Blue Jeans Cable Iconoclast

Here ya there.. Townshend Fractals are just a few smidges below and they will work with you on a good price. I have their Fractal Speaker wires and Podiums and they make good stuff.

A couple of points. 

Cables generally don't make a substantial difference.  If they do, your current stuff is of poor quality or a mismatch with your system's other components.

Secondly, some us are in pursuit of even the smallest sound improvement, an end in itself.  And we are willing to spend substantially in that pursuit.  I respect and understand those who are less interested or able to do that.  It has little to do with most non accountical music... and almost nothing to do with bands playing loud electric guitars.  Cables, tube swapping, vibration control are all a part of that.  Does the music sound better?  Yes, more definition and depth.  The small stuff is what thrills us. And, it is very costly so we are paying for the excitement.  Five or maybe ten percent improvement for thousands more dollars.  

@navyachts - I think the answer to your question can be found on a thread on the Audiophile Style on a discussion titled "Ho ho ho! Belden and Blue Jeans Join the Dark Side".  I think it can be summarized to say that Iconoclast holds the same basic principles without budget being a factor in the optimization equation.

The following is what appears to be a post by Kurt from BJC that you can find on page 3:

"Hi, Kurt from BJC here again.

One of my great fears going forward is that people will think that we, who have always been a voice for good sense in audio cabling, have had some sort of personality change. I’m here to assure you that while Iconoclast is not in our traditional pricing zone, that’s not the case.

We’ve been asked countless times to take on various “high end” cable products for various people, and we have always said no. It’s not that we reject the idea in principle, but that we always find ourselves rejecting it in practice. Usually we have just not found the technical case convincing, and sometimes we’ve found it downright bizarre.

I first learned about Iconoclast before it had a name – several years ago, while meeting with Steve Lampen, Belden’s (now retired) cable guru/evangelist. We were talking about “high end” cable products and he surprised me by saying that there was, in fact, an engineer at Belden who had come to the conclusion that there really was something to this, after all, and that he felt he had a good handle on what it was. That got my attention; and then, a year or so later, I found myself on a trip to Richmond, Indiana to meet Galen, review the product development work that had been done, and start working on how we might assemble these for Belden. Belden’s existing assembly operations were all much more volume-driven, and this wasn’t a good product for them to handle assembly in-house.

For the last few years we have been the assembler for these cables, but suffice it to say that we’ve been as frustrated as anyone by the marketing side – it just seemed to be very difficult for people to buy! When you consider that Belden really has no consumer sales operations at all, though, that’s perhaps not very surprising.

Now, Pam and I named our company “Blue Jeans Cable,” back when it was just the two of us at the dining room table, as a kind of contrast to what we saw as a lot of pseudo-technical sales talk in the consumer cabling business. But from the get-go, we weren’t Monoprice. We were there to make a cable that was better than the customer needed, but so good that he needn’t worry about it. S/PDIF cables with a thousand times the needed bandwidth aren’t essential, but they sure are sufficient. To us the question always was: could we sell cable without having to fib about it? The answer, I am very pleased to be able to say, turned out to be yes. We now have seven full-time and three part-time employees in our little building in Seattle.

The way I think of Iconoclast is something like this: it’s very well known what you need to do to make an acceptable, reliable speaker, RCA or XLR cable for analog use. But every cable design is an optimization problem, and one of the factors to be optimized is cost. For example, when you can dramatically reduce the inductance in a speaker cable, but the result is a cable that is extremely expensive to make and slow to terminate, the ordinary reaction is to say that the inductance in a conventional design is low enough, in light of the cost of reducing it. In the case of Iconoclast, Galen has shifted the balance of that optimization problem – mere cost is not enough to make a solution impractical, and the real question is whether the cable can be manufactured at all. In some cases, like the Generation 2 interconnects with miniature uninsulated star-quad conductors held apart by tiny splines, it wasn’t always clear that the cable COULD be made, until the difficulty of doing it was faced and experimented with.

Does anybody NEED this? No. In fact, conventional speaker cable designs work very well and have well known performance characteristics. But if a person really is trying very hard to squeeze the best audio performance from a system, every aspect of that system deserves a look, and that includes cabling. Nobody “needs” Iconoclast; the question whether one WANTS it, however, will depend intimately upon his or her evaluation of it within a high-end system. Like most things we make at BJC, Iconoclast is better than it needs to be; it’s just that in this case, no expense has been spared to make it better.

An important part of our getting this new approach set up was to get pricing in line. We felt, on looking at the original pricing, that it had been pegged much higher than it needed to be. And whether the prices as they now are make you blanch or make you cheer, know this: they are in line with our ordinary pricing approach at BJC, which is to price things in direct relation to what they cost us to make.

Now, maybe I will lose credibility by saying so, but: I’m not really an audiophile. I’m a cable assembler. I know how to pull and terminate and manage cable products, but while I do love high-end audio when someone else is paying for it, and have sat enraptured at audio shows before marvelous systems of the greatest clarity, I can’t bring myself to drop the kind of money on it that some of these systems require. And I don’t consider myself to have golden ears, or be the world’s best critical listener. As a result, I never tell anybody what he’s going to hear. I’m not going to tell anybody that his system will sound better with Iconoclast in it – what I will say is that it’s here, we have it, it has the best and most well-attested engineering work done on it by a man who is one of the nation’s top experts on electronic communications cabling, and that anybody who would like to have a listen to it ought to do just that. But if somebody tells me that he hears no difference, I’m as ready to accept his word about what he hears as I am to accept anybody else’s word on the same subject.

As I said: if this had been the usual sort of “high end” product with which we’ve been presented, we wouldn’t have been interested. But with Galen’s technical papers at hand and with the testimonials of quite a few happy customers, we think that this is the real deal. The technical case is well made, the manufacturing work on this cable is high quality, and all that leaves is the question we don’t try to answer for anyone else. We’ve always been happy to take returns, for whatever reason, so we’re happy to do that here, too, and hope that people will like this product line enough that there won’t be all that many of those returns.

But our personality will be the same as always. We won’t write sonnets about the cable or promise that the bass will be more chocolatey (around 78% cacao content). We’d rather let the product do what it does, and see what people say."