Gramophone Dreams #33: Interconnects & Loudspeaker Cables
When I applied for this job, I wrote a pretend review of the Rogue Audio Sphinx integrated amplifier and emailed it to Stephen Mejias, then Stereophile‘s deputy editor, who printed it and put it on John Atkinson’s desk.
Before I sent it to Stephen, I showed a rough draft to my business agent, Sphere, who said, “Herb, you can’t turn this in like this.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you speak as if you are not an audiophile and think you’re superior to audiophiles.”
“So?”
“You can’t do that, because your readers are all audiophiles . . . and so are you.”
“I’m not an audiophile. I’m a record collector!”
Sphere squinted and stared at me suspiciously.
“What kind of speaker cables are you using?”
Like it meant nothing, I replied, “Audio Note AN-SPx.”
Sphere responded sternly, “People who are not audiophiles do not use thousand-dollar silver speaker cables. They use cables from Radio Shack.”
Sphere was right. I am an audiophile. Not because I use silver cables, but because I listen to recordings to experience purity of sound. I have been listening critically to sound coming out of boxes since 1968. I have developed a conscious need for my records to be reproduced with a certain physical force and tonal rightness. Therefore, I had no choice. I surrendered and declared proudly, “Okay then, I am an audiophile!”
Last year, when I visited Nelson Pass of Pass Labs at his home in Sea Ranch, CA, I was surprised to discover that he connected all the gear in his laboratory listening room with Radio Shack cables. When I asked why, he told me, “Because I don’t want anybody else taking credit for my accomplishments.”
Last month, when I visited John and Rich Grado at their funky-cool factory in Brooklyn, I asked John why the cables on their headphones are not detachable. John declared, “Because these cables are a significant part of why Grado headphones sound the way they do, . . . and I don’t want people to mess with that.”
You know I am old
Back in the 1960s, audiophiles began fabricating their own interconnects and loudspeaker cables. They believed they could improve, sonically, on the zip cord and generic interconnects included with the products they bought. In every audio magazine, the big debate was over which sounded better: stranded or solid-core wires. I thoughtfully compared both in my own system, finally deciding I was in the unbraided, solid-core camp, because I thought this electromagnetic geometry made instruments sound the most solid and distinct. In comparison, braided, stranded wires sounded softer and more diffuse, but also more elegant and refined. I remember thinking, I am a solid-core kind of guy. My decision was partly a hormone-fueled identity thing and partly a compromise. I thought neither type sounded more “accurate” than the other. Each, I realized, emphasized different aspects of the reproduced sound.
During the 1970s, I was an avid reader of the magazines Speaker Builder and Audio Amateur and a vociferous part of the DIY community. One day I got a call from Robert W. Fulton of Fulton Musical Industries, asking if I would beta-test some proprietary loudspeaker wires he had concocted: “Herb, just tell me what, if any, difference you hear with my cables.”My task was easy. The difference between Fulton’s wire and my DIY twisted, soft-rubber-encased, 14-gauge (stranded) Belden wire was not subtle. (I was using homemade transmission line speakers with Hafler amplification.) On the phone, I told him, “Bob, with your cables, my amp and speakers appear to dance more in sync. I sense a tighter coupling.” I told him, “Using your wire is like putting better shoes on dancing couples.”
With Fulton’s wires, I experienced more nuance of tone and bigger, but not tighter, bass.
During the 1980s, I switched to Kimber Kable for all my interconnects and speaker cables. I even used Ray’s silver and copper wire in the many DIY tube amps I built. Prior to Kimber, my daily-driver hookup wire came from bulk rolls of Belden and vintage, new-old-stock Western Electric cable. (Thirty years later, I’m still a fan of Kimber Kable, because it has that solid and distinct quality I love in my audio system.)
Charles Burchfield, Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring), 1950. Watercolor on paper, 40 1/8″ × 29¾”. (1016mm × 737mm). Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark, 1959.
During the 1990s, I imported Audio Note products from Japan. Audio Note’s founder, Hiroyasu Kondo, was a metallurgist by trade and based the sound aesthetic of his entire line on the character of his very pure stranded and braided silver wire, in which each extremely thin wire was lacquer-coated. Kondo believed his hand-drawn silver preserved small-signal information better than even the best purist-quality copper. He believed his winding geometry canceled several varieties of noise. My long-term listening corroborated his claims. Audio Note silver was lush and added a glorious, seductive glow to sopranos and pianos. Because the sound was so luminescent, I used to tell people my Audio Note system sounded like a Charles Burchfield painting. The sound of massed strings was seductively supple and nuanced. Most important, and more than any other cable I had used, AN silver cables restored lost beauty to classic recordings by Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Willem Mengelberg—a welcome blessing and not an easy task.
One day, around 1995, Andy Singer (Sound by Singer) was ringing up a customer who was spending around $300k on Audio Note amplification and asked the man, “Would you like some Audio Note cables to hook everything up? They will complete your system without damaging the sound.” The man replied simply, “Yes, please.” That “yes, please” added $55k for what was then regarded as an accessory—not a necessity.
I must now interrupt these prosaic wire stories to tell a different kind of wire story. One that happened on the Côte d’Azur in France. It was a balmy early-fall night. I was standing at the end of a long pier on the bay at Cannes, with Audio Note’s Hungarian distributor, the late István Csontos, and our Philippine distributor, Hondoko. We had left the Top Audio Show (in Milan) that morning, prior to which we finished exploring some really big boats at the Cannes Yacht Show. We were tired, hungry, and ready for the day to end.
Starry Night Over the Rhoône (September 1888, French: Nuit étoilée sur le Rhoône) is one of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of Arles at nighttime.