Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Wiring

Yea but, those NBS cables *do* come with a lifetime warranty John.

That's unreal!

The pricing is interesting:
$10K/4ft pair
$30K/12ft pair

I guess that means that the wires are where the magic is and the connectors are thrown in for free. I think most people who have experience with wiring would say that the connector is key, but then again I'm not charging over $1K per foot of wire.

But hey, go to the mall and the local jeweller charges thousands for pretty but otherwise useless tiny polished stones, so what better way of saying "I'm rich" for the audiophile than cables?

Anyways, took a look at the nbscables.com website, and they have some technical details on their cables. One actually meaningful (but confusing) tidbit is that they use gold-plated beryllium copper (BeCu) for their connectors. Now, BeCu is commonly used for microelectronic probing applications because it's a strong alloy but it is self-cleaning, i.e. each time it makes contact with a pad it sheds off a layer (or so the literature says). So why plate it? You gold plate metals that oxidize, not BeCu. Weird.

They also claim a "Passive Frequency Inductance Network (PFIN)". If that's what they call their braided wire, I'm at a loss why that would be either a good or a bad thing for audio.

Then, they say they have a "specially plated chromium barrel to reject RFI and EMI". (Those are RF and electromagnetic interference.) A metal connector becomes frequency selective? Huh?

Another gem: "However, all frequencies demonstrate harmonic structures." A frequency is a frequency, whereas a signal may contain multiple frequencies, and a nonlinear element may generate mixing terms (harmonics). Bizarre statement at best, misleading technobabble at worst.

another classic example of "if you can't dazzle them with knowledge, baffle 'em with bullsh!t". the sad thing is i'm sure that someone has bought that crap thinking that they're getting quality product.

This whole area of cables/ wires is so RIDICULOUS that I personally believe that the FTC MUST step in and establish a standard.

I wonder if anyone who reads this board has a set of those cables? NO!! If they bought those cables, they must have also bought $100,000 speakers. LOL!

A fool is born every day!

Absolutely, Bernard! Anyone who spent maybe $50,000 on the wire and cables handmade by "Mr.Fields and the chief technician" would certainly want the $100,000 speakers which are his "original design"(I can certainly believe that). Plus, they'll fly you one-way to their Minneapolis studio to audition the speakers and put you up in a 4 star hotel; and if you commit to purchase they'll even fly you back home! Of course, if you don't.....

A place in Owensboro KY, Tyler Accoustics, makes some beautiful speakers. At 50,000, a hand made custom finish 6 1/2 foot tower. It's some of the best woodwork I ever seen. The guy says they average 3 clients a month.

What a way to force a purchase. You don't buy, and you're stuck in Minneapolis forever! (or until you come up with bus fare home.) Bua ha ha ha hah!

Do sales go up in winter?

In reply to:

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What a way to force a purchase. You don't buy, and you're stuck in Minneapolis forever! (or until you come up with bus fare home.) Bua ha ha ha hah!

Do sales go up in winter?

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At least you'll have $100k for an airfare home!

I bet the FTC has some formula for prioritization of which cases to pursue. They probably count the number of complaints, whether there's a public safety issue, or other harm that customers might experience. This is just rich people wasting their money. Why do people buy certain brands of very expensive cars? Maybe a Lexus has the same ride as a Rolls Royce for a quarter the price (just guessing, just trying an analogy, have no idea), I think the Lexus looks better, but a Rolls Royce is a statement. At the very least, it looks distinctive enough that there's no doubt that its owner is stinking rich.

There are various standards in place for cables used in engineering, but these standards are set by engineers and not by audiophiles. See e.g. http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/cable/coaxperf.html#power

By the way, it is reasonable for top quality cables to be rather more expensive than what Axiom charges for speaker cables. My employer (Agilent) for example sells ordinary rugged BNC-connector cables for something like a hundred bucks per meter. Other manufactures sell semi-rigid cables for precision testing from DC to 40 GHz, charging maybe a hundred bucks per foot. (At the highest frequencies, they normally come with special connectors that require torque wrenches to get the connection just right, but below a few hundred MHz you don't need anything better than BNC.)

But such cables are sold with any claims of resistance, impedance, leakage, shielding, all independently verifiable. I simply cannot imagine how you could get better transmission of an audio signal (better meaning less noise, better controlled cable capacitance and inductance, at all frequencies) than what you'd get with a conventional ~$500 cable used for test and measurement.

If cables really mattered to audio, what you'd see is high-end manufacturers making speakers that require individual, shielded BNC connector cables for the + and -, everyone would buy 50 Ohm cables off the shelf (they only cost a couple bucks per foot and are good up to 10s of MHz) and high end receivers would have BNC connector outputs for the speakers. Since the cables would be of a known impedance, speaker design would be simplified. For the ultimate in high fidelity, "triaxial" cables could be used, since these reduce the leakage (and noise) in cables still further, and would only cost maybe twice as much as regular coax if that. Snobs could get the Agilent quality cables (they look nicer, they're supple, the connectors are top-notch) and the rest of us could get RF cables for the same cost as Monster cables. Amazing but true.

But the need clearly isn't there, thus all we're left with is marketing-driven nonsense like hi-fi cables.

I disagree, somewhat, with you!

I just don't think that the current situation is simply nonsense!!!!!!

IT IS CONSUMER FRAUD!!!!!!!!!!!

Other than that, your post was EXCELLENT! You gave some EXCELLENT examples.