Audio Cables

Like them or loathe them, cables are a necessary evil or a means to realise the potential of all music systems. There is great deal of controversy because audio cables proliferate in a bewildering choice of prices, brands and claims. The vast majority are not worth even half of their asking price, so buying used is not the answer.

The Audio Salon has valuable experience in audio cables and can justify the claim to be a consultant or adviser in this specialised market.

Cables fall into two groups (or extremes): commercial and engineered.

• Commercial cables are usually standard ingredients made for, but not by, “manufacturers.” These are essentially off the shelf and very cheap to make. But as they change the sound, they will balance and customise any music system. Some are good cables; most blend strengths and weaknesses. They all establish the market by a sophisticated PR, advertising, and reviewing process. They are all overpriced. During the 1990s this motivated market leaders to small businesses to get into lucrative cables. By now reviewers are either fed up of reviewing another new cable, or grateful for another bribe! But dealers are generally happy with the profit to be derived from a cable. I once sold a second-hand Philips CD player for £200 and went on to demonstrate a £200 interconnect. The man was so impressed that he (rightly) spent the price of his CD player on one metre of interconnect. With a properly designed cable, the sound is so beautiful you just can’t resist!
• Engineered cables are carefully designed to eliminate the problems of cheap conductors, dielectrics, solder, and connectors. Made in smaller quantities with quality materials, they will be more expensive. There are several techniques, but the aim is to exclude RFI and EMI contamination whilst offering the signal a wide bandwith (open conduit). The goal is to add nothing and substract nothing from the audio frequency signal. It is important not to filter even well above audio frequencies or down to DC, because the energy does not disappear; it intrudes. The art and science of audio cables is highly developed.
• Some people believe that cable technology ends at RCL and all else is unscientific. RCL is the electronic model of cable as a network with Resistance, Capacitance and Inductance; clearly this will tune the signal in proportion to its length. Cables are thus a function of their materials and geometry, but how does the insulation work? How does screening work? The important point to realise is that unfortunately they don’t merely resist or reflect; they react! Newtons Laws say that they have to do something with the energy they absorb. An insulator is a dielectric and absorbs the bombardment of electrons by twisting along and axis and thus regenerating current in the wire giving a smearing or ghosting effect. A shield has an equivalent contribution with both external and coaxial wires because the energy fields are electromagnetic: electricity generates a magnetic field and vice verse, but this process is an infinite cycle which (of course) reduces; it is like seeing your image in a set of mirrors.

Advertising, importing, and distributing multiplies the price of commercial or engineered cables. It is not necessarily a bad thing to pay for a well-known and trusted brand; but be aware that you do pay for the name!

However the internet now makes it very hard for dealers to assume their customers will be limited in their knowledge of brands, performances, and international prices.

In the 1980s we sold well-known brands like AudioQuest and MIT, but the UK prices were excessive. In the mid 90s a customer introduced us to JPSLabs who were a combination of a well-engineered product range with very honest pricing in USA based on spending less than 5% of their income on marketing. We proposed to JPS to give up all other brands in return for exclusive UK rights: to be a Direct Dealer, we would buy and sell at USA prices just as if we were a US dealer and absorb shipping costs (which are not huge). Of course we need to add VAT, but nothing is perfect!! JPS as an up-coming company then being acclaimed by Stereophile etc were rightly nervous. ONE dealer for the UK, serving most of it by mail order???

      From our stand, it was also a risk and a sacrifice, but it suited us. JPS shared our philosophy: and here is our advice.

• Don’t mix and match brands of cables. By all means mix and match price points, but the synergy of the loom launches a music system to a higher orbit. The reason is that using the same conductor and the same EMI/RFI rejection technique throughout a system has the obvious result: synergy, amazing definition and accuracy.
• Do not use cables to balance and fix systems (voicing, masking, enhancing). Not only does it limit overall performance but it hides problems and also means that your audio cables will not suit upgrades.
• JPS cables are guaranteed to impress anyone who has good hearing and good components! In that sense, one size fits all, but we will be reluctant to advise customers to use JPS unless they are aware of, or like, components that are in some ways deficient or defective.

JPS cables are based on a unique conductor discovered by the designer some 20 years ago; properties which combine the desired qualities of silver and copper without high purity and without the limitations of these two elements. JPS exclusive AlumiloyTM combines copper and aluminium to form a molecular structure which approaches the theoretical linearity.

