Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

The Maplin ones are rubbish for the money compared to the (identically priced) Cambridge Audio ones. The Maplin ones have too much plastic, as Chris says the CA ones are all metal and all gold-plated.

My approach with speaker wire is not to buy the cheapest but to buy the cheapest What Hi-Fi recommended, so for the kitchen hi-fi I've just put in that was Audioquest FLX-SLiP 14/4 at £5 a metre. I don't think there's much point spending more than that.

Sounds like I need to upgrade my cables... I think I have the second cheapest Richer have, something like £1.50 a meter.
I dont understand what you do with 4 wires in those ones though.

Bi-wiring?

I know nothing....

The guys in richer sounds said to me I should spend about £2 per meter which I don't think is a bad price to be honest

Bi-wireing doesn't do anything.

Ah the old second cheapest option, like wine lists :)

You can bi-wire as @fizzy.bleach says but I've just got the two marked left and the two marked right twisted together at the ends.

Do Richer Sounds let you listen to different cables to compare? You only need better cables if they sound better/you can tell any difference. I went for those because What Hi-Fi recommended things have always worked for me and by the time I got to hear them they would be buried inside ceilings, in walls and under a lot of plasterboard. So I didn't want to want to replace them with something better when I listened to them!

There is nothing like listening to things. I was trying to decide between the Marantz MCR610 (old model) and the MCR611 (new model) for our kitchen. New model was £100 more but had better inputs and a few extra features, but not really £100 worth. So went into City Richer Sounds for a demo at the weekend, thinking there'd hardly be any difference, if any...

The MCR610 sounded so much better, and the difference was pretty huge. Even my other half who has smaller ears than me was surprised.

"I'm celebrating tonight, bring me your second cheapest wine!"
Every time.
I can convince myself I can hear the difference. Keen on getting this new set up as perfect as possible. The phone stage sounds soooo much clearer. Might send the Beogram off for a proper full refurb.

hold on a mo, you don't know which maplin ones I buyded do you, caaarrnt

;)

My speaker cable is pink. I think that might be a bad vibe as it stands out a bit... time to measure up some new cable!

I went with the stuff from Studio Spares https://www.studiospares.com/Cables-Leads/Cable-Speaker/Europa-Speaker-Cable-225mm_548320.htm Reasonable price, fairly chunky, given they mainly supply to the pro-audio market you'd expect a decent quality/price match.

Van Damme cables are the ones that everyone seems keen on but £5 a metre upwards was a bit rich for me.

@Fox @chrisbmx116

Ah the old second cheapest option, like wine lists :)

Wine supplier friend had a take on this that makes sense.

House wine will generally be good. If it's not then people don't come back.

Second/third cheapest will generally be worse than the house, or at least will have a much healthier markup, as they're taking advantage of people on dates not wanting to look cheap.

Oh yeah, totally heard that actually too. Cheapest wine it is for me from now on!

I'm not sure I'd even bother listening to cables in a showroom - if they're appropriate for the power handling (physics, not magic) they'll be fine. The other thing with the showroom is it will sound totally different to your home, so 'better' in one is not necessarily 'better' in the other.

And if you ever look inside a speaker cab you can be surprised by the shitty thin wire from the terminals to the crossovers.

It's just electrons flowing and the normal household hi fi current is rarely enough to overload a wire.

It's just electrons flowing>

Y'all need to stop now

Y'all need to stop now

...but...but... we haven't even covered cable directionality yet you brute!

On the previous page, the link to 'bad' banana plugs is the exact type I've had the intermittency issues with too.

srsly y'alls. stahp.

But there is so much more. For instance, FLAC sounds worse than .wav. And electricity sounds different from, erm, other electricity. So much fun is to be had, surely?

On another forum I sometimes frequent, there is a bloke who is convinced that he can hear "what is missing" in red book (ie CD) sampling rates....

And electricity sounds different from, erm, other electricity.

It does, it does! :)

I should say, I'm no expert - but assuming you're talking about my ebay link, those things are just crap. If I pulled on the cable after tightening it down, it'd just pop out of the plugs. The two screws one seem to actually hold them in place and generally seem to be made of sterner stuff.

It does sound different to your home but you can test things against each other. Something that sounds better than something else in a showroom generally sounds better at home too.

That said I have never listened to cables in a showroom.

No más.

I know we should stop but, just read the blurb on these!
http://www.audioaffair.co.uk/black-rhodium-duet-biwire-dct-cs-speaker-cable-terminated-pairs?gclid=CMDgxYeTpMsCFfEV0wodLZUJQg

"Advanced Cryogenic and Crystal Sound Processing for a Superior, High Impact Sound"