Cable Test II. - The story of the Naked King

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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...'

Watering hose - OBI

Then many years went by, a lot of music went down, it was calm again, there was nothing worthwhile to listen to, 2 years ago, that dust was on the PowerR wires. The memories of a few speaker wires after the session, he gave me to listen to, thin ones, which are really good, he said, and after 5 minutes I took it out, it faded nicely. New records came gently, the system went a lot.

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.

Stealth V16

And then somehow I had it in my hand. 'Thick' is a gross exaggeration, because the outer plastic stocking is about 2 mm thick, but he said that in his coordinate system this is 'thick wire', because there are not 128 Litze fibres in 1 mm, but about half a dozen, and the thickness is really of a different order of magnitude.

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.

 

Now I hear that harpsichord again. There, then, the rest of it was weak, high swallowed, the top was never there, the low was nothing below about 100 Hz, but that strange 'stringiness', I remember it to this day. I never thought I'd ever hear that in a Xovered system, in a way that I liked the rest of the range.

The other was the moment when ML №512 first rang in the room.

When there are no questions, no comparisons, no analysis of where and what has improved. Just some strange feeling that something is weird, that it can't be that good...

I haven't dared to move since.

Rudolf mentioned two more things when I asked him why I like it so much now.
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.

This speakercable will not be commercialised, that is obvious. Few would dare to do it, and you really need an undisturbed environment and a stable nervous system to connect it. How it would do in your set /  country, I have no way of knowing. A small number of trials have been done with some improved version with a completely new insulation, which also gave very good, but mostly shockingly very good results. I can no longer test these, and I'm not a test lab. It's just a great pleasure to have such a good sound.

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.

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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Thank you for the images
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Ortiz: Trattado de Glosas – Cocset & Balestracci

We have few records to accompany us all along our lives.

Ones which I take off the shelf blind and I’m ready to comment on them any time of the day or night for just talking about them makes me feel fine.

Such CD is the record of Savall’s Ortiz one which set the bar so high that the rest deserves no mention, especially for no selection dedicated to Ortiz has been released.

It’s been the case up to now.

Alpha has recently brought out a new CD.

It’s a new Ortiz record.

Its outlook, the artwork is the new Alpha following today’s trends; it’s refined, however, you’d better not try to find the visual culture of the old Alpha records.

The inside, the music is a different story indeed.

Trattado de Glosas.

It’s actually a schoolbook.

Gitároskönyv. [A very popular book for learners of the guitar in Hungary]

Of viola da gamba from 1553. 

The book teaches you what and how you should do. It demonstrates, educates, illustrates and exemplifies. It actually gives encouragement for the freedom of expression that the faithful rendering of the notes should mean other than the essence but it ought to be the first step only. Just like the competence in using letters should only be the base when, for instance, you write a poem.

In the case of musicians the intention and the message are obvious enough.

What about us, the listeners?

It’s clear-cut for us too. It does the same as all great masterpieces: it finely compels you to make a standpoint or manifestation. It gets you to reveal your soul, however, to what extent it proceeds inside or outside or in both directions will be different for each of you.

We’re familiar with the music. The great hits of the Renaissance are coming one after the other. Obviously, the common lines now are the glosados and the diferencias – there seems to be some important thing here; so grave that the CD was released just for them.

You certainly get to the issue of the variations and repetitions. 

The monotony ensures a sort of safety and reliability. It’s not like – hundreds of years later in a symphony – that all of a sudden something completely different is coming in a next beat. Nope, here there’s the magic of permanence. 

Which may be the same as the delight of frolic within certain limits.

The Limits of Control?

What’s the additional sorcery? 

What is unique in these simple variations the bulk of which is heard in the overplayed pieces whistled in the streets even today?

To answer these questions is rather complicated. 

It’s so complex that even the majority of the musicians cannot catch what’s going on here. They say ‘Yah, Ortiz’ with a fine ascending tone; 'well, yes, it’s not a very complex music, (means ‘poor’), the harmonies are simplistic, yet, there’s some beauty in them'. Then they take their instruments to play a recercada and it’s going to be just the same as they foretold. It’s poor and monotonous and it’s for school kids. They may have listened to the record of Savall but they inly and deeply don’t understand what makes it so good, so extremly good, what is it that makes you pant and love and be keen on and keep the dedicated edition in a safe.

And what is it that makes their music:

so bad,

and boring,

and of no weight,

and no sense

and no any spirit,

and, no real music.

Youtube is full of these. The scarce exceptions glitter like tiny stars.

