FS: 90s Digital Audio Cables (Audio Alchemy and Mod Squad/McCormack)

Three cables from the last millennium.

Audio Alchemy ClearStream. Two for sale, both RCA to RCA. The big aluminum cylinder plugs into your digital source; there's an RCA plug at one end, an L-pad and a Hammond pulse transformer inside for impedance matching and isolation, and a mini-UHF connector at the other end. The cylinder screws onto a 36" mini-UHF-to-RCA cable, so you end up with about a 40" RCA-to-RCA.

This cable was my choice for digital signals for 25 years -- from the mid 90s until I switched from a CD transport and 1x streamer to upsampling streamers a few years ago. Peter Madnick designed the cable when 44.1K was the only consumer-audio sample rate, so it works great at 44.1/48K but it WILL NOT pass data through at 176.4/192K or higher. I'm unsure how well it works at 88.2/96K, but I've got a scope and I'd be happy to test it if you need to know.

Also, this probably goes without saying, but the cable is only suitable for digital audio signals, not analog.

$80 for the one in retail packaging with instruction sheet
$70 for the bare one (I'll include a photo of the instruction sheet)
Free US shipping

Mod Squad Wonder Link, XLR3 to XLR3. This is an unusual thing: The RCA Wonder Link I and BNC Wonder Link II cables were well-regarded and popular, and they still come up for sale periodically on the used market, so you can find images of them on the web -- but this is the only XLR Wonder Link that I've ever seen. It was given to me by Steve McCormack, so I suppose it might have been a prototype, but it was in a retail box so I don't know. Anyway, it's made from two parallel runs of the Wonder Link "Digital J" cable (so each half of the balanced connection is coax), it's 1 meter long, and I've never used it because I've never owned a digital source with an XLR output.

$90
Free US shipping

 

I found an old listing for the Mod Squad Digital J from the Japanese Hi-FiDo listing. It is rare since not much info on the web. It is an interesting looking AES/EBU digital cable

 

Thanks! Good to know it was actually in production.