Another cable test.
Or rather, not a test, but a report from the labyrinth in which many of us are stuck. Or rather, we live there, don't we?
I think it all started when Rudolf Radnai, 'Uncle Rudi', was sitting in my armchair a few years ago, and I could see it on his head, and I could feel it, and he told me that the sound was very-very good. And that he really didn't hear anything like it anywhere else, and that the audience that was using his cables was raised on completely different music, so he praised the sound, and I liked it.
Yes, I like it as much as you do, when I'm praised.
But.
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| Acoustic Zen Absolute |
But, with a subtle 'but' in his voice, he looks at my thick speaker wire, but isn't it too thick, dear my friend Peter? All that plastic in it, and the large diameter, it's definitely not right, it's not technically correct, a much thinner diameter would handle ten times the current. Indeed, the pipe I use to water the garden is a little thinner, yes, there is a kilo of purple plastic insulation and a pile of Teflon to insulate the elementary fibres, which are not so thin themselves.
So that was my comment, in the end 'close your eyes and imagine that it's 1 mm only...'
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| Watering hose - OBI |
And recently, a phone call came in saying that now there's a breakthrough, that there's a new prototype, and that it's 'thick', and that it's going to rethink the thin-core theory... I didn't really want to give it a try, because several of us had booked: his speakercables as phenomenal value for money, but it just didn't break into the upper caste here, no matter how much he wanted. I've had at least five trials, all in vain and with no chance. It seems the quality of materials, or the technological advantage of the big cable manufacturers, is simply irrecoverable.
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| Stealth V16 |
I put it in, nothing surprising at first, in fact, the basic tone is almost similar to Zen, nice musicality, this Monteverdi SACD is very good, very good bass, a little pale but -.
This is the 'but', this is where the trouble always starts. Always. Because I simply heard more colour at times, more music coming off, flawless midrange, but a kind of covered up sound... even if the bass, it was extremely engaging, well articulated, and specifically, more bass in quantity, there was nothing to embellish. But with me, the room is very good, with a rare lucky corner placement and an ultra-light resonant stand, Zen also produced beautiful and sufficient bass always.Then I took it out, and yes, Zen, it's a really good cable, everything fell back into place, I liked the sound again.
But.
It wasn't the exhale of 'finally home'. Tiny achey memory-crumbs came, tones that were now hidden, near-sub chords, drums that were now just 'just plain good' bass... The first time I wondered a little if there might be some spare still lurking in the system, and right around here somewhere. And that with a 3k nearby cable, something like a discussion could be starting.
I was sitting in the armchair; I was crumbling that disgusting black plastic, it was like it was empty, I couldn't feel the usual-favourite-silk Litze-1mm in it.
Then I thought about the air-wire-system of Darvas, and the hysteria around insulation, and the worship of dielectric parameters. And when I handed the wire back, it somehow slipped out of my mouth, I don't know why, to make me a naked version.
Because all I knew was that the elementary fibres were enamelled, so, with due care, there would be no short circuit. He said at first that it couldn't be, because it 'wouldn't hold', it would come apart, it would be untransportable, and it would get tangled in a way that would be impossible to get out of.
Then he called me a few days later to say that he had solved the problem, albeit with great anguish, and that I could come and get it.
Then at home I found out what all the fuss was about.
Imagine a piece of cardboard about the size of A4, with notches on it, and the 4 wires wrapped around it, the banana ends taped down and marked where to start unwinding. Well, by the time I had the first one down, I was almost screwed... :)
Some f...thin wire, not much, about half a dozen with two strands of white sewing thread in the middle, around which the whole project was gently wrapped, this wire itself, one of the poles of one of the channels.
So much for loosely, that when I took it apart and put it into place, it was spaced from 2 mm to 2 cm. Lightly crumpled, but it was definitely coming apart. Because it did,
I finally got the thread out. :)
An easy half an hour on all fours, plugging everything in and taking care, because it was like a living creature whose favourite form of appearance is the 'organic tangle'. And then I looked up Zsolt Huszti's phone number, [the owner of the Heed Audio] and I thought about how I was going to phrase it if the enamel didn't work, and I short-circuited it, and I said 'guess what, Zsolt, the Nexus went fine for about 6 and a half years, and then I'm sitting there, and whoops, all the end transistors are all fucked up at once, I just don't get it... "
So, I turned it on like I've never turned it on before: started the record, plugged in the two Nexus in a flash, heard the sound, okay, about 1 second, and stopped the music and let the amp warm up so at least the currents would set.
Those who know me will guess that it was only about 3 minutes...
And I spent 3 minutes thinking about that 1 second. What I heard.
Because it was an incredible sound.
And I finally started it.
And I couldn't believe my ears.
Some heavenly richness of tone. A translucence, an airiness. A chorus and a chord progression. Perfect mid-tone. And bass like never before.
Records were exchanged and I went from one amazement to another. I love the plucked instrumentsI like the harpsichord at the forefront. The harp, something that to say 'faithfulness to the instrument' doesn't quite cover the the essence of the story. Something extra was created, and not a little. And no some parallel sound quality, but a bewilderingly better one.
More, more beautiful, more real.
I'm an enthusiastic type, but this is not the first time I've stimulated large-scale change on my first try. However long we've been in the game, no one can escape the grip of preconceptions in the short term. Believe me, no one. So I cautiously waited for the days to pass, for the magic to fade. In the meantime, I went through the obligatory rounds required by an old Spendor: where there is 70 cm of internal continuation of the speaker wire, i.e., 2/3 super wire, 1/3 trash wire.
