adamdea
You are not a sound quality evaluation device
Herb Reichert:
"I would never blame an audiophile for thinking that specialty audio cables sound mostly the same and that buying expensive wires would be foolish. That view is justifiable because it reflects most audiophiles' experience. I felt that way myself until one day in the 1980s I went off-piste and experienced my first silver-wire cables from Kimber Kable.
Ray Kimber, who I met somehow through the Audio Amateur magazine crowd, called to suggest I try a loom of his new braided silver wire. His cables turned my well-behaved, even-keeled system into a macrodynamic, microdetailed fantasia. No wolves or mammoths appeared, but the clouds vanished, and the sun came out.
Before that silver sun came out, my system was wired with various gauges of generic Mouser "hookup wire," which I had discovered by using it for point-to-point wiring in the amplifiers I was building. Mouser's stranded polyvinyl-coated copper did not appear to stifle or grossly pollute signal currents, so I began fashioning all my interconnects and speaker cables from it, in my preferred colors, with Switchcraft connectors.
Changing from Mouser copper to Kimber silver interconnects and speaker cables threw a brighter, purer light on every recording. Atmospherics and the specters of performers became a more prominent part of the listening experience. Equally noticeable was how silver added something akin to a shimmering halo around the stereo apparition. I found these enhancements appealing and worth the extra cost.
A few years later, I switched to hair-thin, hand-drawn Italian silver wire from Audio Note Japan (now Kondo). Those wires, which were made entirely in-house, took data retrieval to an extreme level that forced me to coin a new descriptor—"LSD-spiderweb"—which referred to the surfeit of detail I experienced. Changing from almost-free copper to Kimber and Kondo silver was like switching from aspirin to windowpane acid provided by Owsley Stanley III. I tried those top-shelf silver cables with middle- and bottom-shelf components and discovered that their effect was pretty negligible with the bottom-row stuff but sometimes dramatically effective at upping the excitement factor of midlevel components. As a result, I have no qualms about using $4000 interconnects with a $2000 integrated amplifier."
"I would never blame an audiophile for thinking that specialty audio cables sound mostly the same and that buying expensive wires would be foolish. That view is justifiable because it reflects most audiophiles' experience. I felt that way myself until one day in the 1980s I went off-piste and experienced my first silver-wire cables from Kimber Kable.
Ray Kimber, who I met somehow through the Audio Amateur magazine crowd, called to suggest I try a loom of his new braided silver wire. His cables turned my well-behaved, even-keeled system into a macrodynamic, microdetailed fantasia. No wolves or mammoths appeared, but the clouds vanished, and the sun came out.
Before that silver sun came out, my system was wired with various gauges of generic Mouser "hookup wire," which I had discovered by using it for point-to-point wiring in the amplifiers I was building. Mouser's stranded polyvinyl-coated copper did not appear to stifle or grossly pollute signal currents, so I began fashioning all my interconnects and speaker cables from it, in my preferred colors, with Switchcraft connectors.
Changing from Mouser copper to Kimber silver interconnects and speaker cables threw a brighter, purer light on every recording. Atmospherics and the specters of performers became a more prominent part of the listening experience. Equally noticeable was how silver added something akin to a shimmering halo around the stereo apparition. I found these enhancements appealing and worth the extra cost.
A few years later, I switched to hair-thin, hand-drawn Italian silver wire from Audio Note Japan (now Kondo). Those wires, which were made entirely in-house, took data retrieval to an extreme level that forced me to coin a new descriptor—"LSD-spiderweb"—which referred to the surfeit of detail I experienced. Changing from almost-free copper to Kimber and Kondo silver was like switching from aspirin to windowpane acid provided by Owsley Stanley III. I tried those top-shelf silver cables with middle- and bottom-shelf components and discovered that their effect was pretty negligible with the bottom-row stuff but sometimes dramatically effective at upping the excitement factor of midlevel components. As a result, I have no qualms about using $4000 interconnects with a $2000 integrated amplifier."
