I know what you mean about the snake oil claims, I've seen enough of it with interconnects and speaker cables. The limited testing I've been able to do in that area has told me that good quality can be had for modest amounts so I generally draw the line at £40 to £50 any more than that and the diminishing returns are too much for my wallet to handle - I don't have deep enough pockets to indulge myself more than that unless I get promoted at work! I'll definately keep an eye on ebay though and hopefully pick up a bargain or two
Ground Loop issue after rebuild
- Thread starter drichardb
- Start date
Everything makes a difference, from the quality of mains, interconnects, using thicker speaker cable. What your doing is taking electric energy and using it to power an air-pump (speaker), everything in the chain effects this process.
You don't have to go crazy on the money however, for example i'm running Van Damme Lo-Cap 55 interconnects, that cable is used in Abbey Road studios, they can be had for about £35 for 1 meter pair, the 3 meter ones where £70 a pair. The cable is very transparent and it has very little high end frequency roll off due to it's low capacitance, it also has an extra braid over regular interconnects that reduces noise even more.
You don't have to go crazy on the money however, for example i'm running Van Damme Lo-Cap 55 interconnects, that cable is used in Abbey Road studios, they can be had for about £35 for 1 meter pair, the 3 meter ones where £70 a pair. The cable is very transparent and it has very little high end frequency roll off due to it's low capacitance, it also has an extra braid over regular interconnects that reduces noise even more.
Last edited:
Agree 100%. I snagged a 3 meter set of QED Performance 40i RCA interconnects from my local branch of Audio T when I was buying my subwoofer last year. Paid £40 rather than the £90ish sticker price. Bit longer than I need right now but already had in mind the furniture revamp I mentioned earlier. It was a case of "I'm gonna need them soon, I'm buying an expensive sub, make me an offer I can't refuse", and they did!
I have no idea what those QED's are like, but they will be better then typical budget cables.
And where you wrote "I'm going to need them soon". This is how I purchase many things, so instead of being reactive and paying full price, I will buy things in advance when there on sale or I see something cheap second hand.
An example of the above. My Seasonic Titanium PSU was purchased about 18 months before the motherboard / CPU, as OCUK had a really good offer on it, and I knew I would eventually need it. I do this will all sorts of things, I buy engine oil filters in bulk in advance for example.
And where you wrote "I'm going to need them soon". This is how I purchase many things, so instead of being reactive and paying full price, I will buy things in advance when there on sale or I see something cheap second hand.
An example of the above. My Seasonic Titanium PSU was purchased about 18 months before the motherboard / CPU, as OCUK had a really good offer on it, and I knew I would eventually need it. I do this will all sorts of things, I buy engine oil filters in bulk in advance for example.
Snake oil police here as requested sir.
I have. When I had a similar issue to the OP a few years ago (which I originally thought was a ground loop but it wasn't) I borrowed a full set of AudioQuest cables (mains, interconnects, speaker cables) from a friend who was about to sell them, they cost more than my car when they were new (several hundred per cable, several thousand total). Since I had them I decided to do some measurements with a calibrated microphone to see what if any difference they made to the overall sound (frequency response, phase and decay) and to the issue I was having.
Power cables, no difference to the audio, did not solve the issue
Interconnects, no difference to the audio, partially fixed the issue, will explain why below.
speaker cables, no difference the the audio, did not solve the issue
If anyone would like a technical explanation from a Physics graduate in terms of electromagnetism why expensive mains cables (and digital interconnects) can't make a difference to audio quality then I would be happy to oblige but you've probably heard it before, and it would be off-topic here.
Anyway back to the topic of the thread. My issue was loud-ish hum coming through the subwoofers but not through the main speakers, the hum got louder as GPU usage increased. I originally thought it was ground loop, but when I did a spectral analysis of the hum I saw it was not stable at 50 or 60hz, it was in the 120-160Hz region and fluctuated depending on what the GPU was doing. It turns out that it was EMI coming from the GPU (or possibly from the PSU but caused by feedback on the 12V line from the GPU) and getting into the AVR circuits that handle the subwoofer pre-out, the subwoofer amp and the interconnect cable connecting the two. That's why the AudioQuest interconnect helped somewhat, it had decent shielding, my previous interconnect had none at all.
