an Aussie mate was staying with me for a few days. I mentioned to him that these cables had made a huge difference to the sound and we did some testing. I twatted around behind the CD/amp and sometimes changed the cables and sometimes didn't. I asked if I was using the cheap and crappys or the good cables. He got it right every time.

We then went to the local Richer Sounds and he bought the same interconnects.

The big difference that we noticed was that the stereo definintion was better with the good cables. If asked to point to exactly where Jimi Hendrix was standing, we could point to an exact spot rather than just "about there". This makes sense as crosstalk - signals leaking from one channel to the other - would be greater with poorly shielded cables.

We did a similar test with the speaker cables and didn't notice huge differences.

When he was on his way home, I emailed his wife to say that "D has just spent £35 on a metre of wire!"

Daz34

I found QED silver anniversary to have a wonderfully clean treble but my bass all but disappeared compared to Nordost Flatline Gold.

ru'

Can't go wrong with some thick, flexible mains cable imho, unless you have a mega bucks system in a properly designed room etc. (and even then I'd still be unsure...)

If you want to spend much more dosh, I'll sell you some in a lovely wooden box for 90% of the price you would pay for the 'proper' hi-fi stuff?

andy97

iTrader: (1)

Its a load of bollox about oxygen free cable, just use multi strand heavy duty mains lead. Buy a 100m reel.

Daryl

I also use QED Silver Anniversary, but why not make your own.

thesyn

Depends what you plan to listen to. If blockbuster movies and tv I would suggest that it makes little difference what you use as the sound track will be so compressed. The compression comment also goes for most cds.
Having wasted a load of cash over the years on pure a stereo set up biased toward vinyl the main difference I can discern is to clean up the power supply you use. Then as for speaker cables, keep the runs as short as possible. I initially had 10m runs of some van den hul cable, forget which but £20+/m, I then cut it in half and bi-wired, I found the bass improved a lot ( by that I mean what you heard in the air as opposed to the shaking of the floor which many hi-fi shops try to convince you is bass )
Just my thoughts

Bubba po

Are you sure that you didn't just accidentally wire them up out of phase?

Bubba po

Agreed. You just want to cut down resistance to a minimum, so the shorter the run and the more copper strands you have in the cable, the better.

carl

Thinner strands have a higher resistance than thicker strands, though.

Personally, I'd pick some up from Maplin's. I've used their equivalent of QED-79 before, as well as their multistrand stuff, and it's fine. Even their silver-cored is cheaper than the "Hi-Fi" manufacturers.

Bubba po

That's sort of true, but it's because a thin strand has a smaller surface area than a thick strand. But if you divided a thick strand into many thin strands, it would carry the current with less resistance.

Did you know that electricity is carried along the surface of a conductor, not through the middle of it?

Daz34

carl

Did you know that the "skin effect", which is the physical name for the phenomenon you describe, isn't a serious consideration at audio frequencies?

Bubba po

I think you're talking about something else. We're talking about carrying current in a wire, not audio frequencies - aren't we? All I'm saying is that the surface area of conductor available for carrying the current is the biggest factor next to the actual resistance of the conducting material.

carl

Eh? How do you think an amplifier drives a loudspeaker? To drive the cones at 20kHz you need to send current with a frequency of 20kHz down the cable? At high frequencies (RF upwards) the current goes down the skin of the conductor, not the middle, hence you can use copper tubes instead. At audio frequencies this doesn't really happen, and the DC resistance of the cable is a far bigger consideration.

Try Skin Effect Relevance in Speaker Cables — Audioholics Home Theater Reviews and News for a fairly technical description (you can skip straight to the conclusion as the in-between stuff is a bit boring)

Bubba po

Ok, point taken. But a finely-divided conductor will carry current with less resistance than a solid one of the same dimensions and material, won't it?