An Interconnect cable is the patch cable that goes between audio separates. For home use they typcially use "RCA" style connectors. The following post is aimed at those types of cables and not XLR style interconnects which can be found on some home audio components.

Go onto Craigslist, Nextdoor, Ebay, or Facebook Marketplace and look for RG6 75ohm coaxial cable. It's the cable that is run in most houses for cable TV. You might even have this stuff laying around your house in a box somewhere. Either way you can get it for pennies per foot if you look hard enough. There are versions with a solid copper core , or a copper clad steel core. For audio use, either is just fine, but as a personal preference I like to use solid copper core as it's better quality cable. However, it does cost just a bit more, but still cheaper than buying cables in a box store.

Next you'll need RCA compression fittings for RG6: Amazon Link

Then purchase a compression tool and coaxial cutter: Amazon Link

If you have cables with the "F-type" connector on them already, then there are adapters to go to RCA male: Amazon Link

Follow the instructions that come with the tools and enjoy cables that outperform even those that are made of unicorn farts and fairy dust that people with too much money but little sense like to tout. These cables will also last forever as RG6 cable is very tough, especially the solid copper core version. I have cables that are north of 30 years old still in daily use.

The only issue with RG6, it is a stiff cable. So making short runs bend at sharp angles is not an easy thing to do. You will need to come up with a method to keep stereo pairs together, or just run them separately. Plus mark the cables as Left or Right channels. I use either colored heat shrink tubing, or electrical tape for this purpose.

Vintage Audio Addict is a great YT channel that I recommend for all Budget Audiophiles to subscribe to.

This video is a dissertation on the work of Peter Aczel. An engineer that lays it out in plain language how audio really works and why "Audiophiles" are wasting their money. I've known about Peter for quite some time and his perspective went a long way in shaping my own in regards to audio equipment.

I have a love/ hate relationship with early 90's to early 2000's audio equipment.

This is an Adcom GTP-350, which a decent mid-range stereo pre-amp from 1993. I bought it off of Ebay for $80 and free shipping. It came to me with no left channel and scratchy to non-working pots. So several applications of Deoxit and working the pots they all came back to life. However, the left channel would just now work, EXCEPT for the radio. The radio played normally through both channels. That told me this unit has fallen to the curse of dry/cold solder joints. So I took about 30 minutes and resoldered all the joints in the signal path of both channels.

Then... I ran into my own stupidity... Sometimes I'm just and idiot and using an extremely flawed testing method and a defective external part (USB-C to 1/8" Stereo adapter) I thought I hadn't fixed it. After messing around with it for another 30 minutes, I discovered my mistake... Then discovered the adapter I was using to play music from my phone was defected (if you guess it would not play through the left channel, even on known good equipment you get a cookie.) So I figured all that out finally, as I said, I'm an idiot sometimes, and it's working great.

The plan is to run it for a week or so and make sure nothing else happens. I am contemplating recapping it, but we'll see. If it passes, then it will go up to my living room so I can get my main stereo back to working. Right now I'm running a Marantz receiver I fixed and while I really like it, I like my main stereo even more.

Here is a photo of the work I did today. I started at the inputs (top center of the photo) and just worked my way down. To the left in the photo is the radio section and it's working fine, so I didn't touch it. Also, we don't listen to the radio, so if something does happen to that section I'll just isolate it from the signal path and just leave it.

WARNING: In this post I talk about working on HIGH POWER electrical circuits. DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN TRAINED... PERIOD! The capacitor in the final photo is quite easily capable of KILLING YOU if you discharge it through yourself. The amp uses TWO of those in its power supply.

As a hobby, I pick up distressed amplifiers, receivers, and other audio equipment and attempt to bring them back to life. This has netted me some spectacularly great pieces for pennies on the dollar, to outright free.

This photo is a receiver I picked up locally for free. Both main channels were "out". It wasn't the internal amplifier that was the problem though, rather the input board had some dry solder joints. About 3 hours of soldering netted me a perfectly working receiver, which has been in my living room for the past two years working perfectly. If you want photos of when I took it apart, just let me know.

Below is an 8 channel McIntosh MC7108 that I bought off of eBay listed "for parts". While what I paid for it probably doesn't fit the definition for "budget", it was less than a quarter what the amp is worth... So maybe budgetish? It's works great, but I ended up not really fixing it. It actually worked for about a week after I bought it. I thought I had really scored, until it started up with a horrendous buzzing noise that came from inside the cabinet. The protection circuits also kicked in and the amplifier would not power up. Some investigation, again photos are available if you want to see them, revealed that buzzing came from a bad capacitor and relay in the on/off switch circuit. As I didn't care about the on/off switch, I simply bypassed it. Now, if the amp is plugged in, it turns on. I control it using a Zwave outlet (look at the power outlet and you'll see it) and that is what I use to turn on and off the entire stack you see.

Below the McIntosh is a Carver TFM-15B that needed the input pots cleaned and new meter lights. It's not a well built amp, but I've always loved Bob Carver's work and it sounds very warm. Bob was known for is ability to copy the sound of much more expensive amplifiers in his design, which he called "Transfer Function." In the case of the TFM-15B is copies the sound of a Classe amp, although I don't remember which one.

Below that is my wife's old Soundcraftsman amplifier that I put new power supply capacitors in. The caps in that thing are the size of coke cans.. Don't believe me? See the last photo...

At the very bottom is an old HTPC I built many years ago. It is retired as an HTPC and is currently serving as a low power server for my house.

Big honking Capacitor:

Channel 3000 Coverage

As of 1:50pm CST: 5 are dead, 5 more injured and the shooter is dead (not counted in the fatality count)

Absolutely unbelievable that this crap has come to Madison.

Sorry for the bad image quality.

The image is of the top of piston 4 and the cylinder wall in a Toyota 2AR-FE with 162,000 miles. All Toyota recommended maintenance was performed throughout the engine's life. I have the feeling those recommendations were written by marketing people and not the engineers.

Based on what the image shows, the engine needs a short block. Am I correct?

Probably a lot of these posts coming, but here's mine.

Just deleted and exported all of my Reddit comments/posts and exported them (hey, I'm old and can experience bouts of nostalgia.) If Reddit as a company cannot respect their users, then a user I will no longer be. Normally such things don't bother me. For profit companies are always behave as scumbags. We're their product and if the product doesn't behave, then it gets put into its place. That is what I have been seeing the past couple of months.

What finally did it for me, to jump ship, as the way the Admins started treating the Mods. People that actually grew and put in the effort to grow the various subreddits. You know, the people that actually did the work to produce the product Reddit, as a company, is trying to sell. It is not surprising that Reddit's management is so clueless. They want to make money, but the product they are trying to sell... Was built by someone else... FOR FREE. The Reddit execs think they have tons of content advertisers would love, when all they really have is a platform, which OTHER PEOPLE built content on. Advertisers don't care about the platform, there are tons of those out there. The advertisers are only interested in the content that will draw people to look at their ads.

My prediction is that the Reddit IPO will be successful, but as a company it will outlast the IPO about 3 years.

Sometimes things are not about money and it astounds me the number of people that just don't understand that fact.