Do you realize that inside every beloved High End component, there is an enormous mass of wires, sorry, electrical conductors of all kinds and purposes, functions, etc., carrying signals through and through every tiny little piece of a PCB board. And you accept to pay outrageous amounts of money for them. Ok, and then how you hook them all, these beautiful and expensive boxes, milled from aluminum, with expensive, isolating feet, with spikes of certain steel alloy or another rare metallic material. And you put them in special isolating bases, and you buy ultra expensive loudspeakers some of them made in aluminum, or MDF, or very special kind of woods, some of them used to build musical instruments. And… and how do you hook them? Some times they come, the components, in separate enclosures: where the juice is received, and going left and going right and then the beautiful component is driven not by Ac current, but by Dc power… And do you realize, that everything in High End, what it really is about, is about the permanent and relentless epic battle to suppress noise, electrical noise in every single measure or interpretation you can think of; and strange acronyms start to flow… THD, IMD, DB, jitter, impedance, you can add and arrange a list, endless list of names, and all referred to measuring noise.
Noise is the enemy! It stays unabated between us and the music or better, recorded music in different media, physical, virtual, streamed, wireless, and submitted to that monster killer of the pure reproduction of sound, musical sound. Noise… Cardas and Nelson Pass used to love to explain some of this babbling of mine through the analogy of water, like Class A amplification, and balanced vs unbalanced outputs, and the conduction of the signal through a cable as trying to enter through a narrow causeway with an ultra high speed and powerful boat and do it not disturbing the water… or you can end crashing your expensive speedboat and destroying it against the edges… or running out of water to reproduce either the highest, lowest, loudest, finest, fastest frequencies of sound and stalling, because there is no more water, the tank is empty, you have to wait and wait and wait, time and time again to regain strength, stamina, volume transient speed, resolution, etc, you can add as many adjectives as you like to that salad of the High End Audio.
Sounds that make you tremble, and vibrate through your fragile human condition, and make you cry, or make you dance, and you start singing and one hour of serious listening becomes 4, 6, 8 hours of a sonic extravaganza that many times you have to eat it by yourself alone, because no one else can keep on in this manic and permanent battle and conquering of the dreadful Noise… Zero distortion, that is the goal,bellow the threshold of our ears, or so far beyond, that no one, I mean no one can hear, but anyone can feel and that is how we distinguish one voice from another, one instrument from another. A piano that reproduces sound smashing strings with little hammers in a fascinating, violent and vertiginous way; that if it is a Bossendorfer played by Grimaud or Uchida, a Steinway, music comes through a recording and we are one with Ravel and Schubert, at their finest and sometimes even feeling like them, they were prophets in their own. Or distinguishing between Montserrat Figueras and Polly Jean Harvey and going to their worlds, and accepting that both are great, an one can takes us to the world of Monteverdi and the lamenti and the other to the realms of the raw and ominous rage of the rock, punk music with an utter and unflinching sense of humor. Well, and how all this little and big boxes are hooked together… with cables.
Our love for music is what makes us fall into this expensive folly of High End. And it doesn't matter if they are ultra expensive or not, they just have to be good and we have to try and experiment and atone our ears to them. Many times I've felt that when I am comparing or testing a component, I can hear my cables doing their job, if they are reasonable good they keep their timbre no matter what. One day, listening to a nice rig with TAD speakers and Viola amp and pre and a EMMS DAC, I remember I could distinguish the age of Mick Jagger and Robert Plant throats, just unbelievable. I bought the Violas, used… Other times, with the help of my beloved cables, I just listened how this heinous sense of time disappears and it becomes kind of endless, Like listening to the laments of Mr de Saint Colombe in a seven strings viola with Jordy Savall, you just forget your common and provincial sense of time, and then you start to find similarities between Savall and Keith Richards and realize that Jeff Beck is distorting the guitar on overdriven amps, all the time… and that experience comes with the help of a set of good cables. So CABLES DO REALLY MATTER, enough said and by the way people that are devoted fans of live music enjoy all this without spending a dime in expensive cables and rigs, just the ticket price, maybe the parking, and they enjoy music sometimes better than someone with the most expensive state of the art High End rig you can imagine.
Noise is the enemy! It stays unabated between us and the music or better, recorded music in different media, physical, virtual, streamed, wireless, and submitted to that monster killer of the pure reproduction of sound, musical sound. Noise… Cardas and Nelson Pass used to love to explain some of this babbling of mine through the analogy of water, like Class A amplification, and balanced vs unbalanced outputs, and the conduction of the signal through a cable as trying to enter through a narrow causeway with an ultra high speed and powerful boat and do it not disturbing the water… or you can end crashing your expensive speedboat and destroying it against the edges… or running out of water to reproduce either the highest, lowest, loudest, finest, fastest frequencies of sound and stalling, because there is no more water, the tank is empty, you have to wait and wait and wait, time and time again to regain strength, stamina, volume transient speed, resolution, etc, you can add as many adjectives as you like to that salad of the High End Audio.
Sounds that make you tremble, and vibrate through your fragile human condition, and make you cry, or make you dance, and you start singing and one hour of serious listening becomes 4, 6, 8 hours of a sonic extravaganza that many times you have to eat it by yourself alone, because no one else can keep on in this manic and permanent battle and conquering of the dreadful Noise… Zero distortion, that is the goal,bellow the threshold of our ears, or so far beyond, that no one, I mean no one can hear, but anyone can feel and that is how we distinguish one voice from another, one instrument from another. A piano that reproduces sound smashing strings with little hammers in a fascinating, violent and vertiginous way; that if it is a Bossendorfer played by Grimaud or Uchida, a Steinway, music comes through a recording and we are one with Ravel and Schubert, at their finest and sometimes even feeling like them, they were prophets in their own. Or distinguishing between Montserrat Figueras and Polly Jean Harvey and going to their worlds, and accepting that both are great, an one can takes us to the world of Monteverdi and the lamenti and the other to the realms of the raw and ominous rage of the rock, punk music with an utter and unflinching sense of humor. Well, and how all this little and big boxes are hooked together… with cables.
Our love for music is what makes us fall into this expensive folly of High End. And it doesn't matter if they are ultra expensive or not, they just have to be good and we have to try and experiment and atone our ears to them. Many times I've felt that when I am comparing or testing a component, I can hear my cables doing their job, if they are reasonable good they keep their timbre no matter what. One day, listening to a nice rig with TAD speakers and Viola amp and pre and a EMMS DAC, I remember I could distinguish the age of Mick Jagger and Robert Plant throats, just unbelievable. I bought the Violas, used… Other times, with the help of my beloved cables, I just listened how this heinous sense of time disappears and it becomes kind of endless, Like listening to the laments of Mr de Saint Colombe in a seven strings viola with Jordy Savall, you just forget your common and provincial sense of time, and then you start to find similarities between Savall and Keith Richards and realize that Jeff Beck is distorting the guitar on overdriven amps, all the time… and that experience comes with the help of a set of good cables. So CABLES DO REALLY MATTER, enough said and by the way people that are devoted fans of live music enjoy all this without spending a dime in expensive cables and rigs, just the ticket price, maybe the parking, and they enjoy music sometimes better than someone with the most expensive state of the art High End rig you can imagine.
