I have the ex kings, ex 5’s and 2 sets of 5’s because I like them the best. I hope the king pro’s have the bass of the 5’s and the soundstage of the kings without the damned brightness!
r47zI do not want the brightness, just the soundstage. Think I am going for the tfz tequila instead as it is suppose to have more bass with the wide soundstage. Just hope it does not have the brightness
CablenutBrightness was completely alleviated on my pair of MD King Exclusives with an all copper cable. Increasing the gauge on the signal and return to 20AWG or even 18AWG makes for a wonderful improvement in fullness without sacrificing clarity.
DD16Did that with cryo’d pure occ 8 strands copper. Did help somewhat with with taming the treble but still not enough and definitely still not close to the bass of the series 5 (bass head). To be precise, I am hoping for something like the asg2.5 but at a great price. I want
1) sub bass
2) bass impact
3) big soundstage
4) clarity
5) zero sibilance and brightness
CablenutI changed to a 7N UP-OCC 18 strands and the soundstage and imaging has blown. Bass has been tamed but the brightness is still there but doesn't fatigue. Voice and snare it's always in the middle, guitars on left and right. But the brightness is not for everyone. But good paring with darker sources.
r47zThe one thing that attracted me to tfz’s was the bass. take that away and tfz loses its main selling point. I would go back to my 8ba’s. its kind of ironic that my cables cost way more than my iems. iems for me needs tobe portable. Have full headphones and multiple hiend stereo setups at home so my iems are used only offsite. I even tried adapting my nordost neimdall y cables for my iems and the attack and soundstage grew tremendously but again impractical.
r47zIt seems the tequila’s are voiced for edm (bass :)) with the same drivers so I will probably go for that as a starting point ranther than the pro’s. I can try to tame brightness with cables but only so much i can do for bass without eq
CablenutWow! Haha!
As an experiment a two days ago, I used 12AWG solid core Neotech copper in Teflon for the return on the Kings with the 18AWG for the signal. The 12 gauge was soldered to a 30 mm strand of solid core copper and the 20 gauge to the connector pins. The increase in clarity was unexpected, but totally unusable.
r47zNull audio Vitesse Cryo 7N CGOCC-A Pure Copper Earphone Cable currently on my king’s and next will be the 6N solid core 16guage GPOCC 50um. At a certain point, it does not make sense that the cables out price the iems by several times over But I am a cable nut.
CablenutYour user nickname is quite accurate. I don't wanna discourage you or anything, don't have too much experience on the subject of audio cables, but from an engineering perspective this whole cable stuff sounds kinda stupid. As long as one cable has proper conductivity (and maybe shielding, if you're on a noisy environment), different materials/thickness/colors/whatever are just "fancy" stuff that won't affect sound in any way. In the end, cables only transfer a transient DC current from the source to the drivers, so if you have a "decent" cable upgrading to a "triple OFC 10AWG double shielded w/ platinum core" won't make any electrical difference (maybe just a 0.01% better conductivity, if that's worth the money you paid). I'm curious to further research on the subject, and maybe I'm totally wrong, but from the few tests I performed I'd say this is just snake oil.
Eli35long standing religious debate, no more than power cables anyways...
boils down to 3 things imo:
1) Can you hear a difference? No? > Stop here, it does not matter to you and you save a ton of money
2) Do you like the difference? No? > see above & or try something else
3) Are you willing to pay for the difference? No? > see above
CablenutI got this cable form Aliexpress, to be honest, the stock cable is pretty good already, especially the connector is smaller and not protruding out that much over the ear. This 8 core cable has a clearer sound (brighter), I know the king is bright already but I am a sucker for bright sound. I used this on my King and the stock cable I paired it with my KZ ZS6.
There's no myth about cable mod or upgrade cables, the differences are there (different materials and impedance). But is it worth the $$ for such small improvement? That I will leave to your own judgment.
