I am in search of "High Grade Powerlink Mk3---------------------------High Grade Powerlink MK3 cables" that i can order from Europe ?!

I can´t find anything on http://www.flashbacksales.co.uk ??

 

Regards

Is there a reason you do not want to use the standard B&O ones?

 

Craig

I don't know of such an animal, and really don't think you require it. I got DIN-RCA connectors from Flashback sales, but the B&O powerlink interconnects will do the job when you need to connect B&O components. (There's a lot of audiophile mumbo-jumbo about the need for thick cables, specially insulated, etc. - but you'll find it hard to pick them out from quite standard cables).

I know that B&O's audio engineers have had quite a bit of amusement with providers who have gotten in touch, sensing a big business opportunity when evaluating B&O's cables. "You should use our cables!"
"Sure, come along and demonstrate them."
The engineers then ask them to pick out their cables from a comparison with B&O's.
 

soundproof:

I don't know of such an animal, and really don't think you require it. I got DIN-RCA connectors from Flashback sales, but the B&O powerlink interconnects will do the job when you need to connect B&O components. (There's a lot of audiophile mumbo-jumbo about the need for thick cables, specially insulated, etc. - but you'll find it hard to pick them out from quite standard cables).

I know that B&O's audio engineers have had quite a bit of amusement with providers who have gotten in touch, sensing a big business opportunity when evaluating B&O's cables. "You should use our cables!"
"Sure, come along and demonstrate them."
The engineers then ask them to pick out their cables from a comparison with B&O's.
 

I have a more advanced question to you Soundproof:  Today i have put in 2,5 m Powerlink cable in 1,5 m (BL 8000´s) "rubber snakes".

I have one tight bend on the cables in each " 1,5 m rubber snake".. And i wounder what you think about when cables are in too tight bends they can´t longer maintain 75 Ohm theory / fact.??.  Does Powerlink gets affected by really tight bends?

 

 

Regards

 

I know what you mean. What with modern electrons getting bigger and bigger they must have trouble moving in a tight bend!

And how can they see where they are going? It must be dark in there!

As far as I am aware, the best Powerlink cables are the fully wired ones as they have the most shielding. B&O obviously feel there is no reason to specify any more esoteric cable and I could not possibly disagree.

Very diplomatic!

Lets get a cable debate going.

 

Craig

No thanks! I've already decided that it's money better spent on a good album...

Peter:

As far as I am aware, the best Powerlink cables are the fully wired ones as they have the most shielding. B&O obviously feel there is no reason to specify any more esoteric cable and I could not possibly disagree.

Have to say that MKIII is better, because if the cable is bend f.x 90* there is Little chance you get interference from the Display data, because the shield can brake in the bend.

Other than shielding and the quality of the cable itself (nothing to do with sound), I can't say I've ever noticed any sonic differences between cables (although I'm not so sure the same applies for amplified signals).

Okej.. Do anyone think the sound would be better if the cables are straight or no difference?

 

With Lab 8000's as posted you will have no problem with ordinary Mk1 powerlinks. I have supplied countless pairs of 6000's and 8000's with these and have never had a problem.

High end cable, high end connectors, high end price!! It's just an excuse to relieve the mug punter of more money.

If there was a problem with ordinary powerlinks then I can assure you that my customers would complain, so would Lee's and so would B&O's. But they don't.

'Nuff said!!!

The 75Ohms specification I'm aware of deals with digital cables, and is a measure of resistance (impedance) in the cable. Most s/pdif coax feeds are intended for a 75Ohms interconnect. I'm not aware that the same requirement holds for regular Powerlink cables.

Of course, one should never stress the cables with very hard or repeated bending or crimping, but if you set a cable in a corner (usually 90 degrees) and fix it there then you're OK. As some have mentioned above, B&O's engineers have measured their cables' performance and signed off on that.

I love watching the faces of people who have bought super expensive Van den Hul digital coax cables when they see the standard issue B&O digital cables snaking to my BL5s. "What? You must replace those right away!!!" It's been a long time since I stopped trying to explain data transfer to them ...

I bought my DIN-to-RCA cables because I wanted to eliminate a connection. Much better to have a cable of the right length with a DIN-plug in one end and RCA-plugs in the other, than to have a converter plug with a short stretch of wire to RCA female plugs, attached to a longer stretch of RCA male/male cable. And for that the company you mention in your first post is the place to go.

