$20 XLR cables that sound good

An excellent place to purchase the Canare, Mogami, and many other brands of pro audio cables is B&H Photo Video:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/shop/4174/Audio_Single_Cables_XLR_to_XLR_Cables.html

I've made many purchases from them over the years, of pro audio and video stuff, and they've consistently excelled in price, selection, accuracy of in-stock status shown on their website, and prompt shipping.

I have no connection with them other than being a satisfied customer.

Regards,
-- Al

I first want to point out that OTL designs such as Ralph's have considerably greater output impedance than most amplifiers, and are designed based on what he refers to as a power paradigm, as opposed to the much more common voltage source paradigm, and so we should be cautious extrapolating from what works best with his amplifiers to others.

For that matter, as Vett93 alluded to above, source components or preamps with highish output impedances will tend to be "revealing" of cable "differences" which are in reality just the interaction of their output impedance with differing capacitances of the cables being compared. And power amplifiers driving difficult loads (loads that are either low impedance at some frequencies, or are highly capacitive such as many electrostatics) may react to those loads differently depending on speaker cable inductance and resistance.

Not to mention that many expensive cables are designed to be non-neutral.

I'm not particularly taking a position on the disagreements which have been expressed in this thread, just pointing out that it's easy to mis-generalize about cable differences, and that some of the reasons for differences don't correlate with price.

Regards,
-- Al

Regards,
-- Al