After I gave my friend his cables back I bought a reel of two-core + shield* cable (designed for high end microphones) and wired up my own interconnects that worked just as well as the AudioQuest ones. The only other solutions that worked (out of dozens of things that I tried) was just to move the AVR and subwoofer amplifier physically further away from the PC, and to undervolt/underclock the GPU when not gaming.
*Many cheap (and some expensive) and amateur DIY shielded interconnects have only two conductors and they use the negative/ground conductor as the shield. The shielding works much better if the two conductors carrying audio are a twisted pair both shielded by a third conductor that is connected only to a ground wire that you connect to a separate ground somewhere isolated from the rest of the gear. The presence of a 'ground wire' coming off one side of the interconnect signifies it has been built properly. Something like https://www.futureshop.co.uk/audioq...MI_MaV346l9wIVielRCh1GWAOTEAQYASABEgLfh_D_BwE These are also pretty reasonably priced cables BTW, just ignore the nonsense about long-grain copper in the description.
Last edited:
By happy coincidence I bought a 3 meter version of that for my sub, think I got at least a tenner off it too 
I do get where your comming from about the crazy price you can pay for audio kit in general, not just cables. Last night I watched a youtube vid where this guy up in London had spent north of 250k on his hifi. The CD player alone was split into about 4 components. Absolutely bonkers if you ask me but if I was a multi millionaire then chances are I would drop a very large chunk on hifi but not that kind of silly money.
The overall argument, at least to me, is more about peace of mind than anything else. Better to spend a small amount and be satisfied with your setup than have that doubt in your mind which spoils the enjoyment. I can honestly say these last few months (post subwoofer/soundcard/cable upgrade) have been the most enjoyable Ive had in many years so on that basis alone I consider my investment so far to be money well spent
I do get where your comming from about the crazy price you can pay for audio kit in general, not just cables. Last night I watched a youtube vid where this guy up in London had spent north of 250k on his hifi. The CD player alone was split into about 4 components. Absolutely bonkers if you ask me but if I was a multi millionaire then chances are I would drop a very large chunk on hifi but not that kind of silly money.
The overall argument, at least to me, is more about peace of mind than anything else. Better to spend a small amount and be satisfied with your setup than have that doubt in your mind which spoils the enjoyment. I can honestly say these last few months (post subwoofer/soundcard/cable upgrade) have been the most enjoyable Ive had in many years so on that basis alone I consider my investment so far to be money well spent
There are some areas of hi-fi where spending more money spent can lead to better performance (subject to diminishing returns) and some areas where budget gear performs 100% as well as super expensive stuff costing 100x more. Being able to work out which is which requires lots of research or a good understanding of electrics (i.e. an undergraduate in physics or electrical engineering). You can't trust the industry or reviewers to be honest about this stuff, there is simply too much money to be made by convincing people to spend more and more even for zero benefit. And of course anyone who has already spent a huge sum will argue to the death that it made an improvement even if it didn't.
Short version: For amplifiers, turntables, pre-amps, DACs, processors and speakers, generally speaking you get what you pay for, more expensive gear should have been built with high quality and that should translate to better (more accurate) sound. Of course there are still manufacturers that overcharge vs others for the same performance level, and every now and then there's an outstanding product for a very low price but generally speaking, more money spent should translate to better sound, but still subject to diminishing returns.
For CD players (with digital outputs), CD transports, cables (especially digital cables), streaming devices, once the gear reaches some threshold level of audio quality there is no further improvement to be had. This makes perfect sense for anything digital once you understand the nature of digital sampling theory. Even for speaker cables which work in the analog domain, all that matters is capacitance/inductance/resistance, provided the cable is thick enough it will have low resistance, and any plain old cable will have negligible capacitance and inductance unless you or the manufacturer do something silly with it.