Buy Decision Audioquest vs. Audience


In my price range I have narrowed down my speaker cable choices to the Audioquest Rocket-44 and the Audience OHNO-III.   This will be a 1.5m pair connecting my Coincident Frankenstein Mk-II 300B monoblocks to my BD Design Orphean horns.  Your input is greatly appreciated.
tinear123

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Audience makes good stuff and that model uses the OCC copper (Ohno), but it's normally all stranded wiring from this company.  The Rocket 44 is combination of PSC and PSC+ copper (Audioquest's Perfect Surface Copper, which is very close to OCC anyways).  Rocket also has solid-core conductors (which are better) that span multiple awg sizes.  The only downside is that Rocket sometimes has those silver-plated spades/bananas which can cause the system to be too bright.

I would recommend buying the Rocket 44 "PREMIUM No Frills" model from Audio Advisor.  They have a deal with Audioquest where they terminate custom lengths of the Rocket 44 with their own connectors.  The PREMIUM version uses the better gold-plated copper Pangea spades and bananas.
Oh, one more detail.  The Rocket 44 is only a 13awg speaker cable, so I do not recommend doing a bi-wire termination.  That will split the cable into a 15awg / 16awg wire set.  If your speaker has four binding posts for bi-wire, I would connect the Rocket 44 to the upper binding posts and use a jumper cable to connect the lower binding posts.

Or buy two sets of Rocket 44.
@dustsailor - it is more likely that you are hearing the gold-plated terminations.  Most people don't realize that the terminations are just as important as the wire.  I'm running Rocket 44's with Furutech rhodium spades and I do not have any problems with soft bass or treble extension.  The gold-plated terminations will have the effect you talk about.  Silver plated will have more of a bright sound.