Belden ICONOCLAST Interconnects and Speaker Cabling

The most important thing for me with any cable is that they are long enough to connect to each end of a component.

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That’s the beauty of this hobby. Nobody is forced to spend a penny on anything they do not believe worthy.

I consider Iconoclast mid-priced compared to others vendors out there. They are not the cheapest, nor the most expensive. I do respect the fact that they are transparent in their design and make all attempts to increase the value based on sound scientific principles. Other than Analysis Plus, there aren’t many out there willing to support “why” it is they believe their products are superior - other than fancy marketing drivel.

No need to besmirch any company or take offense to their pricing model. If their product sucks AND is over priced, the market will correct for that disparity between price and product quality. If they can convince people to purchase their product - more power to them. Nobody is victimized here simply because they are subjected to a company’s pricing model not within their budget or willingness to spend.

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This is perfectly OK. The vast majority of the populace say the same of a $500 DAC as a separate component, and spending anything over $20 on speaker cable. Or even the extra cost of an SACD.

All that matters is one’s personal yuck/buck ratio.

Ha! Well, then you probably won’t been interested in the new contactless “Osmosis” line of cabling I have been developing.

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Well, never say never…how many hours, weeks, months do they need to burn in… :wink:

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Thought you didn’t participate in religion, politics or cable discussions? Stay true to your principles man!

In my experience, the TPC haven’t changed in 20 hours, the OFE sounded terrible for the first 2 hours but have changed significantly for the better. I don’t believe in burn-in per se just what I’ve experienced.

True. But my gut feeling is Jeff’s new cable range will take a fair amount of time to come to fruition. :wink:

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These threads are pretty flexible. They tend to wander all over the place. Take a look at the ones on the TSS for example.

Yes, flexibility is our motto.

I found Iconoclast cable immediately better and did not specifically note improvements with time. I just continued to enjoy them immensely.

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I know, I just like to ask myself before I click reply, ‘does this add anything to the discussion’ or not. I delete as many drafts as I post.

Rhetorical: I presume you have a source(s), a DAC and amp(s) and speakers at a minimum. Perhaps a preamp too. What do you have invested in this setup? As a percentage of the total investment, how much are in cables?

I’m duly impressed with the improvement made to my enjoyment with the Iconos vs. Zu Audio Libtec, and Canare 4S11 and Belden 5000UTP-something cheap.

I still have Belden 1800F interconnects, they sound fine but I’ll sure as sh*t try the Icono gen 2 when available.

I don’t assemble my system by budgeting money by percentages of my investments. I prefer to select my components and cables by listening and choosing ones that provide the performance that I am searching for. I use Kimber Kable 4TC and 8TC in four runs to each speaker. My B&W 800 Matrix have 4 input terminals per speaker. I use Kimber Kable Hero XLR interconnects between my DAC and AMP. I have tried many other cables and these are the ones that work best for me. Please note that this is in answer to your post. i am not trying to divert the direction of this thread. I know that the prices I saw on the iconoclast speaker cables would be prohibitive for me.

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Fair enough but I did qualify the questions as rhetorical; asked merely for effect with no answer expected.

In the event you’re referring to the original Belden pricing, the BJC pricing is significantly lower…

Cheers

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Sounds like a solid approach. That many runs of Iconoclast speaker cable would be costly. You might want to give the XLRs a try. You can always send them back if they don’t suit you.

An excellent approach; budgeting $xx.xx for cables or any other component as a percentage of one’s system cost never made any sense to me.

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Hi, Kurt from BJC here again.

One of my great fears going forward is that people will think that we, who have always been a voice for good sense in audio cabling, have had some sort of personality change. I’m here to assure you that while Iconoclast is not in our traditional pricing zone, that’s not the case.

We’ve been asked countless times to take on various “high end” cable products for various people, and we have always said no. It’s not that we reject the idea in principle, but that we always find ourselves rejecting it in practice. Usually we have just not found the technical case convincing, and sometimes we’ve found it downright bizarre.

I first learned about Iconoclast before it had a name – several years ago, while meeting with Steve Lampen, Belden’s (now retired) cable guru/evangelist. We were talking about “high end” cable products and he surprised me by saying that there was, in fact, an engineer at Belden who had come to the conclusion that there really was something to this, after all, and that he felt he had a good handle on what it was. That got my attention; and then, a year or so later, I found myself on a trip to Richmond, Indiana to meet Galen, review the product development work that had been done, and start working on how we might assemble these for Belden. Belden’s existing assembly operations were all much more volume-driven, and this wasn’t a good product for them to handle assembly in-house.

