Phono cables WTF!

[Eagle]

A good friend of mine asked me to put new plugs on one end of a set of phono cables that were expensive and he didn’t trust himself to do.
I looked them up £1k

The cable spacer is rosewood. This is completely crazy because even the purest silver audio cable in these sizes is nothing close to even a quarter of that. The design is interesting and not coaxial but the price is just not in it . I thought we were bad with gear .

The even crazier part is the company gives you a two month approval period where you can send them back if you don’t like them for a full refund.

 

[2112]

Guitarists - "We sure do make ridiculous claims about gear".

Audiophiles - "Hold my $2k cable tie".

 

[newholland]

yeah, audio gear is insanely priced. people will pay for what they perceive to be that extra 1% though man. i have a couple of super spendy cables, including a few in use- but i worked with a audio crazy, and hed get them for free on demo and give them to me to try and report back. as much as i hate to admit that some are truly great.. they can be the final word in tuning a mountain of great gear.

 

[Sascha Franck]

No need to cheapskate using these crap cables when there's this as well:

The $485 Volume Knob

Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture Production Blog looks at music recording and production, offering the latest tips, song analysis and book excerpts.

bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com

Kudos do Monster Cable Inc. who are busy in all genres, providing us with trve audiophile stuff!

 

[MirrorProfiles]

I hope he’s elevating his cables otherwise all those sonic benefits might be lost!

 

[Sascha Franck]

And btw, these work fine with guitar amps, too, so there's really no need for guitar players to end up in second place:

AudioQuest - Hurricane Source C15 - Hifi Studio Falkensee - Berlin

AudioQuest - Hurricane Source C15: Hurricane / Source Low-Z / Noise-Dissipation 3-Pole AC Power Cable Solid Perfect-Surface Copper+ (PSC+) Conductors Optimized For Source Components Ground Noise Dissipation Technology (US Patent # 9,373,439) ZERO (No) Characteristic Impedance (50Hz – 1MHz)...

www.berlin-hifi.de

 

[Sascha Franck]

Fwiw, I once had an audiophile friend who was even running a HiFi shop for a while). They had an incredibly optimized room and he would sometimes insist on having me listen to some stuff. The prefered medium back then was direct-to-vinyl-cuts (super-super-super expensive stuff). Just that each and every of those vinyls only ever seemed to be made to impress folks by whatever audio whereas all musical aspects would play no role at all.
IIRC, this here is one of the recordings that people had to listen to endlessly:

Yeah, what an immense joy!

 

[newholland]

i think its easy to mock audio folks, cause theres a lotta hilarious absurdity, but guitarists are absolutely just as absurd on the net elevated cables and knobs are silly... but relicked guitars serve no sonic purpose either. but details matter in the sum of all the parts just like pickups, tubes, speakers, cabinet construction, capacitors, strings, picks. sadly.. that market knows how far it can push the bank accounts of its followers but last i checked i cant afford an r9 sprayed with Magic Mojo (tm) (and tbh.. itd matter less to my life than my audio gear cause thats literally on always while im awake!)

 

[DrewJD82]

i think its easy to mock audio folks, cause theres a lotta hilarious absurdity, but guitarists are absolutely just as absurd on the net elevated cables and knobs are silly... but relicked guitars serve no sonic purpose either. but details matter in the sum of all the parts just like pickups, tubes, speakers, cabinet construction, capacitors, strings, picks. sadly.. that market knows how far it can push the bank accounts of its followers but last i checked i cant afford an r9 sprayed with Magic Mojo (tm) (and tbh.. itd matter less to my life than my audio gear cause thats literally on always while im awake!)

Dude, can you not tell the extra relic'd guitars breathe more from the nitro being worn away?!?!?! Come on, now!

 

[Eagle]

yeah, audio gear is insanely priced. people will pay for what they perceive to be that extra 1% though man. i have a couple of super spendy cables, including a few in use- but i worked with a audio crazy, and hed get them for free on demo and give them to me to try and report back. as much as i hate to admit that some are truly great.. they can be the final word in tuning a mountain of great gear.

But a lot of little small details adds up to quite a lot in the end.

 

[newholland]

Dude, can you not tell the extra relic'd guitars breathe more from the nitro being worn away?!?!?! Come on, now!

totally. i get the micrometer out and verify the sum total surface area to within .00001% of spec to SRV measured standard!

