I may be stupid, but I am not alone. In fact I like the company.
I was surprised to find the cable was delivered yesterday (only ordered it Thursday last week). The manual was something less than I expected. First I made up the interconnects and installed them. I was relieved that the cable did not sound like Cat5 at all. My immediate impressions were that the cable was a "contender". No bloat, wonderfully natural, very large soundstage (particularly depth), exquisite bass (so open, deep and powerful), possibly rolled-off on top. Of course that lasted about fifteen minutes and the sound started to change becoming thin and congested in the mids, getting some high-end extension and losing some of its bass extension. Over the next hour it kept on changing. So no miracles here folks - the same old burn-in stuff. So it was then decision time. Do I make up the speaker cables and let it all run in, or do I wait to see how the interconnects mature? You guessed it, I made up the speaker cables. On first listen to them the mids and highs became more open but the whole bass region was pretty awful. An hour later the sound was improving but not yet good. Oh well, I shall have to be patient.
Interestingly the sound was nothing like CAT5 conductors, which are the same solid core conductor guage, but with a much thinner teflon insulator. The grade of copper and teflon is also different of course.
Ken, I am interested in how you have configured the cables. At first I just ran the conductors separately, and then twisted them together to see what effect it had. The sound was more open, more focussed and more coherent when the conductors were twisted together. But at this very early stage it is difficult to determine how they might change in sound. And from experience flexing the cable (whether twisting or untwisting) tends to cause any cable to go through a burn-in cycle, so it is always going to be difficult to figure out the best configuration by just listening. By the way my Martin Logans definitely prefer being bi-wired, so I am running shotgun (or should that be double pea-shooter) bi-wire speaker cables. I am expecting that twisting will be a good idea for cancelling interference. I was somewhat disappointed that the manual from Sakura Systems makes no mention of this at all.
I cannot help being reminded of the Jimmy Hughes fad for thin solid core cables many years ago. I experimented with various guages and mixtures of guages and settled on 0.6mm as the ideal. It is interesting that this stuff is thinner than that. By recollection, the thinner guage tended to be very fast on top, very focussed but slightly thin in the mids, and tight, articulate and dry in the bass - in comparison with 0.6mm.
From your post Ken it will be some time before I will be able to post any conclusions. Are you able to post a description of the interconnect and speaker cables as separate items? I must admit the sound so far indicates a lot of promise, but with some question marks over the cable between my valve monos and the woofers on the Logans - but clearly too early to tell yet.
