Interconnect and digital cables by Demograf Audio: owners’ reviews

Between 2011 and 2014 Dmitriy Gubchenko made interconnects, coaxial digital cables and power cables for members of an audiophile forum, and several of them wrote about what they heard. Most of these cables use a solid-core wire of a copper-based alloy; one is built on vintage Western Electric wire. Below we summarise the owners’ reports, what they compared the cables with, and where the evidence ends.

These impressions are summarised and translated from owners’ posts on an audiophile forum. They are the subjective views of their authors, not measurements or claims of Demograf Audio.

The cables

Demograf Audio does not list cables in its current catalogue. The cables described here were made for individual owners and are an earlier part of Dmitriy Gubchenko’s work. Today the instruments in the catalogue are wired internally with Demograf Audio’s own alloy wire, “RareCoreFusion”.

Analogue interconnect

The interconnect most owners write about is a solid-core wire of a copper-based alloy in a braid that one owner compares to Kevlar, terminated with Canare F09 RCA plugs. He found it fairly stiff and springy.

Coaxial digital cable

The coaxial cable uses the same alloy. One owner also received a special coaxial cable for his RME computer audio interface, with a 9-pin D-sub connector at one end and RCA at the other.

Other builds

One owner received an interconnect built on old Western Electric solid-core wire in black lacquer and a cloth braid: a shielded twisted pair in a double elastic sleeve, with gold-plated copper WBT plugs. Another fitted a Demograf Audio power cable.

The alloy interconnect: what owners heard

Compared with Canare L-2T2S

One owner ran the cable in for 30 to 40 hours and compared it with an interconnect of Canare L-2T2S on the same plugs, switching instantly between the two analogue outputs of his DAC. He describes the overall character as neutral, even and fast, like the Canare, with no emphasis on any part of the range, but more transparent and spacious, with a better-defined low end. It was, he writes, as if someone had turned up the contrast and colour of the Canare and added resolution. Timbres became more varied. Switching to the alloy cable felt to him like wiping a window or drawing back a curtain in front of the music: more open, fresher and more interesting.

He tried to include an older AudioQuest Topaz in the comparison, but found it hard to listen to next to the other two.

Bass and lower midrange

This is where the same owner heard the largest difference. The gain in timbral resolution was clearest in the jazz double bass, and he listened with pleasure to all 56 minutes of solo bass on Ron Carter’s All Alone; it was also clear in the lower register of the piano. The lower midrange gained body, density and elasticity, which made images more solid and three-dimensional. At the same time he heard no boom and no masking of the midrange: the bass did not dominate, and it was fast, clear and even more agile than with the Canare.

The character carried over to his headphone system, where the bass of his Beyerdynamic DT 48 came alive. He also heard a better sense of the recording space, most noticeably on concert recordings.

Compared with Black Rhodium, Oyaide and Furutech

Another owner ordered a one-metre pair out of curiosity, to compare with the interconnects he already owned: a Black Rhodium Symphony, an Oyaide ACROSS 750 and a Furutech FA-220. He found it very detailed and transparent, but never harsh: plenty of detail that does not jump out, and no aggression or hardness in the treble. The midrange impressed him most, voices above all. He describes the sound as elastic, with an incisive treble and a sense of space that does not tire. At first the bass may seem a little light, he writes, until you realise that there is exactly as much as there should be.

Even before it had run in, it was the cable he preferred of the four, listening through his headphone amplifier and Sennheiser HD 650. His pair had Canare plugs, and he heard a further improvement with Furutech plugs.

A “wooden” timbre

A third owner wrote that it was the first cable that had ever moved him and made him want to listen to his collection again. He particularly liked the noble, “wooden” timbre the cable gave the sound. He heard precise placement of instruments, more detail and at the same time a more coherent whole, and bass that went deeper and became tight and dense, which made electronic music especially enjoyable.

Stage and focus

A fourth owner, who received a pair of interconnects in 2014, found the sound cleaner and more detailed, the stage larger and, as he put it, more correct, set further in front of him, and the bass tighter.

The coaxial digital cable

The first owner did not expect a digital cable to change much. Swapping optical and coaxial cables against his Canare coaxial cable had made only small differences: a little cloudier or clearer, denser or airier, but nothing he could call clearly better or worse. Ordinary interconnects used as digital cables, including the alloy interconnect itself, sounded murky and vague to him, which he puts down to the 75 Ω impedance a digital link requires. The alloy coaxial cable was different. Compared with the Canare he heard:

• a more spacious sound;
• much more clarity: very quiet sounds and nuances, and a wider variety of timbres, so that cymbals, triangles, brushes and sticks all sounded different, and voices singing different parts were easier to follow;
• the removal of a cloudy veil he had not known was there;
• more dynamics: sharper attacks, clearer rhythmic accents and pauses, though the Canare sounded more blunt and chopped;
• the same neutral tonal balance as the Canare.

He rated the new cable well ahead of his old one.

The owner of the RME interface heard a more focused sound with his coaxial cable: a slight smearing he had noticed before was gone. Of the two, he felt that the interconnects had changed the sound more than the coaxial cable.

The Western Electric interconnect

The owner of the Western Electric interconnect compared it with two others. Against an Oyaide Tunami Terzo he heard a less bright treble and a warmer sound. Against Demograf Audio’s alloy interconnect, it lacked the alloy cable’s noble “wooden” timbre and had clearly raised frequency extremes. Even before it had run in, he heard exceptional detail across the range and a deep, elastic bass, and it took the main place in his system.

The power cable

The power cable appears in one owner’s report on his Demograf Audio DAC, an earlier build on a Cirrus Logic chip with a tube output that can drive headphones directly. After running in both the DAC and the cable, he found that low-impedance headphones such as the Audio-Technica ATH-W5000 and the Sony MDR-CD3000 sounded better from the DAC’s tube output than from dedicated headphone amplifiers he knew. His report covers the DAC and the cable together, so the cable’s own share cannot be separated.

Do cables make a difference?

One owner, half joking, called the cables esoteric and wondered whether he was imagining things, before concluding that, joking aside, they work, on loudspeakers and on a headphone amplifier alike. That doubt is worth keeping. These are sighted comparisons by enthusiasts, without level matching or blind testing, and the differences they describe are subjective.

Some effects do have plain technical causes. A digital coaxial link is designed for a 75 Ω cable, and a cable of the wrong impedance can cause reflections; an analogue interconnect’s capacitance matters more when the source has a high output impedance. Beyond that, our article on audiophile misconceptions discusses what can and cannot be expected from cables, and our guide to choosing loudspeaker cable covers the measurable properties.

Summary

The owners who wrote about these cables agree on a few things: more transparency and detail than the cables they replaced, without harshness; a fuller, more elastic and more agile bass; and, for two of them, a natural “wooden” timbre. The coaxial digital cable surprised the owner who least expected a difference. These reports are about cables made for individual owners more than ten years ago, and they are subjective.

Which Demograf Audio piece fits

Demograf Audio does not currently offer cables as catalogue products. The alloy wiring these owners describe lives on inside the instruments: Hector, for example, is wired internally with Demograf Audio’s “RareCoreFusion” alloy. Every instrument is made to order by Dmitriy Gubchenko and covered by a one-year warranty (extra warranty available: +1 or +2 years).