I recently discovered some cables with a capacitance as low as 47pF/m. The cables are hand made by order and this is what the technician who build them told me when I asked him about the capacitance of this cables (this is a translation, sorry if there is some technical fault):

"The previous version had a Star Quad (4 twisted conductors) geometry with a common braided shield. The new one is a miniaturized version of the above: same metal, same insulation, same cotton filling, but being thinner I can use two separate conductors per channel, each with their own shield and each with positive and negative signal in braiding pair. By reducing the size I can use an additional wire for connecting the grounds, and thus the shielding of each tube is connected only at the end of the destination (male connector), and so the only effective capacitance is the one  which occurs between the stranded conductors: 47pF/m, unlike the previous cable that´s about 50pF/m between conductors and 100pF/m between conductors and shield."

This cables are the most neutral and clean I ever had. I compared this cables with the AntiCables and found the AntiCables adding some kind of brilliance, same as Mani said. As a plus they are cheap. Now all my cables are made by this guy including the power cable for the NOS1 with an L shape connector which make it easier to route the interconnection cables without touching the power cord.

If anyone is interested in this cables PM to juanpmar@gmail.com. I´ll be glad to help.

Regards,
Juan

Well, Gerd has just been... and gone, with my beautiful mono amplifiers 

It was an absolute pleasure to see him again. His enthusiasm for our hobby is contagious.


Actually, Gerd disagreed with this. His main focus is in the time domain, and not the frequency domain. He suggested the following scenario. Imagine a 1m cable that was smearing the signal in the time domain (most cables do this, according to Gerd). Now imagine placing an identical 1m cable in series with this. There would probably be no change in sound (or very little). According to my 'hypothesis', this shows that the second cable is perfect. But of course, it isn't. It just isn't good enough in the time domain to show the issue up.

So, I'm now going to go for plan A. I will try all permutations of cables and NOS1 positioning to determine which is the best configuration. I asked Gerd how I could determine the 'best', without a reference. His answer was to compare directly to real instruments playing in the room.

Hmmmm...

Mani.

Well again, this is where my method 2) comes into its own. If they indeed 'filter less', then when placed in series with another (any) cable, the sound should not change fundamentally. But it does. And there's the rub.

The cables that truly 'filter less' MUST be those that affect the sound the least when placed in series with another (any) cable... no?

Mani.

So ?
Mine (for LS cables) didn't work out my a mile also; same reasoning I had in advance. But what if they filter less ?


My view : all overdoing things. All you need to take care of is the capacitance (hence what the NOS1 can drive) and for 100% sure this won't matter for anything between 1cm and 5 meters. Beyond that ? take into account that capacitance (which you did I think).

Peter

Tomorrow is going to be a sad day. Gerd Sauermann is coming over to collect the mono amps he lovingly built for me. I just don't need the Sauermann amps for the fully-active Orelinos. Otherwise there is no way I'd be selling them. I put Gerd's amps in the same league as the NOS1 sonically, and well ahead of anything I've ever owned in terms of build-quality.

Although I have no need of Gerd's products going forward, can I just give him a big plug? If I was using passive speakers, there is no other amp on the planet I would rather use than Gerd's. If you're in the market for an amp in the €8K-€10K range, please put Gerd's amps on your list of those to listen to. In Europe, it should be possible to get some sort of demo.

Mani.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I compared the 10m Klotz directly with a bunch of 1m ICs, including a pair of 1m 'anti-cables'. These direct comparisons are what I meant by method 1). And of course, these direct comparisons were with the NOS1 still in the room. Isolating it totally from the room (using the 10m Klotz cables) may well dwarf any differences I'm hearing between ICs.

Or do you mean <1m length??? I think the only really short XLRs I have are a pair of 0.5m Analysis Plus cables (I have both the copper and silver-over-copper versions). But even if I preferred the sound of really short ICs, the result would be moot as I'd still need to use a pair of ~2m ICs, even with the NOS1 bang in the middle of the room between the speakers.

But what I like about my method 2) is that it gives an idea of the exact affect a cable has on the sound. For example, I would have sworn that my anti-cables were the most transparent cables I had. But this proves not to be the case - they're actually adding a brightness that isn't there otherwise. I could not have identified this characteristic without method 2).

Anyway, I'm going to repeat 1) and 2) again in-depth... before I commit to pulling up any floorboards.

Mani.

Hi Mani - what would be interesting is a comparison between a very short length and a long length of your favoured i/c.

But I guess that will not be easy to do!!

P

I just set all my settings to = Juan
q1=6, q1X=10, q3,4,5=1, clock 1ms and sfs = 120

Everything works! (even with cover art)

I was reading about q1 and it seems to = importance with buffer size.  I had to experiment with old XX version with my KS Hi face usb module and 768 seemed to work ok.  I'm not positive that is correct. 

Just received another unable to clear proxy error after disabling cover art.  qs not = 1