Hello together,

my system is Akurate DS, M6100 and fully active Ninkas. As I´m considering in buying a Kikkin 2.2 I´m thinking of upgrading my black interconnects (I´m not that satisfied with the Rothwell Attenuators).

So far I had a closer look to:
- Atlas Cables (Voyager or Navigator all CU)
- Chord Chorus 2
- vdH Integration Hybrid
- Linn Silver
but I didn´t test them (which is quite impossible).

Did anyone make some experience with those and could You give me some recommendations?

Thx
Christian

weinconsi wrote:my system is Akurate DS, M6100 and fully active Ninkas. As I´m considering in buying a Kikkin 2.2 I´m thinking of upgrading my black interconnects (I´m not that satisfied with the Rothwell Attenuators).

So far I had a closer look to:
- Atlas Cables (Voyager or Navigator all CU)
- Chord Chorus 2
- vdH Integration Hybrid
- Linn Silver
but I didn´t test them (which is quite impossible).

Did anyone make some experience with those and could You give me some recommendations?

Historically the Linn Siver interconnects perform well with Linn components, and several members on this forum like the way they sound on other brands of audio components as well. ThomasOK has compared the Linn Siver interconnects with various non-Linn interconnects of all price ranges, and prefers the Linn Silver sonic qualities.

Over an extended period of time, I compared the Linn Black and Silver interconnects with other brands before making a final choice. Generally speaking, it might be tough to beat the Linn Silver interconnects...regardless of price.

I recently bought an Ixos XHA305 interconnect. It's surprisingly refined and transparent sounding for the money, and it's a Hi-Fi Choice Best Buy.

Lingo wrote:I recently bought an Ixos XHA305 interconnect. It's surprisingly refined and transparent sounding for the money, and it's a Hi-Fi Choice Best Buy.

Is the name of the company Ixos :?:

That's right. I'm very impressed with it :)

Thanks Lingo,

did You compare them against the black ICs?

Christian

No, I've never had the chance to hear the Linn Black cable.

Black IC's can often be found cheap second hand, due to Linn including them with a lot of their products.

In my opinion, few interconnects beat a pair of Blacks when it comes to musicality. And the ones I solder myself sound even better than the stock ones. Since late 2010 I do them better than ever, due to a re-evaluation and adjustment of the exact temperatures used.

To compensate for the above boasting, I confess that I've never managed to beat the two pairs of Linn Silvers that I have as references (using Linn Silver cable and connectors, of course). Those two pairs are very early, from when the Silvers were first introduced, and they sound better than any other Silvers I've heard.

The Silvers I solder myself sound clearly better than Blacks, but the early originals have an effortless flow that I haven't been able to achieve.

Lingo wrote:That's right. I'm very impressed with it :)

Thanks for the reply Lingo, I haven't heard of that company before now. But I'll give a look at their product line.

Please note, Tony, that Ixos is a cable manufacturer. They are all notoriously unpredictable when it comes to musical performance. The bigger the product line, the less chance of them being interested in anything but making money.

A few years back, I tried 3 different Ixos cables. The cheapest one of the three performed best. But it wasn't great.

Ixos used to make a clear blue speaker cable, perhaps ten years ago, that played music really well. Not as good as K400, but it was cheaper and much easier to hide. Naturally, they dropped the model. :roll:

lejonklou wrote:Please note, Tony, that Ixos is a cable manufacturer. They are all notoriously unpredictable when it comes to musical performance. The bigger the product line, the less chance of them being interested in anything but making money.

A few years back, I tried 3 different Ixos cables. The cheapest one of the three performed best. But it wasn't great.

Ixos used to make a clear blue speaker cable, perhaps ten years ago, that played music really well. Not as good as K400, but it was cheaper and much easier to hide. Naturally, they dropped the model. :roll:

Hmmm, that's good information to know. I agree with you, the more cable products a company has, the more they are interested in money.

lejonklou wrote:A few years back, I tried 3 different Ixos cables. The cheapest one of the three performed best. But it wasn't great.

I've heard something like this before. My first experience with Ixos was around 15 years ago when I read a review in Hi-Fi Choice saying that the cheapest Ixos 104 was better than 2 other Ixos interconnects costing more.

I wrote to Ixos asking them if they would re-introduce the 104 and was told that it had been replaced by the XHA305, which to my ears is a more transparent sounding cable than the 104. It's also one of the cheaper IC's in the Ixos range.

It's generally a good idea to keep an eye open for nice sounding interconnects 8) . However, once I find a really nice sounding set of interconnects, I don't keep looking to replace them.

For the most part, there are many other areas to spend money on an audio system. And in many cases, these other areas can have more sonic improvement than interconnects. Although the interconnects are certainly important :!: