Bottlenect RCA Interconnect Cable Kit

The Story

We’ve been asked to do an interconnect kit repeatedly over the years. And, in fact, we have offered a few. For various reasons those have gone by the wayside – difficulty in acquiring the materials, subcontractors who struggled with the pricing, or that fact that often the kit was rather hard to build or the cable was rather fragile.

In the meantime we had gone to building our own custom cables to realize the level of resolution and tonal balance we needed from our reference system in order to evaluate new Tape Project titles we were working on. They needed to be cables we could create without paying astronomical prices, something we do very well. Over the years we cooked up a cable recipe so good that we would carry a set with us to trade shows. In fact those cables saved our buts more than once when the latest multithousand dollar whizzbang cable we were told to hook our gear to fizzled.

Yeah, they are very cool cables. Lots of nines long crystal copper with teflon dielectric in hand twisted pairs slipped into braided copper shield, Techflex covers in different colors to easily identify left and right cables, and Neutrik RCA plugs. But a total bear to build and even with beefy heat shrink at the connectors they could fail after a lot of abuse. We could live with those downsides in our listening environment where a technician could rush in and fix a cable that went bad and have us up and running in a few minutes. But there was no way we wanted to sell a kit that was a bear to assemble or unreliable in the long term.

So a few months ago we spent a lot of time and dollars buying all sorts of wire and cable and seeing if we could come up with an easy to build, attractive and reliable cable that could stand up to our house cables. The path was a long one but eventually – maybe around cable number 15 or 20 – we hit one that sounded pretty close as soon as it was finished. It went into the lab system for a nice long break in period, maybe 50 to 100 hours. When it came out we were surprised to find that it not only matched our house cable but seemed to sound even a bit better.

What really turned us on was that the noise rejection of the cable, even around power transformers, was excellent due to its very precise coaxial geometry. The treble is sweet and extended and the bass is deep and tight. And just as important the cables are a snap to build. So now we had some righteous cable, what about the rest? We found a really elegant looking and rugged right angle RCA plug that looks super clean coming off of the Bottlehead top mounted jacks. And we determined that the cable is just the right size to slip some Techflex over before terminating the right angle plugs, thus allowing our cool red and black jacket color coding system for left and right cables.

We are offering the cable kits in three lengths – 1/2 meter, 1 meter and 2 meters. One kit supplies you with what you need to build one pair of cables – four RCA plugs and the proper amount of cable and Techflex in two colors. These should make for an easy first kit, something to build in an evening. The simple assembly instructions are on line here.

Build ’em up, run ’em in for maybe 50 hours and enjoy.