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Ordered some Tempo Electric silver to compare with these Chinese knock offs.

Posted by ABliss (A) on March 20, 2023 at 10:11:43

I have bought three sets of Chinese speaker cables so far with mixed results.
First was the Nordost White Draws, this cable after burn in sounds very clean and airy, but a bit light in the bottom end. It's basically a solid core cable as each strand is isolated, but it's silver plated copper.

Wanting to improve on that cable made me get the Nordost Valhalla, this is also silver plated but with more strands, so higher gauge, so a much better bottom end and more of the transparency that I think solid core offers. I really like this cable, although it's silver plated it doesn't have the brightness. I may very well end up keeping this cable in the system.

I have had many flavors of cables over the years, but I never had a good set of pure silver. I know solid core sounds better than stranded, I know silver plated sounds airy but can be edgy and wears you down, so I have always wanted to try solid core silver.
I did make a short set of solid core cables many years ago, to try with my mono blocs, can't even remember where I bought the wire , probably Tempo also. They been sitting in the closet for years.

So, seeing this nice looking pair of supposedly Netherland 5n 99% pure silver cables on Aliexpress, I ordered them. When they finally came they were lovely to look at and very heavy which made me kind of suspicious. I played them a few days and wasn't impressed as by this time I had hooked up the short pair of double runs solid core silver cables I found in the closet, and I had a idea how pure silver should sound. I had my 300B monos in the system, so the short length was no problem.
Being anal about cable termination, I decided to see how well the Netherlands cables were done, and to check the wire claims. Well, to my not so much surprise, not only was the connections not very tight, some strands were not even stripped properly, but the wires were just silver plated not pure silver.
Yes, maybe I was just the fool to think I would get a 8 foot pair of pure silver for $150, but I think the looks got me, they are beautiful. So you win some you loose some.
I reterminated all the bananas and played them for more days, but the Nordost Valhalla sill blows them away.

So I was left in the mean time liking how good the Valhalla is , and loving the super clean, natural, holographic sound of my short 5ft pair of newly rediscovered home made solid core pure silver cables.
The bass was good but not as much as the Valhalla because I knew the gauge is less, but the treble was more natural, not sure what difference the lengths make, the Valhalla being 8ft, but due to the fact that the resident amp for that system is a McIntosh MC7270, and the monos are just visiting, the 5ft cables can't end up staying there.

So I have ordered 32 feet of 14 gauge solid core silver wire from Tempo Electric to make a 8ft pair.
The Fake Valhalla is nice, but after trying that little bit of solid silver, I couldn't get it out of my head. If it doesn't live up to expectations, I will just sell it.
Just a word of advice to anyone buying Chinese cables, besides the fact that you're never 100% sure what you're getting, if you can't do it yourself, have someone remove the heat shrink from the connections and redo them. They are often very poorly done, even the power cords, you would be surprised if you open one up.

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