 

 

 

The trouble with the internet is that everyone believes is and is perceived as an "expert" as there is nothing that allows you to qualify one's credentials and 'know-how' on a topic.  All I can say is that there is a lot of noise in these forums and not many people know what they are talking about.  So, who cares about better quality sound and power cords and power conditioning?  I do and you should.  Power cords and conditioners made a significant difference in the sound of my equipment.  If you think investing in Nordost, Wireworld, Chord, Shunyata cable type brands it is not value-add perhaps (you should stop reading this now and) you shouldn't be buying B&O gear in the first place and should start experimenting with some of these brands before you comment.  These cables make a world of difference and there is more to cables than electrons running through a wire (e.g. conductivity, bandwidth, contact surface, insulation etc).  This applies to both analogue and digital signals and it is more evident on the latter (buy an oscilloscope if you don't believe me).  If you're really happy with the default kettle cords supplied by your system and that gives you peace of mind that you haven't been fooled by the audiophile expensive quality brands, well, good on you but I can't help thinking you are yet to experience and understand the difference. 

 

 

dkresz:

 

The trouble with the internet is that everyone believes is and is perceived as an "expert" as there is nothing that allows you to qualify one's credentials and 'know-how' on a topic.  All I can say is that there is a lot of noise in these forums and not many people know what they are talking about.

Not entirely certain as to the address of your post, but I guess it's a result of my comment above concerning Van den Hul digital cables. I don't work professionaly with audio equipment. I'm an enthusiast, but a fairly critical and discerning one, I would think. I have both studied comparative tests, compared a lot of different cables myself, gone through the surprisingly few proper blind tests there are on cables -- and I am personally convinced that there's a lot of placebo, spurious effects and outright nonsense involved in Hi-Fi.

For instance, the Nordost VIDAR cable burn-in machine that's just been offered to the market is a joke of the highest order, requiring you to believe that cables are close to living organisms if the theory behind is to have any justification.
And if you do buy Valhalla or Odin cables, at tens of thousands of dollars a metre, shouldn't they already be burned in? A Rolls Royce does come with tires.

But don't take my word for it. J. Gordon Holt, the founder of Stereophile magazine, is interviewed in the most recent issue, which is the 45-anniversary issue.

Holt is asked: Do you see any future vitality in high end audio?

And this is his answer:

Holt: "Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double blind test,for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavour since Pascal.
This refusal is a source of endlessly derived  amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often at that) was, that they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.

Remember those loudspeaker shoot outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasion when various writers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least favorite) model?
That was all the proof needed that (blind) testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT- double blind test - confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio."

" ...the mindless acceptance of vodoo science, were not part of my original vision"

 ===

There's a lot of vodoo science in today's high-end audio, and the worst of it is in the area of cables. Where I would claim that people are being defrauded of their money.

However, James Randi and Michael Fremer are trying to hash out the conditions for a DBT of high-end cables versus regular cables. Fremer's been challenged to pick his favourite cables. The manufacturer of the initial set of cables proposed, Pear Cables under Adam Blake, pulled out of the test, one suspects after having been unable to pick out their own cables in their own listening room.

I'm sorry dkresz, but I am a complete cable agnostic, after years of trying high-end and low-end cables. There are certain requirements that need to be met - once they are you're set, and spending money on snake-oil cables is a waste. Digital is bits and bytes - if you can test for the same bits and bytes having been transparently conveyed in a regular cable, there is no need to have an expensive digital cable. In fact, the world as we know it today would cease to function if that was the case, since digital transfer of data decides our safety, bank account and infrastructure.
I have seen and participated in tests where people who were convinced of the improvements you speak of were incapable of identifying their preferred components under controlled conditions - that was enough for me.
 

Furthermore there are enough Engineering members of the forum to give a Scientific "consensus" view and sadly that would be that, beyond ensuring a few basics are observed, cables are, in fact, cables!

It seems that we understand the science required to make cables that can conduct many thousands of amps, at hundreds of thousands of volts over immense distances - we can manufacture cables that carry signals (both analogue and digital) in a controlled and predictable manner at frequencies in the Gigahertz region and yet we are meant to believe that we don't fully understand the physics of a cable carrying signals in the audio spectrum.

We have had the debate many times in the past - no one will be swayed to change their opinion. The only answer is to agree to disagree - if you percieve a benefit with your expensive cables then you do and thats fine, carry on and enjoy. Conversely, until someone can prove by repeatable testing that there are consistent differences the non-believers will continue to disbelieve.