Savall stands out intensely for he plays in a weird way; sort of ornamentation-metaphysics; masterly handling of the instruments and much deep background content. It’s so good that releasing the same music was brevity indeed.

Cocset and Co. are running on a different trail in this record. No rivalry whatsoever for the mode is so diverging.

What strikes the ear is that the playing is more straightforward. It’s not that ornament-oriented; he doesn’t wish to be an eminent learner of the guitar. Today, in the era of prestige-complications first you don’t comprehend it much. 

But then something takes place like when you stop under a blooming tree. 

A new world is unfolding slowly and nicely. 

More and more details are coming out. 

Arcs are shaping. 

And once something opens up like in the Szék [a village in Transylvania] folk song: 

'The Sky has opened up in three'.

And the viola da gambas start to speak. Indeed, they do make the violas speak. At some places they are so expressive that you shiver. 

They’re telling you something important.

What is it? 

Well, the answer will not come as the crow flies. No any stable lighthouse in the horizon.

For the spoken and written languages differ from the music very much here, the morphology and the system of rules, the history, its living nature and meta-content are simply not enough. 

Something is intensely leaking from the proto-language. You might, of course, grope in complex transfers, periphrases, feelings and association of ideas; moreover, in the private sphere they make the direct translation into words impossible with a despairing diversification. 

Perhaps good poems resist the central analyses in a similar way.

The record is on and you realise that the main point is not the melody or the harmony or the right-played notes or the rhythm or the dynamics or the counter-points of the parts.

Nor even the improvisation.

The point is what’s going on with you – the way we take a glass of wine or a cup of coffee afterwards, how your speech and intonation alter a bit, how you perceive the colours.

How your eyes flash when hearing the question: 'Well, how do you like the new Ortiz record?'.

Truly, the sounding is an intense part of the above. Alpha has been eaten up by Outhere; the artwork team has probably been working elsewhere since then but the sound engineer who conceived the transferring of the project into sounds, Hugues Deschaux has luckily remained and the CD bears the traces of his hand; his enthusiasm and homage to the tones of the instruments and the greatness of the selected acoustic ground.

A part of the instruments were manufactured right for this Ortiz recording. One has a nicer tone than the other. Among them there’s traditional, finely coarse gamba sound and there’re some as big as a contrabass whose overwhelming orotundity is simply enthralling.

Of the performers Cocset and Balestracci alternate in the centre; I myself can hear a lot fewer differences in their way of delivery than usually in their other records. 

For they have similar thoughts about all this. 

For both love Ortiz. 

And they don’t say it or write it down but make a record like this.

The CD has been on for days.

It has captured me. I reread what I have written above and I can see that it doesn’t really turn out why.

No problem.

Then I carefully try to find a place for it on the shelf. It’s going to be placed among the elite records – I knew it when I sniffed into the cover while ripping the foil off.

Beforehand, I put the last number on.

It’s amazing. 

The atmosphere is so intensive that I keep asking my friends to recall what few words come to their minds – and they list a lot. I am happy to hear that the CD stirred them too.

The start is the finest consort-style; then they cheat with the beat a bit like the manual hurdy-gurdy of the Wurlitzer; it keeps speeding up and slowing down there and back, dancing, whirling, market, then the prairie wagon is leaving and vanishes in the distance of the centuries.

Absolutely recommended.

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Translated by Kenesei Andrea

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Thank you for the pictures.

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Regina Bastarda

By the Vocabolario dell'Accademia della Crusca published in 1612 ‘bastardo’ means “nato d’inlegittimo congiungimento d’huomo e di donna”, and “tutto  cio che traligna”, that is, who was born out of an illegal intercourse of a woman and a man, or anything which is deviant. Later the 5th edition is quite forgiving, contains an example: a bed too big for one person but too small for two … it is also a ’bastardo’.

In music the expression always appears in two forms: viola bastarda, the instrument, and alla bastarda, a sort of performance. 

The two may happen to be one and the same thing.

Paolo Pandolfo’s new record is about the above and many other relating things.

Since it was established in 1830 the British Royal Geographical Society has aimed at the geographical description of the Isles including the precise definition of the length of the coastline as well.

Lewis F. Richardson attempted to overview the above seemingly less complicated task in the first part of the 20th century but he found himself confronted with weird principal issues due to which he happened to say that to tell what the length of the coastline is “not possible”. The reason was that the smaller unit he chose for measurement the more precise the result was, yet at the same time the length became worryingly big expressed in miles, so much that leaving the 100th step of re-scalings (obviously theoretical) the length of the coastline well exceeded the Earth-Sun distance.

