One end of my Hi-Line IC cable, which goes from my Supercap DR to my Supernait 3, has broken.
Has anyone had any luck having this repaired? I contacted Focal Naim America (not heard back), a few Naim dealers, and AV Options to see if they could.
I come from the electrical/electronics service side of life and repaired and made many IC cables of all types and always found it easy providing you have the correct tools.
The trick is to completely remove (wick out) the old solder and wire. I’ve never found a crimped pin, not saying yours aren’t, just I’ve not seen that.
I agree with @Mike-B so suggest having a go yourself. It is a very fiddly task but can be achieved with care. I am sure some will say it impacts the sound quality if it’s a d.i.y job but in my experience it didn’t.
Should be straight forward. Easier if you can get simeone else to hold the socket and the wire in place. Leaves your 2 hands to hold the iron and solder. Its how i do it, saves a lot of effort that way.
I’m not entirely sure this is such a simple repair. Given that one of the wires has snapped off, it will need to be stripped to expose enough bare wire for resoldering. This may not be possible without releasing a bit more wire from whatever strain relief there is in a Hiline DIN plug, and it may then be best to resolder all 3 wires to ensure a neat termination without excess loops of cable in the plug cavity.
What I think you would have to be particularly careful of here is that the wire you see at the end is not the same wire used for the length of the cable. It uses lots of very fine wire strands, and the black shrink wrap you can see in the OPs photo I think is what covers the joint between this and the short length of bog standard cable which is then soldered to the plug. Over tightening the strain relief or bending the cable around could damage the extremely thin strands. Also, if you mess up the soldering and need to have another go at it, you will soon run out of wire altogether.
All do-able, of course, but care needed.
Yeah, I gave it the ol’ college try. Not confident my soldering skills are doing it justice.
Sending it off to Focal Naim America, they replied and will handle it.
I will have the entire plug replaced and resoldered. Part of the issue is that the plastic plug came loose from the small cap and could twist in place. From what I’m hearing from the dealer, it’s common for those wires to break off this way.
It’s surprising that such an expensive cable would be so fragile. I’ll report back when I get the fix.