Burson Audio Cable+ R2R cable Review

Burson Audio Cable+ Pros&Cons

Pros

  • Well-made product
  • Easy to use

Cons

  • Questionable manufacturer claims
  • Requires external power


Packaging

The cable+ comes in pretty interesting packaging for an audio cable. The clear plastic case, along with the molded foam on the inside serves as good protection for the cable, as well as giving a sense of exclusivity to the product.

What’s in the box?

  • Cable+

What Is It?

The Cable+ is Burson Audio‘s promise to “clean up” your audio. As they state it, “sonic details once lost, will be fully reproduced to create a complete experience”. Basically, we are told that there is a mismatch between various devices, and that the Cable+ is the messiah of cables to fix this problem.

Design

The Cable+ certainly looks like a well designed and manufactured item. There doesn’t seem to have been any silly cost-cutting going on and all the connectors and the machining of the “magic box” seem to be of high quality. 
In total the cable has a total length of almost 1.3m (4.25ft). However, it’s with this length that the first problem arises. It’s actually not so much the total length which is the issue, but the length of each “section”. You see, the Cable+ has an input and output side to its magic box. However, for some or other reason Burson Audio decided that it would be a good idea to make the cables for the input side 1m (3.3ft) long, whilst making cable for the output side only 20cm (0.66ft) long. In order to understand why this is an issue, allow us to explain how to hook up the Cable+ to your system.
The Cable+ comes in 3 different styles, and the one we’ve been sent is the R2R (RCA cables on both ends). There is also an A2A model for connecting the Cable+ between the 3.5mm single ended jacks of an amplifier and other analogue output, as well as an A2R model for connecting a Cable+ between a 3.5mm single-ended output and 2-channel RCA input on an amplifier. The Cable+ also requires external power in order for it to output a signal.


So for the R2R model that we received the input side of the Cable+ could be connected to the RCA (left/right channel) outputs of your DAC,  and then the output cables to the RCA inputs of your amplifier or preamp. Technically the output cables could also be connected to a set of powered speaker or studio monitors. However, this is where the issue lies. The output cables are only 20cm long, which means that they would be far too short to reach the RCA inputs on those powered speakers.
Also consider the fact that the RCA outputs on a DAC would be pretty much right next to each other; so why do those cables need to be 1m long? This seems like a pretty severe oversight on Burson Audio’s part.

 

 

Functionality

So, as we’ve mentioned, Burson Audio claims that the Cable+ is here to rescue your audio from the horribly horrendous and evils effects of impedance mismatching.

They’ve even got some graphics on their website to illustrate just how effective and incredibly valuable the Cable+ would be in terms of audio fidelity.

It paints quite a picture, doesn’t it?

So after realising that we wouldn’t be able to simply connect the Cable+ between our IFI Micro iDSD Black Label and Presonus Eris E5 studio monitors, we opted to stick the Cable+ bewteen the iDSD BL and the IFI Micro iCAN SE.
Well what do you know? It worked!

The music certainly sounded clearer, and punchier. Could it be, can a cable really make this difference? Absolutely, but we need to understand why.
We swapped out the Cable+ for just a standard set of RCA cables, and then measured the output. This is when we discovered what was going on…the Cable+ seems to have been acting as a preamp, providing just a bit more power. That’s right, the Cable+ was making things louder. Of course the music was going to sound clearer and punchier.
In fact, we even went so far as to volume match and record the music from the output of the iCAN SE in each scenario, and then imported the two recordings into Audacity. From there we inverted one of the recordings and pressed the play button.

Silence.

Yup, the null test showed no difference between the two recordings, which suggests that all the Cable+ really was doing is to increase the volume slightly. Thankfully it was doing so in a very linear manner though, without creating any distortion or altering the frequency response of the system.

 Read: IFI-Audio Micro iDSD Black Label Review


Value

Burson Audio asks $150 for the Cable+, which seems to be on quite the steep side for a cable. Granted, there are far more expensive and less useful “exotic audiophile” cables out there, but $150 is still $150. Seeing as the Cable+ is merely acting as a preamp, you would have to assess your system as a whole in order to determine whether or not your system would benefit from a preamp.

However, where we do take issue is with Burson Audio’s claims. As our test suggests that the Cable+ merely has an inline preamp, their claim of “sonic details once lost, will be fully reproduced to create a complete experience”, seems incredibly misleading. In fact, it actually doesn’t make any sense.
If details are “lost”, well, they are LOST. No amount of cable wizardry is going to bring that back. If the DAC doesn’t output the audio signal faithfully, a cable is not going to bring those lost details back. In the same way that you cannot take a lossy audio file and expect a cable or any other type of equipment to restore that lossy file back to the original lossless file.

So, $150 for a cable? If you need a cable that has an inline preamp, sure. But there are other areas that you could be spending you money on to improve your audio system.

 

Rating

The TECH MERIT rating system is designed to take as many aspects of the product into account as possible, and is generally a good indicator of how it stacks up to its rivals in terms of features and specs.


Packaging
Look and feel: 6 / 10

Build
Quality control: 9 / 10
Seems durable: YES

Value
Performs as manufacturer claims: 2 / 10
Competitive price-point: –
Relative value: 4 / 10


Final Rating: 5.2

 

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