Eli35There are plenty of aspects of sound that are virtually impossible to measure in a useful fashion already. Lots of these things are pretty easily noticeable in listening. Soundstage is a big one. I've yet to see a measurement that really showed that one thing has a much better sense of space than another.
But, there's also a lot of easily represented data that goes into the effects of cable swaps. Impedance, capacitance, braid geometry (potential noise rejection), are all going to affect how power is transmitted. So it's not zero difference...
But a lot of things aren't going to be capable of showing these effects, simply due to how minor a lot of them are. I've heard some fairly large changes on certain things, but in many of those cases, the change in cabling was dramatic as well. 18AWG mystery wire to 11AWG with a known low capacitance is not a subtle change in power transmission. Going from one 20AWG cable to another is not going to be that level of dramatic change, unless something was broken before. Once you've hit a certain level of reproduction and you have chased a sound you're after far enough, those minute details of the sound reproduction are exactly what you're trying to iron out though.
Personally, I don't change cables often, simply due to price, but I won't deny that there are changes to be had, however subtle they may be.
And then of course, there's the length and termination argument to recabling. Sometimes you just want something physically different that another cable doesn't offer, regardless of performance. That's generally the trigger for the times that I do replace a cable.
ProfessorPatAs I said, comparing a "decent" cable with a "premium" one (strictly based on represented data) won't be 0 difference but very very close to nonexistant: In your example, 18AWG and 11AWG cables, both 120cm lenght, resistances will be 0.025 and 0.005 ohm respectively; 0.02 ohm difference when your headphones have (at least) more than 1000 times that impedance is completely negligible. I know, impedance is not resistance, but AWG only measures resistance, and in a straight non super-tightly-coiled cable I doubt there's gonna be a huge impedance difference between them.
Eli35In the actual case, from a pure DCR standpoint it was about 90x greater, not 1000x+ Is it still insignificant? Yes, of course, if you’re looking at it from a pure functionality standpoint. However, it was pretty plainly audible in that case, regardless of what resistance has to say.
As I said though, we‘re after minutiae if we’re swapping cables solely to tailor sounds (Which is on a level I think is odd on anything that isn’t virtually perfect in every way for you already). We’re chasing the unquantifiable in many cases in this level of change. Of course the other design works, and the differences are negligible from a numbers standpoint, but what’s the real world difference between a 100dB SNR and a 130dB SNR if we’re just after practical figures? These differences are tiny, particularly if you assume anything past 60dB or so is already pretty much inaudible. Why chase any higher levels than what’s sufficient?
My point is, while there are plenty of people selling horrendously overpriced cables, it’s not all snake oil, and there are differences, whether they’re large enough to easily notice on any arbitrary piece of gear or not. More often than not, I can’t hear a change that’s worth replacing something with an identical length of cable, especially if the price difference is anything significant, but I can see cases, rarely, where it makes sense for people.
ProfessorPatI agree with your last statement, no need to further discuss about that. But I don't get the 90x impedance of your headphones: 90 x 0.02ohm = 1.8ohm, do your headphones only have 1.8ohm impedance? I said 1000x impedance meaning the typical dynamic driver IEM (1000 x 0.02ohm = 20ohm, nothing crazy). Am I missing something? (as I said, I know impedance is not resistance, but I'm assuming both cables has approximately the same phase and that it's almost negligible).
Eli35The 90x comes from it being a significantly longer run than your estimate, and into 8 ohm speakers.Headphones are going to be short enough (standard HD650 cable is ~3m long, but that’s also a 300 ohm headphone), and high enough impedance, unless you have an K1000 or something run across a large room, that your numbers were good. Nothing wrong with the math, just largely different criteria. The same change with headphones probably would have been less obvious, with the difference being significantly higher than ~90x. With it being that low (relatively speaking) I definitely noticed a change though.
ProfessorPatOh, speakers, that's right. With speakers I can see why a lower impedance cable can make a little difference in sound, using high-end gear and having good hearing skills.