I knew Robert Fulton back in the late 1970s. He pretty much founded the entire high end audio cable industry. Back then, people thought he was nuts, with his Fulton Gold 8ga speaker cable and his Fulton interconnects. We (my audiophile friends and I) were listening to differences in audio cables way back then.
But I also played in various orchestras and those got recorded. I was able to listen to the direct mic feeds on several occasions, and the thing that really stood out was how amazing they sounded, through cables that were clearly a lot longer and lot older than Fulton’s cables.
The recording stuff was balanced. Fulton’s cables were single-ended.
So from as far back as 1973, I had this lesson that balanced line cables worked and that was why when it came time to design a preamp, I designed what turned out to be the first balanced line tube preamp ever made. The first units were sold in 1989.
Of course we played with a lot of cables back then. Before we had a line stage going that supported the balanced line standard, we built a passive balanced volume control. Running 30 foot cables, the difference in sound between them was nothing short of dramatic. The old mic cables I had on hand sounded broken next to the Kimber and Purist.
Finally we swapped in the line stage. All the cables sounded better. But the funny thing was the old studio cables sounded every bit as good as the others and they all sounded the same.
And that is why we’ve pushed balanced operation ever since.
I don’t like the idea that you can hear differences between cables- because it means that all the cables are wrong. Everyone reading this knows this is so: next year the manufacturer of the ’best’ cable will have a better one and if he doesn’t, someone else will. So that means the cables you have now aren’t right.
Now I’ve often been accused of being nuts but I don’t get why you have to spend thousands of dollars on a cable and then watch it turn into something you can’t really sell- like used underwear. Its a bad investment. I always thought that audiophiles would love the ability to ditch all that if they knew they could get better sound while using a cable they could run for decades.
Turns out some do.
But-
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