DH Labs began in 1992 when designer Darren Housepian (hence the DH) began designing mike cables while still a student at the University of Michigan. The other major players, VP Greg Housepian and business and sales rep Terry Rossen (both shown in the photo), have been with the company since the early days.
The DH boys were touting their new Q-10 Signature speaker cable. Featuring four strands of pure copper with heavy mirrored silver coating, the cable contains two 12-gauge conductors and two 14-gauge. If not used in bi-wired configuration, this is equivalent of 10-gauge. An 8' stereo pair costs $304, with additional cost for internal and external biwiring. There is one line of speaker cable higher up: Revelation SP. With extra quality comes cost: an 8' stereo pair costs $3850, or $7700 in biwired configuration.
Also new is their top-of-the-line Red Wave Power Cord, which contains 1386 strands of triple-shielded copper with mirrored silver plating and Oyaide connectors. It is so hard to squeeze these connectors into the connector that a single termination takes an hour. The cost is $799/ 2 meters. By way of comparison, their Power Plus Studio Reference, which features double shielded 12 gauge conductors. It costs $250/2m, All DH Labs power cables feature noise-canceling geometries.
COMMENTS
I need you all to know I am much too important and discriminating to purchase such inexpensive cables as these. Unless my cabling costs as much as a vintage Rolls Royce formerly owned by Jay Leno, and unless I can tell you all about that fact, I am simply not interested. These cost effective products would be like driving a BMW, for God's sake. (shudder)
As I advised another recent poster, suits_me, you shouldn't give up your day job to become a stand-up comic. Some of DH's cables are indeed relatively affordably priced and their AES/EBU cable is used by many recording engineers—including me!
You see my dear..that in this BS bisiness called "the high end", we pay for the PRICE, nothing else.We must part with our money some way, so we wait and wait until the audio rag editors spout verbal ejaculate about this or that.....when we are satisfied that we have the rarest of the rare, when the "veils been lifted" count has risen to 4.5 mentions per paragraph, we pounce. that lasts for two months until the company that just took 5.2 million dollars from our idiot hands comes out with another new and improved model and cliches start flying about once more.such as "XXX is about power" the power of one, the power of many"..GAG!!. the cycle repeats over and over.meanwhile, those in the know, ie professional recording engineers are enjoying music with well designed vastly superior products that remain immune to the reprehensible audiopile tailchase, while us with more money than sense or logic follow the pied piper audio rag shill pimps over the cliffs down t
So sorry you fell down the cliff spouting so much venom, Ray. So, let me see if I hear this correctly. I write about a lower-cost cable line. John Atkinson says that he uses one of their cables in his recording chain, hence considering it of professional quality. And then you go about accusing us being seduced by audiophile doo-doo and ignoring professional quality cabling? I think this is what's called knock-down comedy.
Jason,Could you please expand a little on the blog a little. What was the 'modest display system'? WHat were some of the other strengths and weaknesses?I have an all DH Labs/SilverSonic wired system (including power cables from AUdio Art, whcih are Darren's designs) and would be interested to know how compares to my experience.As far as the Air Matrix IC with Ultimate RCA plugs is concerned I found them to be superior to the entry level Transparent Link 200 ICs.Being located in the Middle East, I bought everyhting from Darren directly, got great service and pricing to boot!
Hi there, I had a chance to check out the reference cable mentioned above when I was deciding between two another Europe producers. After replacing my previous interconnect DH Labs Silversonic Air-matrix (which is, by the way, an outstanding wire especially for its asking and let me tell you unbeatable price!!!). Well, after that replacement the soundstage got steadier and immediately I noticed slight shift towards bottom end. I have been trying to look for a convenient interconnect since I auditioned nearly complete REGA system including lovely warmly sounding CD Jupiter 2000, pre-amp Rega Cursa 3 + power amp.Rega Maia 3 coupled with 2-way French floor-standing speakers Cabasse Farella 402. Especially with Farella 402 the overall sound had always leaned to upper midrange lacking down-to-Earth slamming bass to push you into your comfy chair!!! All the stuff I have is supposed to be literally initial "peep into" a high-end sphere compared to commercial fancy plasti
plastic-looking stuff. According to variety of reviews, I'd spent some time over, my Farella 402 belongs among the so-called neutral speakers, but still were imagining somehow up-range. I often asked myself "Where all the bottom line bass has rolled off?" With CABLE4YOU Dee-Lite interconnect the whole stage got somehow into place by better location of musical instrument - mainly while listening to chamber music or 3-4-men jazz - unpleasantly piercing upper midrange has lowered to the place where it should have belonged to a long time ago and I finally felt the bottom line!!! The sound stage - especially after exchanging my previous speaker cables DH Labs Silversonic Q-10 for Cable4You Audio X-treme also got much wider both ways from left to right and front to back. The voices don't sound too harsh any more and I quite like to be withdrawn into that magnificantly immense space image still without lacking sufficient detail. Although a bit of shadow seems to be cas
e cast onto the music, surprisingly enough there is simply nothing to be lacking, which just makes me wonder how it was achieved. To shorten it up - I am at last happier and have finally stopped searching for another pair of interconnect to get the best out of my system - now I am more than satisfied unless one wants to take the hell deeper bury into one's pocket!!! I didn't believe that wire would matter that much until I checked it out and found for myself. Maybe this could be the path to choose if you consider appropriate rewiring. Finally got a feeling of listening to music itself rather than cables and wondering what could possibly „improve“ the sound. By the way, to put you on track, I just luckily happened to get all the wires second-hand so I didn't really bleed to death and still don´t regret a single penny:)
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