Man I must have missed this one while on vacation. I use just two wire types for connections from tonearms to the Piccolo.
I either use Cardas 33awg tonearm wire. This is litz construction, 6 nines pure copper and is cheap. A foot of red, green, white and blue is just 6.00. I buy this from Michael Percy.
The other wire I like is from A-M Systems in Washington. They sell teflon coated solid core silver wire in 25 ft spools. The cost is about 75 dollars with shipping. So a foot of 4 wires comes to about 12 dollars.
12 dollars a foot for silver wire! Just make sure you order the 34 awg wire size, otherwise the wire will be so large it might bind and create friction going through the main bearing.
I like to use Cardas 6 nines copper wire in solid state applications and prefer the silver in tube applications.
Both of these wires sound very balanced, they break in relatively quickly, and they don't break the bank. They are very low capacitance so will work well with either MM or MC cartridges.
I use braided copper shielding from the tonearm base to the RCA inputs. Drain the shield to the earth ground connection of the tonearm lead. This gives great RF shielding.
BTW I put these fragile wires into a 14 awg thin wall teflon tube to give the wires more support and provide stress relief.
I get the braided shield and teflon air tubes from action electronics in Los Angeles. 100 ft of ptfe tubing is about 35 dollars. The braided copper shielding is superb and also cost effective.
I have experienced very few failures with this wire (an occasional break at the cartridge clip leads) and the results sound like the very expensive boutique wires I used to sell for up to 600 dollars.
Thats all based on my highly unbiased opinion..... Its hard to hate something you build yourself!
