If you ever get out to the Portland OR area, give me a holler. Unfortunately my partner is disabled and I need to stick around here.
My guess was that you listened to music much louder than I do. I am having a theory coalesce around louder music covering up some of the nuances in the music while reenforcing some of the major characteristics. This could account for apparent differences in wire performance. I need to do a lot more thinking on this to see if I can scrape together something logically consistent with enough supporting evidence.
On a tangental thought. I went through a period to try and determine if there was a “correct” volume for playback… assuming one was recreating the real event. I was attending the symphony every two weeks and would look for clues. Concentrating on pieces of music that started very quiet (coming out of the background noise floor) and the very highest volumes. My seats are 7th row center, so at the high crescendos the volume would be slightly higher than my ears could process properly. By that I mean it was too loud… I could tell the dynamics would fall apart just because my ear drums were overloaded. This only happened for a couple of seconds during a few pieces. But with those guides and the average sound levels, I worked at home to recreate the experience.
It was a very interesting exercise. Overall, it was extremely useful for me for classical, but I really think helped for all music, I was able to tune in music to the maximum dynamics. Interestingly… this along with better components over the years served to lower the volume at which I listen.
Another variable that comes into play is how dampened is your room. If your room is reflective turning up the volume is required to overcome reflected sound. Since the sound path is shorter than the reflected to increase dynamics higher volume is the obvious way.