Audioqest Wild Wood or Tara Lab Omega Gold?

Labyrinth:

"...the Omega gold speaker cable's do sound natural, audioquest does not make a cable to this caliber of performance..."

It's one thing to strongly prefer another brand and model of cables but I feel your attempt at a definitive statement is not based upon enough listening to higher-end AQ cables in all probability (or you simply prefer Tara) and is therefore not correct. In truth, AQ WEL Signature and 1 other (IMHO) upper line of their cables (at least) do perform at that level of performance, you simply prefer the sound of another brand....as do I, for the record, but I don't bludgeon other brands based upon a listening opinion. Again, for the record, I've got a lot of pairs of AQ and Tara in my past ownership history with very good results and even more from an extended demo point of view...

If someone/Tara or Dealer is willing to send me a pair of each (or one at at time) already broken in reasonably without some huge financial outlay to do a very targeted in-home test, I'd love to try them and hear all that you love and respect about them both! I did realize you've heard alot of other brands as many of your responses/threads have the details; I was commenting on the absolute nature of your comments and comparisons.....have a great day!

Audiolabryrinth....I did not make any reference that I recall to 6+awg wire/effective gauge of cables on this thread.

Audiolabryrinth: "AWG" refers to "American Wire Gauge", a standard unit of measure for a single piece of "wire". When someone lists something of the form 6+ AWG, it is probably meant to imply the wire is more than 6 gauge (and probably less than 7 gauge depending upon written context). For audio cables, or any cables of any kind made up of more than one conductor, you need an "effective gauge" calculator to determine the actual effective gauge of the resulting cable made up of more than one piece/strand of wire of a particular gauge and/or multiple strands of wires each of different gauges.

For example, if you have a cable made up of 10, 24 awg wires, its effective gauge is 14, not 24. Multi-gauge calcs of multiple wire/strands for each gauge (typical of many audio cables) yield more interesting results. As you can imagine, "big bad audio" power cables and speaker cables generally are of lower effective gauges and things like interconnects, etc...are of higher effective gauge.

***Note: I say "generally" as there are clearly many exceptions to this observation for many good reasons....***

Reasonably good effective gauge calcs for both single-gauge and multi-gauge blends can be found in many places on the web,...here is one that yields good results;

http://www.wirebarn.com/Wire-Calculator_ep_42.html

If you wanted to determine the effective gauge of any of your Tara Cables, you'd need to know the specifics of what goes into it.

See Wikipedia for more detail on AWG, what it means to wire, composite cables, etc...and other listings on the web regarding effective gauge for more details...

Absolutely,...thanks for the correction and the note Cleeds.

If you have separate negative and positive runs for speaker cables (typical of Tara The ONE, 0.8 and possibly later models,...one of the features I rather liked when I owned my Tara products), you definitely have to sum the wires by gauge and count in each of the legs of one channel/side of the set and derive the effective gauge....

Almarg: Great post,...thank you for sharing all your knowledge; it is very much appreciated!

Ditto on at least 350 hours of burn-in for AQ cables,...I've owned quite few (Cheetah, SKY, Raven, Volcano and Mont Blanc) and they really 'come out' after 350 hours....when I tried WEL Signature AES and XLR, the requirement was the same.