Page 1 of Thanx for your advice (Clayts,RichardH and markyd) New advice needed?

Thanx for your advice on my first setup.
http://www.dvd.reviewer.co.uk/forums/thread.asp?Forum=211&Thread=72435&Type=1

In the end i went for-
Marantz sr5200 ==£305 from http://www.hifijunkies.co.uk =great price and exellent customer service.
I also took your advice and after reading westy`s review i a went for the Wharfedale Diamond 8.3 cinema package from QED, great price £276.33
ordered them both yesterday.
so got them both within my budget,

all i need now is advice on what speaker cable to use , and interconnects, i see that you (Clayts & westy) recommend getting them from http://www.beyondhifi.net/ but i cannot
see any digital coaxial cables for my dvd player only optical, i am probably looking in the wrong place so please could you point me in the right direction to them.
btw a richer sounds shop is close to me so i could get cable etc from them i just need some good advice on what to get.

Once again thanx for all your help jimmy (jim`ll fixit)

Westy always recommends QED Silver Anniversary speaker cable, and I`d be inclined to agree, altho` I went for some cheap Gale stuff as the credit card maxxed out on me ! Richer do it a lot cheaper than anywhere else I`ve seen.

As for a digital cable, I use a Cambridge Audio digital coaxial cable, again from Richer, which does the job nicely for £20, although you may want to seek out Ixos cables if you can, as these are invariably the best interconnects you can find.

thanx for such a quick response Clayts :)

I see R/S do the Gale speaker cable,s
xl 105 @ 69p per metre
xl 189 @ 99p "" ""
xl hyperlitz 250 @ £1.49
xl 315 @ £1.99
xl 160-2@ £2.99

which cable do you recommend to go for, for the rears ,the fronts and centre ,a mix of any of the above are about right for my price range.

Thanx jimmy

This cable lark is a rip of, you poor fools.

Well, while I finalise my surround speaker positions, I have bought some twin and earth mains cable (the stiff, single core stuff you wire the house with) - intention being that I upgrade it when I`m sure the system is staying where it is. At 50m for £6 (1mm2) - very cheap, and there has been all sorts of hocum over the years stating that it does as good a job as lots of the expensive stuff. I haven`t auditioned it against decent cable (maybe one idle afternoon when the rest of the family isn`t there to pour scorn), but I`m sure it`s a darn sight better than bell wire - certainly for the rears. Mind you, I have got decent cable on the front speakers....

I do know that decent cable DOES make a difference (whatever the physics of it), so do make the effort - particularly for the main channels.

Re beyondhifi and coax cables, am I not right in saying that a coax cable is basically a phono cable (Westy??)? If so, have a look at Hi-Fi Leads / Optical & Digital Leads / TechLink - Professional at the heavy duty rca/phono cable - or try BTECH - XCX Phono RCA Plug to Phono RCA Plug
Pro Digital Phono RCA Plug to Phono RCA Plug.

This item was edited on Friday, 1st February 2002, 08:07

Indeed Richard, a coax is a phono cable, but choose caerfully, as some are designed specifiaclly for transferring the digital data and do it very very well. The ones you mention are excellent as i recommended (actually i bought the lot for my mate as he didn`t have a clue!), them to my friend and his system made up of some reasonably budget components (old Sony 940 reciever, Kef Cresta speakers all round, Wharfedale 750)-but it sings beautifully thanks to the excellent cables (he says like Mr Modest!). You won`t go far wrong with Beyond Hifi, move to the Ixos stuff at a later date-but definitely get hold of the QED Anniversary stuff, it has to be Bi wire for the fronts, they sound so good this way. I`ve sworn by this for years and i`m not about to stop either.

And Wasp, whilst i believe you`re entitled to your own opinion, speaker cable DOES make a huge difference to the sound of your system. Try wiring the Wharfeadle Diamonds with some exceptionally thin wire-you`ll think the magazines are talking s***e, swap for some Qed,Ixos or the Gale cable mentioned above, and the difference is instantly noticeable. It`d be like saying Halfords spark plugs do the same job as the super expensive ones found in Max Power....In a Subaru Impreza!
I challenge you to notice the difference!:-)

Westy

Do expencive cables make a diferance?

Alot has been said on both sides of this one. Here is just one story.

We have a Canadian coustomer who works at the National Space Sience Center here in Leicester. He is one of the technical bods there and obviously knows his stuff. This chap comes in on a regular basis for a chat and to tell us bullishley that a expencive digital coax cable will make no differance to a cheap phono lead as a digital signal is just zeros and ones. One day we said ok here is a Arcam DV88, here is cheap phono lead and here is a Van Den Hul "The First" digital coax at £120 for 0.8 of a meter. Have a play. The next day he came back and was forced to admit (begrudgingly) that the £120 lead was "awesome"

This is just one story. We do have some costomers who after trying can not tell a differance. But they tried it out rather than just discounting it out of hand.

All the best,

Andrew.

Well the day the copper tracks on the circuit board are as thick as the cable you lot use then I just might be convinced, how the hell a copper track about the thickness of a human hair can be improve by attaching a thick peice of copper wire to it is beyond me, the bottle neck is the circiut board and components.


Use wilco mains wire only difference is the price! Oxygen free what a load of twaddle, the Kings clothes or what.

Read an article in a mag once ( no I can`t remember, HiFi Choice, What Cinema, you know the sort of thing ) anyway they got an amp and a dvd and plenty of cables from £2 - £120 and as a real test two lengths of coat hanger wire! - Result was the cable made no difference to the digital signal not even the coat hanger. BUT hey speaker wire is a whole different playground of wheebles.

P.S did`nt convince me I got £40 digital cable in the end.

As a layman, it seems common sense to me that good speaker wire will always beat bell wire. I would have thought that thicker, quality cable will simply have less electrical resistance, and be less prone to interference over the longer distances that the signal has to travel. The copper circuits on a circuit board are far shorter and therefore suffer far less from these probs.

The digital coax is another matter. But I would have thought that even digital signals can suffer from poor cables. How well would all the `zero`s and ones` get through sub-standard cable, would there be any dropout? Side by side testing is really the only answer.

A.