Just wanted to report on my experience today. I have a Sony PS-X70 turntable, quartz, direct drive, full auto, carbon fiber tonearm with litz wire, which already sounded very good, but had an intermittent hum problem, especially with different headshells. The original Sony interconnects still looked good and remarkably decent quality including gold-plated connectors, so I was skeptical as to whether I'd hear significant sound improvement.
Bought some of these cables in 12ft lengths with nice-looking gold-plated RCA connectors at each end. They come in a group of three so cut in half they would make ICs for 3 tables. These are low capacitance (17pF/foot) and could probably be used in up to maybe 6 feet lengths, but I was paranoid about losing sound quality so I kept the length to about 4 feet. I simply cut them at slightly over 4 feet, unsoldered the old cable from the pc board inside, soldered these in place using heat shrink tubing over the exposed sheilding wire, and soldered in a separate ground wire.
After hooking up everything and turning on the power I was at first amazed that I had done this right the first time. It never fails that I either forget something or solder something backwards, etc. Well, needless to say, the hum was gone. And then the sound quality was markedly improved. Smoother, more pronounced bass, fuller and clearer sound all around. As good as I thought this table was, I had always felt that I was a bit distant from the music, but now it feels closer or more up front.
Now I can see why these are so highly regarded at Vinyl Asylum. For an insanely cheap investment, the improvement is considerable and it's likely that throwing that much more cash at it would result in diminishing returns, at least at this component level. I would heartily recommend redoing any vintage turntable with these cables, especially if it's as easy a job as this was. I used the following place to purchase mine:
http://www.sjgreatdeals.com/pet10-5012.html
http://www.sjgreatdeals.com/pet10-5010.html
Howard
