Cables And Connections
Continuing with the selection of components in the musical signal path, I'd like to turn our attention to loudspeaker cables, interconnects, and connections (RCAs, binding posts, spades, banana plugs, and the like). These components function to connect other components in the musical playback chain and are only capable of maintaining or degrading the quality of a musical signal. Therefore, the shortest possible interconnects and loudspeaker cables, combined with the fewest number of connections, will sound best. This is why in part one I asserted my goal for using the shortest possible interconnects and loudspeaker cables. Logically, high-quality interconnects, loudspeaker cables, and connections will allow a system to perform at its highest potential.
Kimber Kable has been making interconnects and loudspeaker cables for over 25 years. Its designs are elegantly simple, but clever, and its choice of materials makes them state-of-the-art. Kimber products are created using its own OSCaR ("Objective and Subjective Correlation and Results") engineering process. Kimber strives to correlate listening impressions to scientific measurements in order to produce cables that offer the highest performance-to-price quotient.5
One of my design goals was to capitalize on the sonic benefits of cables designed for home audio in my car audio application. As most of you know, car audio cabling often requires custom lengths and flexible options for cable terminations. Kimber offers bulk cabling for interconnects and loudspeaker cables, thereby allowing customers to create application-specific cables. I found this to be particularly appealing, since I desired to make my own perfectly fitted cables.
Custom cabling requires custom connections and terminations. WBT, a German manufacturer of audio connectors, has been manufacturing high-quality audio connections for over 20 years and holds more than 20 patents pertaining to audio connectors. In my opinion, they're the finest in existence, and I used their products exclusively for my interconnects' and loudspeaker cables' connections (e.g., RCAs, binding posts, spades, banana plugs, and crimp sleeves).6 I feel WBT's products look like jewelry rather than audio connectors, and when combined with Kimber's cabling, they form the perfect aesthetic and sonic complement to the Genesis amplifiers.
For the front soundstage, I chose Kimber's KCAG interconnect cable made from Varistrand "Hyper-pure silver." To terminate the interconnects, I chose WBT's WBT-0108 RCA-type connectors, which use set screws to compress and secure silver crimp sleeves, rather than solder. The loudspeaker cables in the front soundstage were made using Kimber's 4TC loudspeaker cable and WBT's spades (part number WBT-0680Cu), bananas (part number WBT-0645), and copper crimp sleeves.
Since the interconnects for the subwoofer were about 6 meters (20 feet) long, I chose Kimber's limited-production version of its popular PBJ-series of interconnects (with copper conductors), protected by a non-metallic shield. These were also terminated with WBT-0108 RCA-type connectors and copper crimp sleeves. The loudspeaker cables for the subwoofer were made using Kimber's 4TC loudspeaker cable and WBT's spades (part number WBT-0680Cu), and copper crimp sleeves.
Thus far, all of the essential components in the musical playback chain have been chosen. Figure 1 illustrates these choices in the form of a system diagram.