So, ah... hmmm... tube powered cable

quadzilla

Listening to one now. Tube is used to charge the shield. Need to make some notes and A/B with my silver/copper UPOCC cables.

zingo

Interesting... Is this a design you created yourself?

stuwee

I'd like to know as well, sounds like a interesting idea.

quadzilla

Pre-production Aural Thrills cable. I have some thoughts so far, but need to do more listening/testing.

stuwee

quadzilla wrote: »

Pre-production Aural Thrills cable. I have some thoughts so far, but need to do more listening/testing.

Wow, are they like these? http://www.auralthrillsaudio.com/TubeACS.htm pretty slick stuff, sounds like they need a good burn in to sound theyre best, but please tell more when you can

headrott

If someone tries one of these, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Greg

quadzilla

stuwee wrote: »

Wow, are they like these? http://www.auralthrillsaudio.com/TubeACS.htm pretty slick stuff, sounds like they need a good burn in to sound theyre best, but please tell more when you can

Yeah, it's pretty close to that one. There's some differences though.

quadzilla

I've had this for a few weeks now, and I can say I definitely like it. I like it enough that I bought it @ full price. I was even going to buy a full loom for my 2 channel rig, but Tom actually recommended that I just run it between the preamp and the power amp for greatest improvement.

It uses a 12au7 to charge the shield, and while I haven't tried it, Tom states that different tubes will impart some differences. As my tube collection grows, I'll have to play with that part. I don't have a lot of info on the construction, but I do know it uses Tom's hand-made silver RCAs, the same ones I was using on the cable that this one replaced, and is the same 4 conductor construction in the description linked to earlier. It also uses seperate plugs for charging the left and right shields, instead of the single condutor shown. For the testing, I used the tube Tom supplied and a Pangea AC-14 cable for power. Everything is plugged into a PS Audio Juice Bar, which is plugged into a PS Audio Soloist Ci SE. The rest of the gear is my Empire 298 w/ Shelter 501 mounted on a modified Rega 250 run into an Aural Thrills LOMC phono stage, and Pioneer Elite DV-45a for sources, a Conrad-Johnson PV-2a pre and NAD C-270 power amp, and my TL'ed CRS+'s linked by Jantzen silver spaded speaker cables. The tube cable runs between the preamp and power amp.

The main points are a drastic lowering of the noise floor and accompanying increase in detail. The bass is very solid and deep as well. Lots of air and space on top. I also noticed a good deepening and widening of the sound stage. This replaced a UPOCC solid silver center conductors in cotton insulators, UPOCC solid copper return w/ silver RCAs IC, so the fact that I got this big an improvement was rather surprising.

As an example, on the remastered 180 gram pressing of The Doors LA Woman track Riders On The Storm, now the rain can be easily heard throughout the entire track. The muted guitar playing during the electric organ solo is full of very sharp trasients and little harmonics that were somewhat indistinct before.

John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was equally impressive. John's sax on the title track was filled with tiny little twists, honks, and atonal fills that, again, were not nearly as distinct before adding this cable.

I could go on from there, but there wasn't anything that I put on that I didn't get at least a little bit of the feeling that I was hearing the song for the first time. So if you've got an extra 500 and want a really, really good cable, this would be one to put high on your list.

TL;DR This cable is a keeper.