Another question related to cables...for valve amps

This is a “light blue touchpaper and stand well back†sort of post. When I recently replaced my amplification I spent a little extra of my overall budget to get the amplifier I wanted and therefore had less to spend on new speaker cables, having sold my previous NACA 5 with my Naim amplifiers. I need relatively long cable runs of 7.5m and, unlike before with Naim, the world was now my oyster, a very cheap oyster perhaps, but a fairly wide choice nonetheless.

When I heard the amp being demonstrated the dealer used JPS Labs Ultra, their cheapest range, and these would cost thousands in the length I needed, really stupidly expensive. But I had the amp I wanted and was prepared to trade off some quality in terms of speaker cable until funds permitted an upgrade.

But what to buy or make? Having looked around the local shops and on various forums I decided that I would buy something really cheap and set myself a limit of £5 per meter. Browsing eBay I noticed this auction offering heavy duty bi-wire for £1.99 per meter and ordered some up. £30 plus postage was certainly cheap.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=295&item=5788689095&rd=1

Delivery was fast and efficient and the heavy mid blue sheathed cable that arrived appeard to be of the Van Damme/Maplins professional variety being sized for Neutric plugs etc. After terminating with some spare banana plugs I had lying around the cable was duly installed with little difficulty.

In trepidation I switched on remembering how good the JPS Labs sounded withe amp in the demo room. It sounded surprisingly good, very good in fact with well extended bass and smooth detailed treble. Over the past few weeks the cable and the amplifier have settled in really well and it sounds every bit as good as what I remember hearing in the demo room. At £37 including postage it is a bargain and for the meantime I see no reason to change the cable. Now what else can I save up for?

Happily listening to tuned air!

ft

 

I use Canare with my valve amps and am perfectly happy and content

PS
Your link does not work.!

 

Thanks for that and I have corrected the link.

ft

 

You beat me to a cable post by a whisker as I was just about to start an absolute flaming rant on the subject !. Right, I do agree that cables make a difference - often a big difference. BUT, I contend, a big improvement found in a really expensive cable can , I bet you, be found elsewhere in a cheap one. One that happens to have the right combination for your system and tastes. The trouble is, unless you are a retailer who stocks lots and has unlimited time, or, you have one the Lottery and can buy them all for the fun of trying them out, how the hell can you know? Also, by the time you switch off, change cables, power up again, you lose your refernece somewhat. Anyway my big rant is really with the culture of rip-off pricing that has been allowed to establish itself. Don't anyone try to tell me that the cost of making any cable comes anywhere close to what its sold for. I get very angry about this. A lot of hifi is rip off anyway when you put it in terms of comparisons with other things. So many many people WITH money just don't bother getting sorted with hifi as they see the rip off and say to hell with it. Cables are just an insult to injury that literally make you feel robbed, duped and stupid. I will pay out for good cables but beyond a certain point the industry just takes the piss. Remember in days gone by companies like Naim and Exposure would produce really good quality interconnects and speaker cables designed for their equipment. They decided they weren't going to rip you off when it came to cabling. They said, use this, its good. You might just find something else that happens to work better but you'll pay an awful lot more. That seems to have been abandoned. My new Exposure amps do have a cheap XLR connector thrown in but when I asked about quality I was refered to some sales guy on a mobile who I doubt work for them as such, who pointed me to Chord or Nordost. OK, I checked it out on the net : Three hundred quid for a poxy interconnect -yeah right-oh ! I wonder what that cost to make. Ditto speaker cables. "Oh well for these amps I think you should be looking at something like Chord Signature..." . Oh yes, for a 4m biwire pair, thats over £800. ! Ludicrous ! I suppose that would be bought from him of course. And to think that at one time you risked getting your warranty voided if you damaged your amps using other cables !

 

Clothears,

Well a bit of a rant but broadly I agree and my findings, albeit by happy coincidence or luck, cofirms this. Over the past 18 months or so I have replaced a number of components in my system and generally have bought outside of the latest list of "sonic miracle" or "sets new sonic standard" circus and to be honest been a bit more sceptical or grown-up about the whole thing.

I can honestly say I am now enjoying my music more and worrying less about upgrading. Perhaps this contentment is as a result of other areas in my life being sorted out but I really think that my "downgrading" (or spending less money but buying well matched components) is the best thing I have done since starting out in this great hobby,

Anyway I hope that you feel better having got all that off your chest and now go and lie down slip on a fav track and breathe deeply, afterall its only a hobby!

Happy listening,

ft

 

Am I the only one who couldn't be bothered to read Cloth-Ears post because of lack of paragraphing?

Guess it was the usual cable rant.

 

Darn... I thought this was a valve thread. He he

For what it's worth, I do agree with the 10% rule (or maybe that can be stretched to 20%). That does mean though for someone with a £10,000 system, he gets to spend £1000 - £2000 on cables which is what the market is targeted at IMHO. That doesn't mean they are an absolute neccessity but they will optimize the performance... Alot of budget/DIY/pro-audio/Van Damme cables do a good job for far better value of course.

JJ

 

Equally

Why was the title ' Another question related to valves...' when the post isn't?

