I write this message with a bit of a churning stomach, because Audioquest's advertising is, I think, the worst in home audio. Worse than monster. Worse than mit. Worse than cardas. Worse than kimber.
Yes, you effing twits, "just" ones and zeroes! OK, that off my chest...
A little bit ago, I picked up a separate amp that was a great deal. I intend to use it to biamp my three front mains, with an 8x8 miniDSP providing active crossover. But for now (given that the miniDSP 8x8-in-a-Box isn't out yet, among other reasons) I'm using it to drive my front mains and surrounds.
But that wasn't the only thing I picked up. I also picked up a 75' roll of
Audioquest MAC-6/G wire, which is a bundle of six mini-coaxes (24AWG solid center conductor) and a computer network wire, all in a grey PVC tube. I didn't have many short analog interconnects, so I bought it on the theory that I'd never need to buy another RCA cable for home or car.
Turns out
Audioholics did a piece on them a while back.
The dealer didn't have the ITC-24 ends in stock, though, and he wanted $5 each plus tax to order them while Vann's charges $2.77 with free shipping, so I bought the wire and ordered the connectors online.
To use the amp at first, I hooked up interconnects I had. While I didn't need any longer than ~30", the shortest ones I had were 1m or 2m. So initially I used a snake's nest of Esoteric Audio Artus 2m (bought when I was a silly undergrad who had been persuaded by propagandists that wires had "sound quality" for about $1200 the pair
), Esoteric Audio Graphis "digital coax" 1m (not quite as pricey, but still three figures) and thin green Vampire Wire stuff I bought for my car because it was thin and close in color to British Racing Green (<$15 shipped for a set of six, packaged as two "component video" cables, on eBay a couple years ago; I would've just used these, but four of them run between the Audyssey box and the amplifiers in my car, so I just had a pair left). It was ugly between the amp and my AVR, because there was so much extra wire snaking about.
Well, the ITC ends came in yesterday, and I did new interconnects today, cut to length with about 6" of play. The only thing missing is color coding of the ends, because the ones at Vann's (despite the picture on their website and amazon storefront showing a white rubber ring) ship without a color ring.
They were easy to assemble. I had no use for the jacket, so I slit about a meter off of it, discarded the PVC tube and paper lining, and cut each wire such that there was about 6-8" of play, but no more.
I didn't buy Audioquest's stripping tool, which is $15 or so, because
this one appears identical (down to the labeling on the x-block) and was 1/5 the price. That tool made it easy to strip the coaxes. A few turns and done. I hate to say it, but there is a difference in the six "video" coaxes and the two "audio" coaxes. The video ones are better, not because the center conductor has a silver plate, but because the shield is bigger; the audio ones have a half-wire, half-plastic shield that's kind of annoying to pull down. (When deciding which one to route to which speaker, I paid no attention to metallurgy, and tried to stick as closely as possible to the CEA-863 color code.) They never really "snapped" around the center pin, as their video claims. However, all but one (which ended up having a broken pin) had continuity on my first try. The RCA ends grab very tightly on jacks, so tightly that one could likely pull off the outer shield of an AVR's RCA preout if one yanked rather than twisted it off.
Needless to say, they don't sound a lick different from the interconnects they replaced. But they look a lot better, because the individual runs are thinner and more flexible, RCA ends are more compact (and uniform, as opposed to the previous setup with three very different-looking RCA ends), and they are cut to length. If you're OCD about snakes' nests of wires and want an easy way that's reasonably priced to cut them to length, I grudgingly recommend this stuff despite the maker's tireless commitment to snake oil.
