Jafant - I've been playing around with cables for years with little real success until recently
I started with some well known brands and settled on Van den Hul D102 mkII with Furutech RCA's for many years and flirted with DH Labs bulk cable once
Then I tried the Stager Silver Solids and have never looked back. However, I replaced the Canare RCA's on the Stagers with Eichman Silver Bullets, what an improvement!
I post all of my tweaks on a blog and KL Eichman happened upon it and asked if I would like to try his KLE Copper Harmony
Since then I have reviewed most of his products and purchased many of them - I just bought another set of the KLEI Absolute Harmony yesterday :-)
During that time I have refined my own DIY cable design which uses the KLEI RCA's - since they offer the best performance I've come across.
Other than those mentioned above I haven't compared the KLE gZero to too many other brands.
However, I have had a chance to compare them on friends systems to...
- Kimber Silver XLR IC's
- Tara Labs (RCA) don't the model, but towards the lower end
In various local stores I've auditioned some very pricy cables (>$5000) on systems ranging in price from $70K-$180k from...
- Purist Audio
- Siltech
Now, I can't say how KLEI compared in this instance, since there was no direct in store A/B comparison, but having acclimated to the KLEI sound over months of listening - I found I was not really hearing a whole lot more (if anything) with the Purist Audio and Siltech IC's.
Having said that, I think we all come back from a salivating visit to such stores and on listening to our own systems think - hey, my system sounds pretty darn good :-)
As always in this game, when you get to this level of performance you are into diminishing returns - where it really depends on what people are prepared to spend - which I have no problem with BTW :-)
Moving on - yesterday I took the gZero6 speaker cables and the gZero10 IC's to a local hi-fi store (in Toronto) in the hope they would start importing them - just so others will be able to audition them.
The owner of the store was very impressed at the improvements they provided over his own "benchmark cables". Outcome: He will be contacting KLEI for more details - fingers crossed :-)
That's about it for my IC history - not as extensive as many other members on this forum, but I tend to research things at great length before changing anything.
The one thing that impressed me about these cables was their architecture and how the design combats many issues present in the more conventional cable architecture and RCA designs.
Regards...