It has been my experience, as well as others who owned and since sold HFC, even their ultimate cables, that the HF cables are terrible sounding. Putting pounds of magnets in line on RCAs and A/C cables is a terrible idea and sounds just as bad. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a worse sounding cable. My friend with a formerly $850,000 high end system just removed and sold his $100,000+ stable of HF cables and replaced them with GroverHuffman cables for $3800 and kept some Nordost speaker cables.
Apparently, the Bybees may work similar to what I suggested for the E-Mat.
As to pulling out poor sounding CDs, YES, many CDs I considered mediocre sounding are now sonically involving (the music was the reason I purchased them) with so much more information in clarity, openness and richer tonal qualities. I would say the worst sounding recordings improved the most while the best recordings improved the least. My 78s were really given a boost into their direct disc recording nature, limited primarily at the frequency extremes but providing richer tone and more dynamic swings. I can’t praise the E-Mat tweak enough after a month in my system. The SR blackbox and Atmosphere XL4 are toys compared to it. I wonder though, if the SR fuses and HFTs were required to obtain this vast improvement but I’m too lazy too remove them to test the hypothesis. Anyone out there using E-Mats with standard fuses and acoustically untreated rooms?
