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

@ozzy 

may I suggest you try 2 AAA’s on the ethernet to the streamer and the USB to the Dac? In my case it really worked

antigrunge2....Thanks for the battery tweak!!!

I tried it on my two pair of bi wired speaker cables for a total of 8 AAA batteries (4 per side) and the improvement is way better than I ever expected. In all honesty..I was not expecting anything!

What I'm hearing is a definite uptick in clarity with a fleshing out of notes in a more relaxed presentation across the board... Kinda hard to describe... but it is making for a definite sound quality improvement.    

 

 

antigrunge2,

"@ozzy

may I suggest you try 2 AAA’s on the ethernet to the streamer and the USB to the Dac? In my case it really worked"

My Dac is the Lumin X1 in which I use Fiber cable to it from a EtherRegen. Do you think it will have any effect on Fiber cable? I may try it anyway.

I do have a very short ethernet cable from my router to the EtherRegen and a usb from my external hard drive to the Lumin, so I’ll try them there also.

ozzy

Definitely not on fibre. maybe on the router access? Or do you use fibre there too?

@antigrunge2  Thank you for sharing this suggestion.  Ok mind blown again…I tried this tweak on my main system and got similar results that I got on my second system prior.  Better bass, clarity and definition.  

Placed battery pairs on the following:

Ethernet cable from router to FMC (2 batteries)

Ethernet cable from FMC feeding my Bricasti M5 network streamer  (2 batteries)

USB cable from M5 to my DAC (2 batteries)

Speaker wires both + and - (8 batteries)

Interconnects from DAC to amp (4 batteries)

Not really able to determine which batteries make the most impact 

but the sum of all batteries definitely improves the SQ.  All batteries are staying in place.  Crazy simple inexpensive tweak…much appreciated!