Righto fellas, I've had a 2m pair of these Belkin cables(same as Alex MCR's) sitting around at home doing sod all for about 5 months now. I bought 'em from eBay simply due to the description: "Double shielded, Silver soldered, balanced cable construction etc, etc", they looked rather good too, and for £2.99 for 2x2m lengths I thought, "Why the hell not".



After stumbling over this thread tonight I whipped out the cables above which cost £11.99 from Gear City in Hong Kong and are no mean performers in their own right, and slotted the Belkin's in between my Pre/Power amps.

I began with an excellent lossless recording of ELO's Discovery played via VLC player on my netbook which is connected to my Caiman via an excellent quality Belkin shielded USB lead with gold plated connectors. First impressions are mixed: Clarity and definition throughout the frequency range is excellent. As noted in an earlier post, drum skins in particular took on an almost ethereal quality, as if the drummer was sitting in the room with me. Depth and breadth of the soundstage is staggering and can only be put down to the Belkin leads. The theory as to how cables can make such a difference is beyond me, but these Belkin's certainly do. As commented previously, I've lost a little bass weight, but it is so much more tuneful.

I then moved on to the Happy Feet OST (don't laugh, it's a terrific production and a fun listen too, hehe), which is also a lossless recording (wav). This fared much better. There is some excellent percussion recorded on this album and it was delivered with amazing clarity and impact. Both Mrs 'S' and myself were tapping away with our (webbed?) feet to every beat. I'm currently listening to Aerial by Kate Bush. This is a 320kbs mpeg file and it too is sounding new and improved, although not to such an extent as the two lossless recordings. I'm sure this isn't down to the Belkins though. It's probably due to the difference in quality between the two formats.

I should qualify these comments by saying I have only been running these IC's for about 3hrs so I am fully expecting further improvements over the next 16 to 17 hours. I have another 2 pairs on order from a seller on the 'Bay so I will offer further insights once they have arrived and been installed in my system...