A bloody cable.

[Spectral Morn]

Tripped over some slippery conjecture and ribbing about this 'elsewhere'. The gist of that was that these are heavily influenced by ideas embodied in High Fidelity Cables products.

More I can't say, but I agree with Marco, Strokes of Genius is supposed to be the place where fully formed, illustrated reviews are posted. Not exactly like magazine reviews, but at least more than a few words and a picture.

[Marco]

Indeed, and it should *always* be something that other folks can either buy or make themselves, and therefore FULL details should be provided by the OP, in order to facilitate that.

There's nothing worse than reading about something that's (supposedly) great, but that you can't get, because its details are 'cloaked in secrecy', or the item in question is only for the use of a select few!

Marco.

[Arkless Electronics]

[Tim]

It's not a very helpful opening gambit for sure

[Firebottle]

A steel cored, copper clad, silver plated central conductor in a miniature coax intended for RF duties in the MHZ range. .

Sounds and looks like the cable is RG-316, similar to that used in the Sound Cord.

[sq225917]

That sounds like the stuff. I genuinely don't know what the cable is, here's a fuller review- from the other place.



"'I'm loathe to say this but these do sound significantly different to my Blue Jeans LC1 cables.

I left them on all last night between dac and amp and then plugged them into my Paradise and settled down for a few hours of listening before doing some back to back. It's all sighted, so all biased and utterly unscientific.

I'm not sure which wire Mark has sourced for these but I believe it to be one that he looked hard and long to find. It's a strange combinations of materials and features. It's essentially a steel cored, copper clad, silver plated, miniature coax with an extruded FEP sleeve.It's intended for microwave duties so the steel core doesn't matter to them as skin effects all but completely takes over for its intended duties. For our purposes the steel core acts a magnetically permeable conductor onto which magnets can be attached in such a way that one end of the cable becomes magnetically saturated.

Now Mark didn''t come up with the concept of magnetic plugs, the whole cable is basically a functional work-around of the uber expensive cable brand that's doing the round, they use magnetic centre pins to achieve much the same effect- though they don't to my knowledge use magnetically permeable signal wire, so in that respect I believe this cable implementation is unique. Originally Mark had built two sets of identical cables, one with magnets and one without. They were identical in every way except the magnets, even down to using the criminally poorly built and massively quality variable, cheap Neutrik RCA plugs. These were awful, so sharp that they gouged my silver RCA sockets. They really have no place in hifi. For my cables we chose to use the new KLE Pure plugs. These are the latest Keith Eichmann designs and I selected the versions with solid silver centre pins and solid silver ground pins. They are plastic bodied and large enough inside to accommodate a series of N45 Neodymium ring magnets that polarise the conductor in the wires at one end.

I must say Mark has made a lovely job of soldering them up. I'm the most anal soldering guy in the world- a joint can never be too neatly flowed for me and all excess solder is the Devil's work. (The only thing I hate more than excess solder is hot glue!) Anyway, the plugs are neatly finished they apply a nice even pressure to the RAC sockets when I plug them in and the grommet on the back of the sockets looks like it was made solely to be used with this thin, metal cored, RF miniature co-ax cable. It really is lovely cable I'm surprised it doesn't get used more often.

I settled down with a selection of my favourite and best known test tracks and let rip. Initially I was somewhat disappointed with the sound I thought it a little reticent and hollow sounding, thinned around the edges and suffering perhaps form a frequency imbalance that sucked a little of the life out of the music. It seemed tonally bleached and dynamically stifled. Confused by what I was hearing vs what I'd heard previously from Mark's earlier samples I got up and swapped the cables round so that they were now magnet ends at the amp, rather than at the phono stage side. I sat back down and was presented with a totally rejuvenated sound. The presence was back, the mid-hall seat position was gone. Dynamically the whole thing was sharpened with greater attack and bite to sounds and a seamless sense of musicality that was starkly at odds with the sound of the previous orientation.

I'm actually pretty much an anti-cable guy, certainly I don't come within a hundred miles of being a 'cables are directional' guy buy for me these are breaking new ground and sweeping away my expectations. It's fair to say that they are bringing me closer to the music and enhancing my enjoyment; not just of the test tracks I sat down to listen to but everything I've placed since. From Mingus, to Mazzy Star, Go-Go Penguin to penguin Cafe Orchestra, they're an absolute revelation. My preconceptions of how things sound and what effect cables can have on the quality and enjoyment of music replay in the home have been well and truly smashed. I couldn't have imagined that my my pretty hard line objectivist viewpoint could have been so resolutely turned around.

When i get the time I shall investigate them further with the benefit of double blind testing, until then I'm going to sit back and thoroughly enjoy these simple and quite unique cables."




I'm sure Mark (Ynwan) will be only too happy to make a set up for anyone who wants a set. I might even put these out into the field as a loaner pair.

[Marco]

Ok, now we're getting somewhere. However:

That sounds like the stuff. I genuinely don't know what the cable is, here's a fuller review- from the other place.

Which "other place"? Why not just spit it out!

Now Mark didn''t come up with the concept of magnetic plugs, the whole cable is basically a functional work-around of the uber expensive cable brand that's doing the round...

Again, I have no idea what you're referring to... Which "expensive cable brand", "doing the round" where exactly?? The above presumes that folks here are 'in the know', when that's not automatically the case.

I'm sure Mark (Ynwan) will be only too happy to make a set up for anyone who wants a set. I might even put these out into the field as a loaner pair.

That sounds good. However, you'd need to confirm the former with Mark, before doing the latter. Otherwise there's no point.

In future though, Simon, it would be best if you refrained from posting reviews like this until you have all relevant and necessary information about the product being reviewed, and were a little less vague about that.

Cheers

Marco.

[Wakefield Turntables]

The cable review comes from the audioflat forum run by Mark.

[Marco]

Ah, right... Why didn't Simon just say that in the first place!

It's not somewhere I look at very often (almost never), so would have no idea about what's being discussed. Ok, so which cable is he referring to as the "uber expensive cable brand that's doing the round"?

Marco.

[struth]

Quote Originally Posted by sq225917 View Post
A steel cored, copper clad, silver plated central conductor in a miniature coax intended for RF duties in the MHZ range. .

Sounds and looks like the cable is RG-316, similar to that used in the Sound Cord.

Sounds like something you hold up the Forth road bridge with