I recently ordered some OPENHEART 4.4mm balanced cables for my Hifiman Ananda Stealth. I couldn’t decide between the 8-core and 16-core cables, so I bought both.
The weights are as follows:
- Hifiman original: 51g
- OPENHEART 8-core: 37g
- OPENHEART 16-core: 56g
I tried to measure resistance, but my DMM has some low-ohm drift. As far as I could tell, all cable connections were roughly somewhere around 200 milliohms end-to-end (correcting for lead resistance). I know there are methodologies for more accurate measurement, but honestly I think all these cables are sonically indistinguishable.
All three cables were extremely flexible. The Ananda Stealth came with Hifiman’s updated cables that address the complaints about their previous stiff cables.
I was surprised at how flexible the 16-core cables were. The 8-core cables were so “stringy” that they had a tendency to tangle when unhooked. The relevance of this would depend on whether you left them connected all the time or connected/disconnected/packed them up in daily use.
Anyway, that’s it. I figured I’d share since I had both in my hands.
I had picked up a couple of openheart 8 core cables 1.5-2 years ago, and they were nice and didn’t tangle or kink, though it was hard to tell the left and right plugs apart. But the ones I bought were no longer available, so I tried a different version, and they were just so stiff, despite being slightly more expensive. They actually felt far worse and tangled/kinked more easily than the $4 cables I use when loaning to friends.
FWIW, there was no difference to my ears or on a frequency response graph (crude testing rig) between all the cables, including the old stock hifiman cables and even some regular electrical wire, lol.
Totally. I’ve been known to hook up my Magnepan speakers with lamp cord in a pinch. Shhh, don’t tell my audiophile friends…
I have that experience as well, I have several of the black/brown/brass hardware one that is nice but I have another OpenHeart cable that’s very stiff.