hifi-advice.com - cable end sleeves

Should you use sleeves?

For what we sell at our webshop we always try to avoid crimp sleeves, also when using power cables. Crimp sleeves improve the reliability and are easy to work with bit most of the time they don't sound good.

Extra layers of metal on your connection, especially metal of questionable composition, usually adds a layer to the sound. This can be heard as a glassy hardness that's unpleasant to the ear. Especially when the metal consists of several layers of different material, or is a composite, this effect can get really obvious.

Unless you're using pure copper, you're going to add brightness, nasality and sometimes even brittleness to the sound. So we go to the extra effort of squeezing the naked litze in the connectors. When doing this it is extremely important that the cable is well-twisted and that the screws are well-tightened to prevent dangerous situations. But it realy pays off in the sound which is much more natural and relaxed without the typical tinned mixed metal sleeves.

If you really want to use sleeves, use pure copper or gold plated ones as offered from for example WBT and HiFi Tuning. Because of their purity of metal, these impart the least artificiality to the sound.

A telling example I experienced:

When I recently changed my audiosetup I needed a longer extensionblock powercable but for conveniance first just plugged a second extensionblock into the existing one to add some length. The resulting sound was not very good and even though I know that powercables make a big difference, in this case, since I also changed the position of the entire setup I figured it wouldn't be the extra extensionblock-connection that made for this large difference all by itself. When eliminating the extra extensionblock and connecting the cable directly to the cables in the wall socket (thereby bypassing the Bals plug and no-name wall outlet themselves) the sound became much more relaxed, moe colourful, and most importantly: moe spaceous. The soundstage now filled the room again. All this from bypassing an extra extensionblock and a schuko connector and wall outlet.

This indicates once again that extra contact transitions are best avoided.

Tinning

Tinning the ends with a solder iron is also a bad idea, although at first it seems fine. The thing is: Solder flows under pressure. The connection will get looser and looser until the screw only has a sloppy grip left on the cable end.

Also read:

cable end tinning

Disclaimer

Officially it's recommended to use sleeves for safety. I'm unsure whether it is in fact obligatory,

but in any event, when working with electricity, always be careful!