Experiences With Costly Balanced XLR Interconnects Above $3,000

I agree the Acrolink website is difficult to Navigate. But if you have ever booked an air ticket direct with JAL from Japan then you will get an insight into the Japanese website complexities. I work with a $5billion high tech Japanese company that does work on the space station and it is the same thing. It is just a different mindset complex to us normal to them. 
 

Here is a brochure from Esoteric who relabel Acrolink cables which has a nice summary of the higher end Mexcel series cables.  
 

Here's where I call BS:  If a top line Amp manufacturer (Let's day $50,000 plus) isn't using the snake oil cables why should I?  I  bought the kick ass amp why do I need to upgrade BS external components? Didn't Dan or Mark or Bill include the best cables with this uber expensive demonstration of their best amp?  Of course they did!!

Hi Mark, thanks for the comprehensive response, appreciated. After reading about your experiences, the DA6300 will likely be my final cable upgrade before I call it a day. Your components and speakers are all top-notch so the system deserves the Acrolink DA6300 Mexcel. I rotate between a Chord QBD76 and Luxman DA-06 DAC on the Luxman L-590AXII integrated. Speakers are Marten Duke 2.

I share the same sentiment regarding the transparency of the company (Acrolink) and the high quality construction of the cables. I currently own the Acrolink 7N-PC9700 and 8N-8100 mains power cables and 8N-A2080III Evo XLR and all these cables are very well made. They are inherently stiff cables and the weight of the A2080 XLR is higher than the Wireworld Silver Eclipse 8 apart from looking more solid.

It’s useful to note that you are an open-minded scientist. I am an engineer and agree that measurements although important aren’t everything. The only issue with me is on my bad habit of overspending on cables.

I knew Robert Fulton back in the late 1970s. He pretty much founded the entire high end audio cable industry. Back then, people thought he was nuts, with his Fulton Gold 8ga speaker cable and his Fulton interconnects. We (my audiophile friends and I) were listening to differences in audio cables way back then.

But I also played in various orchestras and those got recorded. I was able to listen to the direct mic feeds on several occasions, and the thing that really stood out was how amazing they sounded, through cables that were clearly a lot longer and lot older than Fulton’s cables.

The recording stuff was balanced. Fulton’s cables were single-ended.

So from as far back as 1973, I had this lesson that balanced line cables worked and that was why when it came time to design a preamp, I designed what turned out to be the first balanced line tube preamp ever made. The first units were sold in 1989.

Of course we played with a lot of cables back then. Before we had a line stage going that supported the balanced line standard, we built a passive balanced volume control. Running 30 foot cables, the difference in sound between them was nothing short of dramatic. The old mic cables I had on hand sounded broken next to the Kimber and Purist.

Finally we swapped in the line stage. All the cables sounded better. But the funny thing was the old studio cables sounded every bit as good as the others and they all sounded the same.

And that is why we’ve pushed balanced operation ever since.

I don’t like the idea that you can hear differences between cables- because it means that all the cables are wrong. Everyone reading this knows this is so: next year the manufacturer of the ’best’ cable will have a better one and if he doesn’t, someone else will. So that means the cables you have now aren’t right.

Now I’ve often been accused of being nuts but I don’t get why you have to spend thousands of dollars on a cable and then watch it turn into something you can’t really sell- like used underwear. Its a bad investment. I always thought that audiophiles would love the ability to ditch all that if they knew they could get better sound while using a cable they could run for decades.

Turns out some do.

But-

This thread exists...

Well since all the cables sounded the same, that begs the question why the preamp couldn’t discern the differences.  Power supplies sound different, types of connectors sound different…silver vs copper, insulation material, grounding, shielding etc….  But hey, great job making them all sound the same 👍