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cheapest cable upgrade ever

I have recently been playing with a very cheap upgrade of signal carrying cables: Attach one or two 1.5V AAA batteries with the ‘-‘ pole in the direction of the signal’s source. Simple strapping on with electrical tape) suffices, no need to connect anything. The benefits are very audible. The weak electric field conditions the outer layer of the conductor to improve electron flow, resulting in a strong increase in transparency and dimensionality. This works particularly well on the digital cable going into the router and streamer as well as the speaker cables (on the latter ‘+’ alligns with plus and ‘-‘ with minus, i.e. two batteries per single post speaker.

At a minimum it is a low cost bit of fun

antigrunge2
koestner
626 posts
 

At least you tried it.... thanks for the post.

antigrunge2 OP
1,331 posts
 

@ozzy

give it ‘til tomorrow…Is the Townshend litz or solid core?

ozzy's avatar
ozzy
7,213 posts
 

It’s not a solid core. They use what they call fractal wire. But it does contain a Zobel type network inside the ends.

ozzy

antigrunge2 OP
1,331 posts
 

Best I know the Zobel is for impedance matching. I use a SteinMusic Speaker Match for the same purpose. The litz has a weaker effect because of lesser skin effect. If you feel pesky, try on the ethernet connection on the streamer. Max effect after ca 2 h

tksteingraber's avatar
tksteingraber
529 posts
 

Ok I tried this crazy tweak on my less revealing second system placing the batteries “-“ to source on my AQ Carbon USB cable feeding my DAC.  Hard to wrap my head around another illogical tweak but this made a significant improvement.  Adding a pair of batteries at both ends improved it even more.  Bass improved, more clarity, fuller sound stage?  My Carbon cable is smelling like coffee now!  

Is it just my brain messing with me?  Even if it’s a placebo effect I’ll take it. Hard to explain but its working and those batteries aren’t going anywhere.  I will try it on my main system to see if any improvement can be had.  I’m wondering if your system is extremely revealing already if improvements are not noticed.   

Glad I gave it a try....cheapest cable upgrade for sure.

 

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