gofar99 Messages: 1949 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi a can of worms for sure. On one hand is the group that thinks that anything under $1000 a foot is junk and on the the other hand is the group that thinks that anything over $1 a foot is wasted and largely snake oil. I really don't belong to either group. I go by some general guidelines though. I figure if it is good enough for the guys doing the original recordings then it should be fine for me. Generally that means for audio cables about 90% shielding and all copper. The copper should be reasonably pure but 99.999999999 (etc) % is not needed. I have concerns about the terminations though. They should be made of the same metal as your jacks. Gold for gold etc. If not the junction of dissimilar metals can occasionally cause problems. Also the connectors must fit well and stay tight. I use mostly ones for PRO use that have barrels that screw in and out and will really tighten down on the jacks. I also use pro grade instrument cable. You do need to be sensitive to the capacitance per foot of the cable. Too much will affect the response. Too little can be a problem with some things like turntables as well. For speaker wire I use 14 gauge twisted pair copper wire that is rated for in wall use. Pure copper again but not 10 nines. Terminations again should match the jacks or connectors. I like to use silver solder to attach the terminations to the wires but I suspect that any solder would be fine. Digital cables are a second can of worms. I don't get into that much, but from the literature and my own experience as long as they are not too long most will do fine. There are apparently more issues with timing, jitter and other oddities in the devices you hook up than in the wire.
Price is a funny thing. The wire, jacks and cables (like HDMI) that I use are similar or in some cases identical to stuff in retail stores. The difference is that you can get them from places like Amazon, Parts Express, MCM etc for about 1/5 the cost. The HDMI cables I have are a great example. Mine were $14 the identical ones in an un-named local big box store were $79. Same right down to the packaging.
So, in a round about way, my thoughts are save the money from the "expensive" cables and put it good use in buying the things you would like to connect with it. YMMV
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