New arm cables

[lejonklou]

Oh, right, I forgot you had a Urika. Definitely inflexible, but the performance might make up for it. ;-)

[ThomasOK]

Well Fredrik, I didn't reply as I don't have anything worthwhile to add at this point. I have been reading the thread with interest and have the same surprise as the others that Linn would unintentionally downgrade the cable. Unfortunately I have only installed one of these new cables so far and that went into an LP12 using older Ittok cabling. It also went in at the same time as a Cirkus upgrade and no separate comparison was made of the T.Kable. I did receive another cable from Linn which I looked at to verify the wiring but it was a duplicate shipment so we are sending it back. Therefore I can't really open it up and install it into a table for testing. Additionally, as with Klaus, I am running the Urika on my own LP12 so the cable is not applicable.

Since the new cable also includes the new tonearm plug it also begs the question of whether the plug itself is actually better than the old one? This would obviously require more testing to determine although it sounds like your research indicates that the cable itself is mostly to blame. I will be getting another of these cables in soon and I hope to have a chance to do some comparing but I'm not sure I'll have the right setup to do it.

Seeing as the Akito 2B comes with the original T.Kable with the new tonearm plug it would certainly be weird if Linn is actually shipping the Ekos SE with a less musical cable. I hope we do get some reports from others (although I have a great degree of trust in Fredrik's ears and little doubt in his findings). It certainly is a confusing situation.

[ThomasOK]

I was looking for threads about the T.Kable to answer another post and realized that I never posted my findings on this matter. I believe I posted them somewhere else but I can't find them and since they belong here I felt I should do an update.

I have been able to test the Mogami T.Kable vs. an original one with the same slotted RCAs. I did not spend a lot of time going back and forth as it was a customer LP12 I was working on so I didn't have unlimited time with it. I did these comparisons with the Akiva phono cartridge.

My findings are much the same as what Fredrik reported. The Mogami has an initial impressiveness, sounding more detailed - maybe even to the point of being somewhat etched, but it just seems to have no musical flow to it. Music is simply more organic and enjoyable through the original T.Kable bringing you more into what the artists are doing and making you want to keep on listening. The Mogami doesn't get you involved in the music and becomes fatiguing. These qualities were obvious with several different pieces of music.

For those wanting to upgrade a Linn arm to a better cable I now recommend the new Akito cable which is $100 less than the T.Kable.

[Efraim roots]

Efraim, I believe the only difference between the XLR T kable and the new Mogami RCA T kable is the connectors. The wiring scheme is supposedly the same.

So, is XLR a better connector than RCA? And is the particular XLR model they use on this cable better than the RCA model? I don't know the answer, but I think it boils down to that. And I don't think the difference will be big.

My original silver T-kable (older connector) developed a problem with hum (the earth wire had broken somewhere) and I decided to buy a new one a couple of months ago. I actually got the new black one with rca at first since my dealer had one on the shelf offered at a slightly better price as good will since my original cable broke. It was OK imo and improved much after some weeks, maybe not better than the original (?) but it was certainly good enough and had a good sound. Then I found some very interesting posts regarding the XLR verison on the Linn forum from one of the designers himself Ian Wilson, which also developed Urika and Uphorik If I got it right. He said the black XLR version was a tremendous improvement on the original silver T-Kable. Here's a quote from him:

So why do we have a balanced cable?
The answer is simple, the coil has a reference, the cold terminal, all the wanted signal is relative to the cold terminal. The phono stage effectively boosts everything on the hot terminal relative to it's notion of the reference signal. If there is a discrepancy between the coils reference and the phono stage's reference then there is a discrepancy in the wanted signal. The solution was to treat the reference signal, cold, with the same care and attention that that we give to the wanted , hot, signal. With a single ended cable, the hot signal travels down the core, while the reference signal is the screen, which protects the wanted signal by being a sink to external noises. With the balanced signal, the hot signal and cold signal are twisted together, the screen is attached to the chassis of the phono stage and provides a screen for noise that prevents noise modulating the reference signal.

Is the Balanced cable as effective for the MM stage?
I would say it is more effective, the high input impedance makes the MM stage very susceptible to noise, I found the performance improvement vast when using the balanced cable with the Adikt.

read more in this thread: http://forums.linn.co.uk/bb/showthread. ... ed+t-kable

Since I have Uphorik I begged my dealer to take the rca t-kable back in exchange for a XLR and we could agree on a deal. Now with the XLR version I must say I'm super satisfied, this cable really sounds good! I haven't done a A/B test with the original T-kable (I did with the black rca version tho) but I get a strong feeling that my system sounds better than ever, and it's not about detail or such stuff, it just sounds very analogue and LP12 like, but better than ever. Take all the best from the original t-kable and and all the best from the black t-kable and then add some.