HiFi Writer Blog

Numbers Watch, which should be on the required reading list of anyone interested in the statistics constantly flung out by the media, draws attention to ‘a speaker cable with an integrated battery’ that apparently costs ‘just over ten thousand dollars’ (US, I assume). Unfortunately the explanatory link to which it pointed is now dead. But the other link points to a high-end cable maker, AudioQuest. A word of warning on the AudioQuest site: it’s all flash (that is, Flash Media), rather than good old HTML.

Now as it happens, I reviewed a couple of AudioQuest cables back in 1997, around the time I started all this hi fi reviewing stuff. They were the last cables on which I ever wrote reviews. At least one of the magazines I write for simply refuses to touch the stuff because of the controversy that is always generated. I can understand this. As a result of this 1997 review I was, or so I heard on the grapevine, black banned by the Australian distributor of AudioQuest products for a couple of years from reviewing the various products it distributed.

And here are the concluding paragraphs of the review that provoked this alleged reaction:

Okay, I confess to being somewhat of a sceptic in regard to high quality interconnect cables. But still it is my job to listen and report. Here is what I heard.

But firstly, some qualifications. AudioQuest claims that it takes time for the conductor/insulator interface to stabilise and recommends two weeks of running in. What with the first set of review samples being lost in transit and then me having to perform surgery on my preamplifier, I had about eighteen hours to use the cables before my review deadline. I left both sets of cables running for twelve hours with two CD players on repeat before trying to do any serious listening. I only hope that the Quartz was not unduly biased by its unrelieved exposure to Tchaikovsky’s 1st and Rachmaninov’s 3rd Piano Concertos, nor the Turquoise by carrying two Schubert Piano Sonatas without respite.

Another qualification is that I felt unable to perform the direct A-B testing I routinely do. This would have involved wiring up a fairly complicated switchbox which, given the necessarily subtle — if any — sonic differences for which I was listening, would have invalidated my results. So I had to listen sequentially: play some music several times, swap cables and play it again several times. Repeat the process over and over for different kinds of music.

Having disclosed my bias and given myself sufficient grounds for equivocation, what did I find?

My feeling is that on some kinds of music — especially very complex sound using a full frequency range (such as Rush’s Test for Echo), both the Turquoise and the Quartz gave a slightly more dynamic, punchier result. On small orchestral works, both cables again seemed to smooth the flow of music, to quieten and sweeten the violins. I thought I noticed a little more definition of a left of centre guitar in the Eagles’ Hotel California.

These results were obtained comparing the cables with a stock standard one metre RCA to RCA cable of the type given away with equipment. This cable was several years old. The differences were extremely subtle and I am by no means certain that they exist. These impressions could simply have been all in my mind. Between the Turquoise to the Quartz I could detect no difference.

So there you have it. I fear I’ve done nothing to resolve the cable controversy — neither in my mind nor in yours. It makes sense to use good quality componentry at every step of the audio reproduction process. Whether these cables are overkill is a matter for each listener to decide by auditioning.

But I can positively say that if you are looking for cables in the respective price ranges of the AudioQuest Turquoise [$AUS139 for the pair of half metre cables] and Quartz [$329] audio interconnects, you will be hard put to find finer examples of materials and construction. They are, simply, beautifully made and gorgeous to look at.

Personally, I think I was being rather kind. These days, with several more years of experience, and many examples of having myself exposed my own inadvertant self-deception, I have come to the conclusion that the differences I heard really were ‘all in my mind’.

Having said that, if you have those thin black cables connecting your bits of equipment, throw them away. What you should look for with interconnect cables are rather thicker ones that use real wound shielding (to ensure decent rejection of electrical fields in the vicinity) and, preferably, gold-plated plugs on the ends. The gold has no magical qualities, but its established physical qualities are that it is far less subject to corrosion than most metals. So once you plug your equipment in, your connections should remain trouble free for years.

If you frequently change your connections for whatever reason, you’re better off without gold because the mere act of plugging and unplugging generally cleans the connections and gold, being a very soft metal, wears away rather quickly.

But such cables are available for around $AUS20. There is no need to spend hundreds of dollars.

UPDATE (Sunday, 14 September 2003, 10:47 am): The author of Number Watch confirms that he was indeed talking about an AudioQuest product, known as the ‘Cheetah’. I leave it to the reader to consider the homonymic implications. I see that you can buy these interconnect cables, complete with their ’12V Dielectric-Bias System (DBS) pack’, for just $US900.