Affordable Audio Cables Auditioned

[Stagger Lee]

Hi Folks. I started another Covid project. While I use "Audiophile" cables. I was interested in finding reasonably priced cables and testing to see how well they stacked up. Here is what I found. Just my opinion.
SPEAKER CABLES: Gotham GAC SPK 2x4.0 mm. (11awg). $2.13 a linear foot from Gotham. I only see rolls of 100 feet listed so maybe you can find a retailer by the foot. This OFC cable is excellent. Buy a roll and sell the left overs to your friends. Terminating is easy using screw on banana plugs from Amazon.
This outfit sells Gotham cables by the foot all except SPK2x4.0mm for some reason.
Acutek 14x4. This is an OFC cable. You pair two 14 gauge wires together for 11 awg. Maybe you can find it by the linear foot but at $.65 a foot, a 100 foot roll will only cost $65.00. (Amazon) CSS uses this cable for internal wiring in their excellent speaker kits.
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Mogami W2921 is another OFC quad 14 awg speaker cable. Pair two for 11 awg. Available from Redco.com for $4.35 a linear foot.

DIGITAL COAX CABLES: Gotham GAC-1, Canare L-5CFB, Mogami 2964. All of these are available on Amazon and Ebay assembled for about $40 or less. All are very good digital coax cables. Mogami the most flexibe, then Gotham, and lastly Canare which is quite stiff.

INTERCONECTS: I found two very good interconnect cables available by the linear foot. You can terminate yourself with some quality RCA connectors from Amazon and be sure to use a quality solder like Wonder Solder (Ebay) or WBT 4% silver solder. (Ebay and Amazon) it makes a difference. By soldering your own, you can save enough to buy yourself a nice soldering station on Amazon for about $40. Gotham GAC 4/1 is an OFC Quad microphone cable for about $1.25 a linear foot. Mogami 2497, another OFC quad cable for about $3.65 a linear foot from Redco.
If you want to go cheap on a decent RCA try Canare F10 connector ($3.50 ea). You can also find the locking RCA connectors that World’s Best Cables uses on Amazon for about $20.00 for four, and Cardas SLVR connectors on Music Direct for $20.00 a pair.
If you don’t want to solder. You can buy either these cables on Amazon assembled by World’s Best Cables with 4% silver solder and nice locking RCAS.

 

[BlueFox]

What other cables did you use to evaluate these against? What was your evaluation criteria?

 

[Stagger Lee]

Forgot to mention my system. I have about Ten K in my system. Schiit Raganok2, Gungnir multibit, Dynaudio Evoke 20, JBL HDI 1600. Audiolab CDT transport. Also a Muzushare X7 tube amp. Two Rel 5Ti subs.
My cables are Kimber 12CT Audience Ohno and a Kimber D60 coax digital. I've tried several cables and the are excellent to my ears and compliment my system. For laughs I also put in some of my old Music Metre cables from back when that was my audio cable company. While my thirty year old cables were not embarrassing, the Kimber and Audience cables are definitely better.

 

[Stagger Lee]

I didn't check every reasonably priced cable out there. I did not care or Blue Jeans cables compared to the recommended cables. I don't think they use OFC copper in their cables and I can hear the difference. I also found myself not liking Canare cables for the same reason. The exception being their digital coax cable but then it is super stiff and actually I think it damaged one of my RCA inputs on my DAC and it had to be repaired. Not worth the hassle. I am quite happy using the Sony 2964 Coax Digital cable from my Bluesound Node 2 into my DAC for streaming. While some of these cables sounded quite good and sometimes surprisingly good, none matched my reference cables. I think these are good starting points for people not sure about cables and don't want to invest a lot of money. I did compare the digital cables against a few high end cables, well, lower end high end cables and they bested the Audioquest Carbon, Panenga, Monoprice, A Nordost cable, and a few other "High end" cable companies cables. They also sounded better than the cheapest Audience Ohno digital cable. It wasn't on a par with their interconnects.