For the last few years we have been the assembler for these cables, but suffice it to say that we’ve been as frustrated as anyone by the marketing side – it just seemed to be very difficult for people to buy! When you consider that Belden really has no consumer sales operations at all, though, that’s perhaps not very surprising.

Now, Pam and I named our company “Blue Jeans Cable,” back when it was just the two of us at the dining room table, as a kind of contrast to what we saw as a lot of pseudo-technical sales talk in the consumer cabling business. But from the get-go, we weren’t Monoprice. We were there to make a cable that was better than the customer needed, but so good that he needn’t worry about it. S/PDIF cables with a thousand times the needed bandwidth aren’t essential, but they sure are sufficient. To us the question always was: could we sell cable without having to fib about it? The answer, I am very pleased to be able to say, turned out to be yes. We now have seven full-time and three part-time employees in our little building in Seattle.

The way I think of Iconoclast is something like this: it’s very well known what you need to do to make an acceptable, reliable speaker, RCA or XLR cable for analog use. But every cable design is an optimization problem, and one of the factors to be optimized is cost. For example, when you can dramatically reduce the inductance in a speaker cable, but the result is a cable that is extremely expensive to make and slow to terminate, the ordinary reaction is to say that the inductance in a conventional design is low enough, in light of the cost of reducing it. In the case of Iconoclast, Galen has shifted the balance of that optimization problem – mere cost is not enough to make a solution impractical, and the real question is whether the cable can be manufactured at all. In some cases, like the Generation 2 interconnects with miniature uninsulated star-quad conductors held apart by tiny splines, it wasn’t always clear that the cable COULD be made, until the difficulty of doing it was faced and experimented with.

Does anybody NEED this? No. In fact, conventional speaker cable designs work very well and have well known performance characteristics. But if a person really is trying very hard to squeeze the best audio performance from a system, every aspect of that system deserves a look, and that includes cabling. Nobody “needs” Iconoclast; the question whether one WANTS it, however, will depend intimately upon his or her evaluation of it within a high-end system. Like most things we make at BJC, Iconoclast is better than it needs to be; it’s just that in this case, no expense has been spared to make it better.

An important part of our getting this new approach set up was to get pricing in line. We felt, on looking at the original pricing, that it had been pegged much higher than it needed to be. And whether the prices as they now are make you blanch or make you cheer, know this: they are in line with our ordinary pricing approach at BJC, which is to price things in direct relation to what they cost us to make.

Now, maybe I will lose credibility by saying so, but: I’m not really an audiophile. I’m a cable assembler. I know how to pull and terminate and manage cable products, but while I do love high-end audio when someone else is paying for it, and have sat enraptured at audio shows before marvelous systems of the greatest clarity, I can’t bring myself to drop the kind of money on it that some of these systems require. And I don’t consider myself to have golden ears, or be the world’s best critical listener. As a result, I never tell anybody what he’s going to hear. I’m not going to tell anybody that his system will sound better with Iconoclast in it – what I will say is that it’s here, we have it, it has the best and most well-attested engineering work done on it by a man who is one of the nation’s top experts on electronic communications cabling, and that anybody who would like to have a listen to it ought to do just that. But if somebody tells me that he hears no difference, I’m as ready to accept his word about what he hears as I am to accept anybody else’s word on the same subject.

As I said: if this had been the usual sort of “high end” product with which we’ve been presented, we wouldn’t have been interested. But with Galen’s technical papers at hand and with the testimonials of quite a few happy customers, we think that this is the real deal. The technical case is well made, the manufacturing work on this cable is high quality, and all that leaves is the question we don’t try to answer for anyone else. We’ve always been happy to take returns, for whatever reason, so we’re happy to do that here, too, and hope that people will like this product line enough that there won’t be all that many of those returns.

But our personality will be the same as always. We won’t write sonnets about the cable or promise that the bass will be more chocolatey (around 78% cacao content). We’d rather let the product do what it does, and see what people say.

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Thanks, Kurt!

Since adding the speaker cables, the absolute phase button on the DS has a now very distinct impact on many tracks. It was there before, but much the same.

For my own notes, I’ve got ~25 hours on the OFE. Will swap back to TPC tomorrow for the week.

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Very interesting.

Really? Very interesting. I hardly ever hear a difference—maybe never—maybe… You’re going to make me buy these things, aren’t you?

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Oh if I only had that kind of power :muhhahah:

The Eagles Hotel California SACD I ripped. Bam, clear as day.