First, thanks to all the 'goners' (heh) who shared their experience, strength, and hope on my thread of cabling for the Moon 780D DAC, which deserves as good as I can provide. After much research, I took delivery today of a full loom of Audience frontRow cables. The AES/EBU XLR digital link between transport and DAC (after about only 10 hours of burn-in at home on top of factory cooking) is the first I installed. Let no one ever preach to you that cables are not a component. This single wire has increased my system's performance to another level of magnitude; I had no idea of all the information which remained to be retrieved from 16-bit /44.1 kHz.
I am most impressed how separate voices interplay with each other, now audible from so much air arising between them, as in the lovingly-engineered Brahms Trio 1 on DGG's Verbier 25th Festival 4-cd set.
And even in a single instrument, Arrau's piano in the Chopin Preludes, for example, octaval overtones create an additional layer of musical experience which I'd never before perceived. I can only imagine that installing the rest of the loom, one by one, can only augment this effect. More and more music. Not to mention more timbral richness, palpability and soundstage height and depth, notoriously difficult to recreate in the digital realm.
Pricey ? To be sure. Worth it ? After 60 years of listening, these cables are for me the endgame, one which I wish had been available much earlier.
Thanks again,
Dr. John