 

It was to sucker people in

Here's a valve question for you Lee, what do 2A3 amps tend to send like? I have never got to hear one and I'm always curious

See! it was about valves hehe

 

I'm afraid the thread title was simply down to my stupidity and technical inability to change it despite trying to edit it twice.

Apologies to all those lured by the whiff of thermonic.

ft

 

your wish is my command

 

I promise to paragragh soon. Yes, I will take a lie down now in my basket. As for "only a hobby". Well yes BUT it is terribly frustrating when this mere hobby is costing hundreds of pounds extra with little real justification. As I said, it is a culture that has been allowed to grow. By us, by magazines and by equipment manufacturers too who go along with it. It couldn't have happened had there not been a rip off culture for equipment in the first place. Take a thing like a pre-amp. It is held that good sound will be encouraged by simple signal paths, lack of processing and lack of features. Accepting that, consider just such a pre-amp costing £stupidsum, now ask: where's the £stupidsum coming from, eh?

 

Chris

Very hard to generalise about 2a3.
As SE they are more even handed than 300b, a bit sweeter, but less wattage.
As PP you just get more of the above, but I feel that PP300b leave them for dead.

However there are apparently better valves out there for SE purposes. 211 and 845 are obvious candidates, whilst PX25, 45 and 212 are a rarer and hence more expensive.

 

KGB144

The JPS ultra conductor would cost you £319 (8ft terminated pair £159 + £20 for each additional 2ft pair 7.5 m would be around 24 feet)for a 24' terminated pair, (thats at full retail, may even get a bit off), I have the superconductor FXbiwire which I run shottgunned (only way to get flexible (FX) stuff and retail on this was around £600-700 but dealer sold to me for around £425 due to strong pound, if you liked the JPS (I do stunning cable made a huge difference to sound stage and imaging) then it's not that expensive, I also have superconductor FX balanced I/c and their mains cables (analog ac, digital ac and power+ ac) and wouldn't change them for anything else.

 

hey, wire is wire, but it does have differences based on the construction method, but yes, these pricey ones they just charge what they can get away with and people will say...corr £1000 for a cable, must be the best....its a bit of blinkin wire.

there may be differences, but you can't guarantee £1000 one will sound better than £100. remember you can't make strings sound more stringlike just by engineering, if you could there would be no need to listen and compare, cos when you design, you don't know how its gonna sound in use.

 

Thats why you should audition.

 

I'm sure I remember someone telling me that transister and valve amps are quite different in their sensitivity to cable changes. I was told that typically with a valve amp you need to use good quality multistrand with good shielding but don't get sucked in to exotic cables, and as for those silver Audio Note things, get real. However , with solid state amps cable choice seems to make much more difference what you do. Now, don't ask me to say why. Perhaps Lt.Cdr. Data could explain here?

 

no idea really, I do know some transistor ouptut stages are capacitance sensitive, and also inductance, as such they can have compensation networks like zobels and others.

you usually find a series inductor on voltage feedback tranny amps.

the zobel, ie parallel resistor and small value cap, resistor is typcially the same as the dc res. of the speaker, is a different function on the output stage than the zobel that may be either on the woofer or tweeter of the speaker, that is to change the impedance of the speaker load, and maybe tweak the frequency and phase response, too,whears on the amp its to keep the ouptut stage stable into an inductive load.

tbh I don't know a huge amount about transistor and tube physics which is where this is leading. just remember there is usually some cheapish bicc cable inside your loudspeakers, so putting expensive speaker cable in is futile on its own. And if companies like proac do it, then does it matter? It really is 90% of the big things, ie schematic, transformers, drive units, the business end of things that matter, the things that do the work, the 'engineered' things. all else is a minor side issue. I havne't done any silver wired listening, so remain very dubious of wild claims of any kind, especially hype, having dispelled much terribly wildly hyped things via listening. Its almost criminal some of this audio lark

imo russ andrews was the worst thing ever to happen, and you can dismiss 99% of the audiofool candy catalog right away.

 

Glad you agree in general there. Thanks for attempting to answer the question about valve v's tranny but it actually went beyond me ! That point about what lies between the speaker terminals and the drive units is a huge one. Its something I love to bring up while talking to a cable manufacturer or dealer. They claim logically that my system is only as good as its weakest link. Ok, I say, then whats the point of spending all that on speaker cable you can see when beyond the terminals it goes up bog standard wire? I think what I'll do once I get my new Exposures broken in and made my choice of new speakers, I'll maybe take the advice of the guy on the phone and get my cables from Chord or Nordost, BUT buy second hand and from one or two down range, or in the case of Nordost perhaps new at 50% reduction I'm told is about to happen as the new range comes in. Once I get all that sorted out I'll sleep soundly in my basket. EDIT : ah yes Russ Andrews catalogue, yes, I used to get it for years following one call I made. Whether his voodoo tweaks work or not, it was great comedy, especially when you checked the price sheet ! :crazy:

 

Also dont forget the output signal of alot of valve amp travels many meters along some fairly thin wire,then made to jump a gap of a mm or 2 then travel a few more meters around some sligtly thicker cables befere it reaches the output terminals