Interconnect build advice

Tony_J

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Yes - these work perfectly well. No need for anything more expensive.

 

diviy

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Cheers all in the end I had a set made for me with that cable it cost me a fiver extra inc postage than if I was going to build them myself .

The end result is they are way better than I thought they would be and now considering changing all my cables to the same as I am so impressed with them just need to

save up some cash

 

Fourlegs

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Oh, I feel the need to scratch an itch and that itch is called an interconnect bake off.

It would be easy to bring kit to that one.

In fact just mail them and I can post YouTube videos of each cable in the system.

That would do wouldn't it?

It's the future of Bake Offs.

 

iquadius

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Hello OP, just my tuppence worth ... I used to make my own but stopped once I discovered 'coastman25' an ex pat ebayer who makes cables for a price that made turning the soldering iron on questionable. I now exclusively use his interconnects and power cables, well made, good quality and terrific value.

Mike

 

parcelmonkey

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Hello OP, just my tuppence worth ... I used to make my own but stopped once I discovered 'coastman25' an ex pat ebayer who makes cables for a price that made turning the soldering iron on questionable. I now exclusively use his interconnects and power cables, well made, good quality and terrific value.

Mike
I have a couple of his mains leads. No blind testing done but nice quality and well made... Still use them 4 years later & see no reason to change.

 

iquadius

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I have a couple of his mains leads. No blind testing done but nice quality and well made... Still use them 4 years later & see no reason to change.
absolutely, one well made cable should be more or less equal to the next well made cable, one other reason for my bulk purchase was aesthetics ... they are unavoidably visible and now they will all match. Job done

M

 
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TheFlash

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Hello OP, just my tuppence worth ... I used to make my own but stopped once I discovered 'coastman25' an ex pat ebayer who makes cables for a price that made turning the soldering iron on questionable. I now exclusively use his interconnects and power cables, well made, good quality and terrific value.

Mike
I have a couple of his mains leads. No blind testing done but nice quality and well made... Still use them 4 years later & see no reason to change.
Thumbs up from me too. Chris (Coastman25 on eBay) does make excellent cables at very reasonable prices including cheap shipping from Thailand. He struggled recently to get some more Belden cable so his standard range might be changing but you can't argue with the vfm and the clearly communicated rationale for what he uses and why.

I have a handful of Nordost Blue Heaven LS i/c's from a few years ago and still prefer to use these where I can (wammers tempted to call this expectation bias might ask themselves what they're doing masochistically reading a cable-related thread!). I happen to prefer the prototype i/c's Nick (Fourlegs) lent me and used at Kegworth to both the Nordost and the Thai ones but they're not exactly widely available...

 

TheFlash

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Realistically, what would be considered a maximum length recommended on an analogue interconnect? <5M?
Others will be able to tell you whether there is any sort of theoretical signal degradation but I run a 6m pair of analogue i/c's from my TV to my amp for watching movies and the sound is excellent. I think length might be more of a concern in speaker cables but I'm buggered if I know why.

I presume you ask because anything else wouldn't reach rather than because you fancy a few redundant metres of i/c curled up behind your kit for no reason at all!

 

parcelmonkey

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Others will be able to tell you whether there is any sort of theoretical signal degradation but I run a 6m pair of analogue i/c's from my TV to my amp for watching movies and the sound is excellent.
I presume you ask because anything else wouldn't reach rather than because you fancy a few redundant metres of i/c curled up behind your kit for no reason at all!
I reckon on 5M max. I just moved my amp away a little on the rack as it's a bit tight to the wall and power lead, ic's and speaker cables all very close. It quietened the amp a little.
Where it is now 1M leads are fine, quite a tall rack, amp runs hot especially with 14 hour sessions and Linn DS is as at top shelf.
I reckon I could relocate amp in middle of speakers, 1 M runs of cable to each speaker and longer analogues...
Might improve things...

 

Fourlegs

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I reckon on 5M max. I just moved my amp away a little on the rack as it's a bit tight to the wall and power lead, ic's and speaker cables all very close. It quietened the amp a little.
Where it is now 1M leads are fine, quite a tall rack, amp runs hot especially with 14 hour sessions and Linn DS is as at top shelf.
I reckon I could relocate amp in middle of speakers, 1 M runs of cable to each speaker and longer analogues...
Might improve things...
 
My take on this is that one should do everything that one can to have the shortest possible speaker cables and that this is more important than short interconnect length. For instance I have 60cm speaker cables and 3.5m interconnects. If you can get to having 1m speaker cables then I think there is a good chance you will notice an improvement in sound. Of course this flies in the face of the measurists who might say that as long as you have 4mm2 speaker cables then you are good for anything up to maybe 5m speaker runs and with no loss of quality. That's fine. They can do what they want but have a go at what I suggest. I use 12mm2 speaker cables even though mine are short.

 
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TheFlash

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I reckon on 5M max. I just moved my amp away a little on the rack as it's a bit tight to the wall and power lead, ic's and speaker cables all very close. It quietened the amp a little.
Where it is now 1M leads are fine, quite a tall rack, amp runs hot especially with 14 hour sessions and Linn DS is as at top shelf.
I reckon I could relocate amp in middle of speakers, 1 M runs of cable to each speaker and longer analogues...
Might improve things...
 
Well if that's all it did, turn the volume up a notch (that's a technical SI unit of measure) and you're sorted.

 

MartinC

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Realistically, what would be considered a maximum length recommended on an analogue interconnect? <5M?
I've never seen a figure for this but my money would be on it being significantly longer than 5m.

I used a 5 m long interconnect for a while, made up from starquad microphone cable. Fairly recently swapping from this 5 m interconnect to one under 0.5 m long made no obvious difference (although I couldn't do a quick comparison as I used the connectors from the long cable to terminate the short one).

(Edited as I forgot tagging is disabled on this forum for some reason.)

 
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parcelmonkey

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Thumbs up from me too. Chris (Coastman25 on eBay) does make excellent cables at very reasonable prices including cheap shipping from Thailand. He struggled recently to get some more Belden cable so his standard range might be changing but you can't argue with the vfm and the clearly communicated rationale for what he uses and why.
Last night I changed over my mains cable (Coastman25 one) back to the standard black kettle lead as supplied by Linn for their DS streamer. Interestingly, the standard one sounds nicer in this room, whereas it wasn't the case in my other place. I can't say better; the Coastman25 one appeared a little more forward but also more sibliant on various albums.

I suppose Linn figured this in to their R&D?

YMMV :^

 
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Cable Monkey

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Don't assume! Linn are no worse than others, they just pitch themselves high. You pay for the name and the build quality. If you know a little about electronics you recognise quite quickly there isn't much if anything to set them apart from the competition other than their own insistence they are 'better'.

 
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