Nordost Purple Flare vs AQ Rocket 44 speaker cbl

My impressions of the two while listening to the B&W 805d: I told the dealer to skip any really high priced cables, as they would be out of my budget and could skew the listening experiance. He suggested Nordost, and I suggested Audioquest because I knew Best Buy has them or can get them (not 100% sure on that, they do have rocket 33) and I could easily return them if not happy with them at home. So the Rocket 44 was the first set I listened to and immediately noticed the bass was a bit boomy or bloated which was a real surprise as the 805d is a high quality bookshelf speaker and I did not expect boomy bass under any circumstance. I listened for a while and was not blown away with the speakers at all which was welcomed news for me as I wanted to be happy owning a lesser priced speaker like the PM1 or CM5. We moved on to the Nordost cables and the boomy / bloated bass was gone. Listening situations can be highly subjective for a number of reasons, however, after the switch I settled in and really heard the speaker sing and was thoroughly impressed with them. It is possible that I did not give the 805d/AQ set up a fighting chance on the first go round due to the perception of bloated bass as I probably could not get past that mentally? All-in-all, I would have to say that the Nordost was a much better match in this circumstance.

It was the dealer’s opinion that audioquest speaker cables tend to have bloated bass in general. I have a Mac amp at home, so we used a Solid State Mac power source that has a built in tube pre-amp and a built-in CD player for $8k retail (no interconnects needed). Both speaker cables were bi-wired.