: Digital is bits and bytes - if you can test for the same bits and bytes having been transparently conveyed in a regular cable, there is no need to have an expensive digital cable

Gents, you both seem as intelligent and mature people so I think agreeing to disagree is the best option out here unless we have this debate over a beer :o)  I will only comment on the statement above.  Digital is in fact only made out of zeros and ones (i.e. bits) and if buffering and error parity / correction of bytes would be built in audio-visual equipment as much as it is in internet technology on which computing relies than I totally agree - any cable would suffice and the only consequence would be picture or sound lag. Unfortunately that is not the case and digital information in AV equipment is transmitted in real time.  So if there are any challenges in the path of the signal (posed by the factors I have mentioned in my prior post above) these byte packets are dropped resulting in, for example, inferior picture quality (i.e. resolution, movement, contrast or color).  Make no mistake a good quality cable with good quality connectors will minimise the error rates and the investment will pay off.  Yes, there is a placebo effect, the passion of a hobby etc. but it is theoretically and practically proven the improvement is there.  Best way to explain this is, imagine the pipes that lead-up to your shower. The are clogged, narrow and when the neighbor or wife turns on the tap in another room you loose water pressure and warmth despite the thousands of meters the water travels on to get there.  The last six feet do count and throw in a water filter also and it is better for your skin... placebo I hear you say :o) 

Please, don't quibble with words. Digital information consists of bits arranged in bytes. The glory of digital is that it has a 1 or a 0 at its base - this makes the transfer of digital information very resilient, EVEN when there is interference.

You mention that one should buy an oscilloscope in your first post in this thread, if one doubts the value of good digital cables. I take it you will then refer to the canard concerning rounding of square pulses due to jitter or interference. Even with significant rounding of a square pulse, a digital system will be able to properly recognize the difference between a 0 and a 1, thus reducing the potential for non-transparent data transfer.

Error correction further ensures that packets of received data are not signed off until they match the sending packets - pretty error proof.
As long as you ensure that the integrity of the digital chain can be preserved, then you definitely do not need any special grade of cables for digital hi-fi.

The reason people think they do is because they stubbornly persist in superimposing analog experiences on to the digital domain. In analog, interference can degrade the output; in digital, the system has a strong, in-built resilience against such bias. It's pretty doggone good, even on a sub-par connection. And we should all be grateful, since I doubt that Van den Hul delivers the cables controlling air traffic, cars, railroads, etc.   Where the information intensity and density is much greater than that required in conveying a simple audio signal

Argh! A cable debate!! I too am keenly waiting for the Randi test - I note that the last double blind test performed by audiophiles showed that one could not differentiate between power cables - and credit to them for publishing the results. I know B&O have played around with cables and have settled on the ones they supply because they are happy with the results in listening tests.

Whoooosh!!!

That was the sound of technicalities whizzing over my head

Hurray another cable debate - me I think there's too much rubbish written about these so called high end cables. I once - and only once - spent a fortune on some and the difference was lacking immediately. I'm not saying I would scrimp and buy cheapo rubbish but standard B&O stuff works fine for me.

 

Chris.

I bought some high end cables years ago, back when I had a big A/V system and the back was open to people walking by.  They sure looked nice.  Did they work better?  Maybe.  I don't know.  But man, they looked nice.

 

Since then the only cables I've bought were last week... RCA cables to connect my TV's output directly to the BL4000s.  Monster Cable model something something.  They look nice.  Sound?  I'm sure any problems could be pointed to on my TV.  However there is one point... the cables have arrows pointing in the flow of the signal.  I accidentally installed one in the wrong direction.  And you know what?  It just doesn't matter. 

dilznik:

........the cables have arrows pointing in the flow of the signal.  I accidentally installed one in the wrong direction.  And you know what?  It just doesn't matter. 

 

Who'd have thought!

dkresz:

 
....Power cords and conditioners made a significant difference in the sound of my equipment.... 

I am totally agree with the above point. Have been testing a lot of different High End cables (VandenHul, Kimber,...), and I must agree, they sound different. But not that much of an improvement.

The real improvement comes from the power line to your house, who is so dirty today. Try to remove all the fuss from it and you will hear a significant sound improvement on your system.

Dont buy new cables right now, but if you are planning to buy some, don't take it to much in to technological crap. Only believe your ears!

 

Chris:

dkresz:

....Power cords and conditioners made a significant difference in the sound of my equipment.... 

  Only believe your ears!

 

Truly sound advice!