Winner: Interconnect Cables under £1k
AudioQuest MacKenzie RCA
AudioQuest cables don’t thrive in a specific ecosystem, unlike some that are mainly used with particular brands of electronics and speakers, and can throw other systems off balance. Nor do they cater specifically to a certain type of audiophile, being neither overly analytical nor euphonic. What they do do is work well with various equipment and appeal to varied tastes. Case in point: the Mackenzie analogue interconnects, which sit more or less centrally within the company’s exhaustive, budget-spanning range.
They’re well constructed, with solid conductors made from the company’s purest copper, a three-layer carbon/metal noise dissipation system and a closed-cell polyethene insulation layer. And their finish is of a similarly high order too. Their natural partner on the map-to-speaker connection side, if you were wondering, would be AudioQuest’s Rocket 33 or Rocket 44 speaker cable. After all, the name of the game here is creating a coherent wiring system throughout the signal path, rather than throwing money at what we would deem to be the most critical connection in the chain.
Informative interlink
Swapping out his interconnects in his most modest hi-fi setup, Eric van Spelde says inputting the Mackenzie makes “a night-and-day difference” (and he uses those words sparsely!). “Now we had a strong, palpable centre image against a dark, solid background… a bigger soundstage with much better separation and strong dynamics,” he says in his review. In a more ambitious system comprising Audio Note, PinkFaun and Silent Pound gear, “everything would only truly fall into place with both the CD player-preamp and pre-power amp connections provided by the Mackenzies.”
AudioQuest • audioquest.com
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