50 years later Mandelbrot came up against the same problem while observing the data of the stock exchange curves, the lightning and the border coastline of Spain-Portugal.

He laid down the mathematics of the above phenomenon in a paper in 1975 known as ’fractal theory’. He came up with a very elegant solution: he wasn’t scared like his fellows in science; he refused to round or to introduce constants, which sweep the issue under the carpet, rather, he pointed out that these systems are ’self-identical’, they preserve their basic characteristics, their rugged nature by each refinement, and this constant ‘fractured’ state is their very essence, hence the name, and this self-similarity can finely be described by not too complicated mathematical functions.

How big deal is it? 

Well, by the old mathematics the fragment of a circle, observed nearer and nearer, becomes more and more resembling a straight section, and, keeping to an infinite resolution the curve becomes a straight line. 

For this a theory, a model, and the reality simply lies in its basics. 

For the world is not like this. 

It is like Mandelbrot’s fractals. When we have a close observation of something it becomes more and more uneven rather than smooth out.

Do we know of fractals? Yes, quite a lot - lightning, broccoli, roots, veins, and music, for example. The halved/sectioned string, the system of sounds are such.

The viola bastarda is indeed deviant; it will not fit in the patterns of musical conduct or behaviour as much as the measurement of shore length in standard mathematics. The instrument, being a viola, is similar to the gamba, albeit bigger - others find it smaller, no real consensus - and its tuning is different too; it provides a bigger grip and possibilities of scales than the ’pure blood’ viola da gamba. The viola bastarda has a deviant stringing, the gut strings are arranged in a special internal plait, and thin metal fibres are added to the ’normal’.

What’s all this for?

Today two things seem to face us with this expectation. One is to perform the intabulations of the old polyphone pieces on string instruments, and the other is that all this should take place with a unique ornamentation/playing method called ‘alla bastarda’.

Indeed, this is why viola bastarda became the Queen of Instruments, Regina Bastarda, the one and only capable of the above.

The Bastard Queen.

What’s this playing method?

It’s a sort of performance in which the ornamentation - used only as a tool today - e.g., diminution and ’passagio’, are given a main role so much that the sounds are almost lead out in their own registers beyond their own boundaries. 

They get bastardised.

Diminution is a weird thing; the record includes a lot.

The word itself means segmentation, fragmentation; a short albeit thickly woven ornamentation among the sounds, loads of sounds with an inner melody, rhythm and structure.

In a word, slowly do we come close to the point, just like when measuring the coastline, ‘B’ can be reached from ‘A’ in a straight as well as a ragged, even fractal way. 

We can get to one sound to another directly or by playing loads of other sounds too.

Little conviction or persuasion is required with the coastline that the nature of the world is other than the straight line from ‘A’ to ‘B’; it is only a rough simplification.

Is it the same with music?

The answer is contained in the record.

Pandolfo did us a favour by making a small choir sing the old polyphone pieces he plays on the viola beforehand just to let us see what has turned to be what.

And what?

Well, something really special which we can think on with our own cast of mind.

Parts of these ornamentations, diminutions are noted down, others are not. That is, it’s nothing but improvisation the way Pandolfo thinks right. He tells us his opinion, what he thinks the story is between two sounds for it’s always the story that counts. 

Of course, we mustn’t think that we may come up with any sort of ideas like pushing in something flashy and the audience will eat it. 

Not.

The listeners won’t take the hook; the performer must have the tenet of harmony and counterpoint technics at his fingertips - it is the basic; the system is too strict; one single unfitting sound can tumble everything.

Is it that nothing is between two sounds in the original Vestiva Coeli? 

Does the sound go from ‘A’ to ‘B’?

Well, what’s and what’s not between two sounds is extremely complicated. Of course, there’s always people who say that this is what the notes are for, everything’s written down and that’s it, why stir things up. 

I think the whole thing is similar to untold and unsaid words, yet they’re there. The world is ragged and rough even if we stare out of our heads on a large-scale map.

Razor sharp. Or 'razor-rough'?

And Pandolfo?

Well, he plays in a way that while listening to the adaptation of the over-ornamented and over- diminished old piece, instead of an annoying fragmentation we feel some fine flow when things get into their very place by revealing their hidden genuine selves.

For what they’re borne.

When a flower is blooming.

He makes us bloom.

This word is included in the tractates of some notes when diminution is mentioned.

It’s so wonderful, is it? 

Just like this recording.

Highly, highly recommended.

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Thank you for the images.

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