What would you have done? Well, with difficulty, but I also replaced that 30 year old 0.5mm twisted PVC insulated wire with this new system. Difficult because there was the connector, which was a horribly corroded, uncleanable thing, some kind of nickel-plated iron, simply offended, not only my hifier brain, but my engineering brain.
How do you clean off copper? Everyone knows that it will corrode in hours, and after a month it will look like this.
No problem. Let's have a good terminal. I'll order it, the postman will deliver it after 3 days.
Now, this is where the maze really came. I suggest you get online and start looking for the 'right' connector.
After 3 days I came to the conclusion that two things were clear: there is no really good one under 1k, or there is, but the shadow of the bigger, unbought brother would interfere with the music listening.
The other is that it will have an 'own-sound', which, given the characteristics of my wire system, will have a questionable chance of blending into the synergy of the system.
So what then? That old terminal, it looks terribly sh@t, I knew it wasn't going back. I just don't want it.
After a bit of thinking, I took a deep breath, thought of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot, and skipped the whole thing. I had to order a longer wire from Rudolf, who laughed, because when I first asked him what he suggested, what kind of buckle, he immediately told me to try to skip it. But I still wound up with a week of WBT rainbows. Finally I put the 70 cm longer wire, straight into the crossover.
And from about that point on, everything really fell into place, and from that point on everybody liked the sound, not just me.
Obviously, I had to try to change the 30 cm between the connector and the crossover, because people are greedy and want homogeneous wiring out of the goodness of their hearts.
The Spendor is 3 way monitor, that's 2×6 wires. Finish, polish, solder, blah, blah, blah... It was completely unnecessary and useless: there, the 'trash' wire was simply designed into the sound. I put them back in, with the corroded hooks as they were.
And in a flash, all the magic came back.
After almost 3 months, the system has calmed down. And so have I. And it's gotten ready-resonant, all this complexity has crept in. I got used to it. It's all gathering dust, maybe that's what it takes??
So, now it's possible to write about it.
The sound?
That's fantastic. So much so that every record I haven't listened to with the new wire is a surprise. A pleasant surprise.
More sound. A broader spectrum. More structured everything. Sometimes I hardly recognize the record for how good it can sound.
More strings, more choir members, more air. Better lows, much better bass. The singers, what they've got is downright phenomenal. Far beyond anything I've ever heard in my career as a hifier.
I have two faint memories of this experience.
One was when I had a pair of single-way, yellow diaphragm, 16 cm funnel-less paper speakers in an OB wall many years ago, without any crossover. The harpsichord, it was simply fantastic. I couldn't believe it existed.
The other was the moment when ML №512 first rang in the room.
I haven't dared to move since.
One is that the wire itself is from 1952. That is, it was produced with the technology that was used between the two Wars. He didn't know exactly how it was done, compared to, say, now, but he certainly didn't know that there was no copper recycling, no copper scrap buying/recovery.
The way it works today is that our discarded mobile phone chargers and E-stuffs are piled up in a rubbish yard somewhere in India or China, the plastics are burnt off with a brutal amount of black smoke emissions. And this 'copper' goes to the warehouses of the mafia, and from there it goes into the complex system of copper smelting, where yes, they clean it and do all sorts of things with it, but this sooty pile of plastic smoking in the dumps, I don't think you can get away with it.
The other, a bit metaphysical approach,
That these metals, such as copper wire, behave like living systems; during manufacture they develop 'not perfect' electron orbital positions, which very slowly settle back to stable equilibrium where. And if not disturbed again, they reward the 'rest' with a minimal amount of added, as yet unmeasured, disturbance signal components.
For me, this wire is a reverse Naked King.
I've heard many expensive wires that are really good, but even more where the king is actually naked, only the price tag doesn't even allow you to assume that. Instead, it's all wording about synergy and component sensitivity and non-existent six-pound copper.
Here, the wire is physically naked, yet its sonic qualities are accentuated by sumptuous clothing. Clothing that gives much more than the austere physical parameters; it drives you into the music, into the love of music. And the realisation of what records we have carved out over the years...
Your systems are different from mine, the beloved music is different, the taste is different, practically everything. Actually, there is only one lesson for you from this report:
That you may have a situation where the 'system is wired properly', the sound, the wiring, is close to the maximum, there is not much of a reasonable step up, the music is going on, it's a quite relaxed situation, the sound is really good.
And maybe it's not. It's really not.
You might find that a simple wire change would give you a staggering musical extra experience. Plus, it might be a lot cheaper. Either with this one I have, or another one made by another guru or a big manufacturer. The point now is not the specific type, but that these two/four pieces of wire, this one already exists somewhere, and are resting nicely, waiting for you, for the intersection of coincidences, in a drawer, on a desk, or even in another system.
But maybe not.
And you really can't get a better sound out of it, even with Odin.
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| Odin Gold |
Synergy is a strange thing. Habit, and individual taste, and inevitable snobbery, that's the main thing.
If I've disturbed you, I apologise.
Good listening, everyone,
Regards,
C.
P.S.
after a few months, the bare wire theory achieved such success in one area, which is rare in hi-fi: digital interconnects. Recipe: take an enameled thin copper wire, as thin as you can find, solder it as a signal line, the ground can be a little thicker, and that's it. XLR needs duplicated thin lines of course. Hardcore hifi fans can go up to 0.05mm, that's approx. the thickness of a medium hair. Not easy-cake to solder it.
And you can throw the old, expensive digital interconnect in the trash.
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