How could possibly a mains cable make a difference?
In theory, one meter of a quality wire to our equipment should not make any significant difference, when all the wiring at home and outside is made of hundreds of miles of low cost copper and worse conductors. Contrary to this logic, numerous machine made copper cable offerings claim great results. However, in our experience, most of these mass produced cables do not bring any significant improvement. Agree or disagree, most copper based mains cables we tried sounded alike, irrespective of the cost. The resulting sound was mediocre, in the best case scenario. Out of this controversy, we decided to construct our own mains cable with best possible materials in mind. We borrowed a couple of ideas from the signal transmission theory, assembled a cable and tested it.
The result was nothing short of a shock! We expected some changes but nothing spectacular. The sound became more life alike, with greater transparency, the soundstage became so huge and deep, speakers completely disappeared. The most striking change was in the dynamics and in the resolution, all instruments and vocals became more expressive than ever. The results changed and challenged all our pre-conceptions about what cables and mains cables in particular can do to the sound quality. With hindsight, we felt that the screened (shielded) copper mains cables were the “bottleneck” to the performance of our audio system. The sound improved by such a margin that we consequently replaced all our mains cables with these. Seeking for a plausible explanation, the mains cables changed the way we thought. That was the main reason for investigating further on the effects of cable construction on the quality of audio reproduction.
One can expect following transformation in sound:
Sound stage – becomes more holographic and the speakers disappear
Frequency response – more extension in the treble and more bass, more magic in the mids
Dynamics – everything sounds more immediate
Resolution – low level musical information you never heard before
Read more about factors influencing sound quality here.
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. Join the official SW1X Audio Club