 

[Eagle]

No need to cheapskate using these crap cables when there's this as well:

The $485 Volume Knob

Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture Production Blog looks at music recording and production, offering the latest tips, song analysis and book excerpts.

bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com

Kudos do Monster Cable Inc. who are busy in all genres, providing us with trve audiophile stuff!

I hate their guitar cables.

 

[Eagle]

Dude, can you not tell the extra relic'd guitars breathe more from the nitro being worn away?!?!?! Come on, now!

Relic guitars sound different because of the very thin hard finish and you can hear it acoustically pretty easily.

 

[newholland]

But a lot of little small details adds up to quite a lot in the end.

tell me about it. i actually rotated 4 different cables in different configs between a power amp and a preamp for last month figuring out what sounded best and why. its silly, and probably what most people deem a total waste of time.. but if you listen 6 hours a day? im alright being crazy

 

[James Freeman]

I only use low capacitance gold plated 99.999% oxygen free quadruple shielded optical spdif cables.

 

[newholland]

Relic guitars sound different because of the very thin hard finish and you can hear it acoustically pretty easily.

i dont really disagree at all- but i think like everything, people do things for different reasons. some people blow money on crazy relic jobs cause its what they do, and it looks like a well worn in guitar - some people actually just listen for what they wanna hear. sometimes its both. but im way more on the latter than the former team! black audio boxes are seldom relicked on purpose

 

[Eagle]

It’s different for guitar, we just need mechanical strength and to like the sound. When you start down “ accuracy “ you are fucked mostly in the wallet.

 

[laxu]

A lot of the audiophile hype is rooted in "well what if they are right and it does sound better?" So people buy whatever accessory is supposed to sound better and sure enough, without any real ability to do quick A/B testing, they'll find that it absolutely must sound better now with the fancy MacGuffin in the signal chain. Or at least they now have the comfort of having "the best".

Honestly us guitarists do the same thing all the time. "Which modeler is the most accurate?!" "Which tube amp best reproduces the tone Jimi Hendrix had at Woodstock, but at late night home volumes?"

Then there's people justifying their 6000-7000 € single channel Two Rocks or whatever other esoteric amps that sound like John Mayer just came in your living room. Or super pricy guitars made by a hermit in the Appalachian mountains. They're always on firstname basis with these guys too. "Steve built me this sweet guitar, only $20K, great deal! The Steve-o-phonics pickups have his dingleberries embedded into the coil for that earthy, haunting midrange!"

With audiophile gear...that super pricy range just goes up and up, with seemingly no upper limit as long as there's even one chump willing to pay up. I've seen 50K € systems that I couldn't tell apart from a pair of 2K € studio monitors in a nice room.

 

[Eagle]

A lot of the audiophile hype is rooted in "well what if they are right and it does sound better?" So people buy whatever accessory is supposed to sound better and sure enough, without any real ability to do quick A/B testing, they'll find that it absolutely must sound better now with the fancy MacGuffin in the signal chain. Or at least they now have the comfort of having "the best".

Honestly us guitarists do the same thing all the time. "Which modeler is the most accurate?!" "Which tube amp best reproduces the tone Jimi Hendrix had at Woodstock, but at late night home volumes?"

Then there's people justifying their 6000-7000 € single channel Two Rocks or whatever other esoteric amps that sound like John Mayer just came in your living room. Or super pricy guitars made by a hermit in the Appalachian mountains. They're always on firstname basis with these guys too. "Steve built me this sweet guitar, only $20K, great deal! The Steve-o-phonics pickups have his dingleberries embedded into the coil for that earthy, haunting midrange!"

With audiophile gear...that super pricy range just goes up and up, with seemingly no upper limit as long as there's even one chump willing to pay up. I've seen 50K € systems that I couldn't tell apart from a pair of 2K € studio monitors in a nice room.

You can measure accuracy. These cables are part of a £30k rig and it’s extremely easy to tell it from a £5k one. I don’t feel the need to have a £30k system but it IS definitely better if you know what to buy. As for expensive guitar gear;
Quite a lot of it is art and as a tech I personally appreciate the effort and dedication of an artisan but it doesn’t always guarantee a better “instrument” but it can certainly be inspirational to use. I see the money in time and materials , expensive can be better value if it ends your quest and the intrinsic value is present in the equipment.
It’s certainly not true that expensive means a bigger profit. I often see £20k guitars that leave the builder on less than minimum wage.

 

[Stone]