FS: Focal Utopia - Balanced Cable - $350 [SOLD]

Selling one of my balanced Focal Utopia cables. Dual 3-pin XLR termination. 7 ft total length.

I make these myself.

The cable is a large-gauge, dual quad-helix topology, which is essentially an interleaved star-quad configuration. Each channel, for each ear-cup, is fully isolated and shielded. Cable topology ensures proper EMI/RFI/Magnetic noise rejection/cancellation.

Wiring is fully shielded, high-purity OCC copper.

The wire has been cryogenically treated, and then finished assembly was subjected to another round of cryogenic treatment*.

Raw parts cost, with cryo-treatment, runs ~$300.

If you need a dual 3-pin to single 4-pin XLR adapter I can build you a color-coordinated adapter for $25.



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*In practical terms, this means four-fifths of f**k-all ... but it sounds good ... and at some point this cable had gotten really, really, cold.

 

Wow! So it begins...

 

What begins?

Me selling off a cable at, effectively, cost, because I've replaced it, and it's brother, with something a bit more interesting (and still self made)?

If I sold these commercially, at "normal" cable mark-ups, they'd be well into four figures. Nonsense though that is.

 

Geeze, I forget how sensitive some people can be... An innocuous comment like "wow so it begins" prompts a dislike. Good thing I didn't share an actual opinion or point of view.

Why is the worst assumed?

All I meant by 'so it begins' is this (being the first time I've seen you sell a cable you've made) marks the beginning of your entry into the industry as a vendor. Like Donald North with his first Sonette or Peter at DHC: these guys all started somewhere. I mean absolutely no disrespect: in fact quite the opposite. You are someone who has built a bit of a legacy around themselves and are highly respected. You have a lot of knowledge about gear and what sounds good. It makes sense to try and turn, at least in part, your passion into a business. Again, Moffat did that, David Wilson did that and so on. Is it an entry for you into the business? I have no idea and that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just saying everyone in the industry started somewhere.

The cable you've made looks more professional than much already out there and people would buy into your brand. Again, it was a compliment.

I'm not sure why a comment like mine was assumed to be negative.

 

Welcome to the internet.

 

Cable looks awesome. Might I ask the source of the wire? PM me if you prefer.

 

Because it was vague. Usually people use that phrase to indicate the start of a precipitous decline and that is how it was interpreted. For example, in the wake of head-fi's forced face lift, rando posts increase on SBAF. And someone might say, " and so it begins." That is kinda how I interpreted it, even if your intentions were different Also, just because someone sells a cable he made doesn't mean hes going to become a full-time cable maker. And very few people would have been able to assume what you actually meant.

 

Sorry folks - I never meant to step on any toes.

 

Too bad I don't have a Utopia. Otherwise, I'd snag this right away!

 

If selling a single cable really meant that, for me, then it happened a long time ago. I have occasionally built cables for people on request. When the Massdrop HD6XX came out I was going to offer to do a run of specially matched balanced cables for those. I decided against it in the end on the basis that I can't make an interesting return on doing very basic cables - which leaves the expensive stuff. And that has it's own set of issues (not the least of which is that even I don't think they make nearly enough difference, if/when they make one at all, to be worth what they wind up costing from a purely sonic perspective).

This cable is just one I built for me, and then recently I made another one that I like better - which is mostly about cosmetics. And as such it's "used", as it's been hooked up to my original pair of Utopia since I originally built it (about 7 months ago).

Thank you for the kind words.

I've contemplated this in several veins. Even made jokes about it, especially with regards to USB cables. And in fact I've made and sold some of those, again on request, from time to time. But I settled on building a little AOIP box (ethernet/WiFi in, AES and COAX/Optical S/PDIF and I2S out and absolutely NO USB anywhere near it) after all the USB nervosa here and elsewhere. That'll really be what becomes my entry into the audio world as a vendor, I think. Though things like Eitr and USB Gen 5 make it a lot less appealing unless you need the remote operation/Roon/DLNA end-point capability. So I might do a simpler, cheaper, version (the original would be $299) as well that's specifically intended to be used with Eitr or USB Gen 5 (not that you couldn't use it elsewhere).

That's pending though ... so we'll see.

Again, thank you for the kind words.

My question was just to clarify what you meant, as there were several possible interpretations. And based on discussions I've had when people have asked me to make cables for them in the past there's often a lot of sticker shock among those that haven't actually ordered up all the parts on these things (and gotten tickled and dimed on shipping from several vendors, since no one vendor seems to sell everything required). Those discussion sometimes, often in fact, turn very negative, very quickly, as people think that "DIY" should be cheap compared to the Norne's and DHCs of the world. That's perhaps a discussion I'll take over to the DIY Cable building thread though.

 

Yeah i mean, DIYing gear for people here will never result in an 'interesting return' because that's hardly the point. People like Fraggler are always open to making super nice cables with great materials for members with very small markups for his time. Obviously not everyone needs to share his motivations, and we can all do as we wish.

 

The intent was not so much to make any money on it from the SBAF crew - that's not really something I'm interested in doing. If I cared about getting money out of any of this I'd not be posting things like "Life after Yggdrasil" or my other detailed reviews, while openly eschewing the antics of those that do such things in other places and are clearly getting kick-backs, discounts or other considerations for doing so, here - I'd throw up a site of my own and put it all there.

And I wouldn't be selling essentially mint-condition items, many of which I bought purely to review here, for generally ~60% of what I paid (with some minor exceptions) if I wanted to be anything other than as "friend-like" as possible.

Nor would I make donations ... or send little treats to other members or offer "prizes" in silly threads, or send my gear to others, at my cost, so they can get hands on time with it.

Cable wise, though ... at some point real-life steps in. Doing odds and sods builds here and there is one thing. Suddenly having to do twenty or thirty cables, at four hours or so a pop (for the one I had in mind), back to back, becomes a more significant commitment, and there was simply no way to do it for the same price as, say, Impact, or ZY (just based on raw parts costs, never mind anything else) without jacking up the volume further. I like making the odd cable, and the experimentation since most of them are different - but building lots of them, all the same, is a LOT less fun. Something has to make that interesting - and since I couldn't do so reasonably, I didn't bother at all.

 

The wire in that particular cable came via my day-job lab. For some of the more exotic things we work on it's necessary to validate things like the purity and in some cases even the grain structure, so I had access to stuff that'd been pre-tested internally and was surplus. It runs about a buck and a half a foot, and there's about 112 feet of it in that cable.

 

Sold, locally, so this can be archived.