The Audio Salon decided some ten years ago to adopt the ideal (but still unique because commercially dangerous) policy to recommend one single brand of audio cables; but the reasons were and remain compelling:

1. JPS is one of the best, if not the best—its sonic performance is world class;
2. Its pricing policy is worldwide minimum, not set according to the markets in each part of the world, and the example is set in the USA by the fact that JPS spends no more than 5% of its income on advertising. This is very ethical, as big spends and reviewer /dealer incentives undoubtedly pay its practitioners. These people grow in five years to high levels of mass market, with High Street and Mail Order business.
3. JPS offer a full range of excellent products; from budget to aficionado levels; digital, analogue and mains cords. This means that buyers can select according to their requirements, and upgrade using a consistent cables technology throughout their system. JPS offers an upgrade incentive scheme to reward loyal customers.
4. The neutrality of JPS suits our products and customers. Most other cables have signatures which may conceal defects, add tone or colour, or balance certain components; but at best it is hit-and-miss, and at worst it will waste money as you upgrade (and mislead your upgrades, pardon the pun).

THE JPS UPGRADE OFFER in USA is usually 75% cashback for a product no more than two years old, but in the UK we offer 60% to allow for the irrecoverable VAT.

LOAN SERVICE. In the UK we avoid the double margin by mail order, but you can try before you buy. We only ask you to pay for shipping and to cover the product, usually on a credit card (on a 10 day sale or return basis), and we ask people not to abuse the system.

THE JPS LOOM. As you replace existing cables or install a loom of all-JPS you will eventually arrive at a moment of revelation or epiphany: all is revealed. What a foolish notion to use mixed and compromised cables!

• Although sonic neutrality seems boring, it doesn’t sound boring—you are letting the musicians provide the variety and colour.
• JPS sounds good from new, but needs burning in. Alumiloy gets cloudy for the first two or three listening sessions but improves perceptibly each time you use it for a few hours.
• You gain 10% more if you clean your plug terminals because oxidisation and grime isn’t purely resistive; it’s partly like a diode and rectifies the signal which is an alternating current like the mains!
• You gain 10% more subjectively if you adhere consistently to a fully balanced or a fully single-ended chain of cables and components. Make sure that the component manufacturer is internally consistent: a major tell-tale sign of pseudo High-end manufacturers is single ended designs (cheaper to make) with XLR in/outputs.

Hi-Fi is an expensive and often frustrating pursuit. And we all make mistakes. However, be assured that a music system that works is worth the effort. Hi-Fi is a miracle of technology. Men have dedicated their lives to evolving what we now take for granted. Music is like food for the soul. You cannot be fully human without music, and poorly reproduced music is like badly processed food.

If you believe that travelling hopefully is better than arriving at the destination, then you are on that famed Road to Audio Hell. There is nothing to beat the arrival!

On a budget?

• Take heart. The best system is not the most expensive; it is the system at whatever price level achieves the purity of sound and “energy transfer” which does not strip the signal of its integrity. Expensive systems are rocket science and are much harder to mix and match!
• You do need to make sacrifices. Playing the market and buying holidays, cars, etc while squeezing the Hi-Fi budget doesn’t work: eBay, AudioGon etc are full of other peoples’ disappointments.
• Planned upgrading saves money in the long term and assures that each step is a system musically satisfying. Focus on upgrading the source components. Buy cables that will last you; spending more on cables than components is counter-intuitive, but it works!

Why Accessorize

Stands are another area where a genuinely large improvement can be had. Most CD players improve dramatically from having a seismic sink located below them. I personally use one under my Gryphon Pre-Amplifier where it makes a noticeable improvement (yes really). The BCD and Grand Prix stands are outstanding and never fail to improve any system that is placed on them. It is no wonder that they have received wonderful reviews.

At the last HiFi show I attended I waited until I had a reasonable amount of people in the room then played a track and stopped it a couple of minutes into the track. I then flipped the input to the gryphon exorcist and demagnetised the system twice. I then restarted the track and played it again. There was confusion and bemusement, along with the general agreement that the sound had cleaned up and improved for the better. People are quick to resist things that they do not understand.

There have been many bridges built in the world that have been well engineered and designed, but that have collapsed in spectacular fashion. That tells me that as good as Science is not everything is understood. HiFi has to be subjective, your own ears have to be as trusted to you as the best scientific equipment. Just telling yourself that it cant be so is akin to sticking your head in the sand and that is just not the way to evolve.