Do Kimber KCAG's sound bright????

Good silver often gets the "bright" rap because it is typically more transparent than copper from the midrange up, and reveals grain and other shortcomings in mediocre upstream components that copper won't reveal. It also tends to take a lot longer to break in, and can sound thin and shrill until it fully comes around.

I have run Kimber Select 1030 IC's and 3038 speaker cables for the last four years. The "Black Pearl" silver conductor in those products takes a full 1,000 hours to completely break in. They didn't sound fully right until they had logged those hours, but then everything was really right. While I was having two stereo amps converted to monoblocks, I had my old Bryston 4B-ST in my system for about a month with the 1030 and 3038 cabling. Sounded incredible. I never knew the amp was that good. My guess is that the Bryston is not your problem.

I do not have experience with Kimber's KCAG, but my guess is that it may not be fully broken in or is laying bare the truth about your Adcom preamp (which are very fine preamps at their price points -- I owned one -- but FM Acoustics, etc., they ain't). Try to put another 500 hours (three weeks of 24/7) on the KCAG with a break-in track, and if that doesn't fix it, try Cardas Golden Cross.

Good luck.

They might not be the best fit for your comp. I had kcag and kctg, even with tubes in the pre they could get fatiguing at times. Why not try to mix some copper in like Cardas upstream.

Silver Wire is just not a good application for Mid-Fi solid state electronics. It is that simple.

Chris

Raquel: i have used silver cabling that NEVER "broke in" i.e. it always sounded thin, bright, glaring, etc... resulting in a lack of listening enjoyment, loss of PRAT and a giant increase in listening fatigue. I thought like you did at first i.e. that it needed more break in time. I've placed cables like this on my burner and then listened to them at various intervals of burning. They still sounded like hell. Some of these were after THOUSANDS of hours on a cable burner, which stresses an interconnect far harder than any amount of actual use in a system will ever do. I did some cabling for SIX MONTHS on a burner, but it was still the same. The only reason that i let this cable go this long as i had read soooooo many "rave reviews" about it that i couldn't believe how bad it sounded. I talked to a few other guys on the net, whose listening skills and opinions i trust, and they had shared identical experiences with this cabling. As such, i knew i was not alone in my thoughts / experiences with this cabling and sold it. Luckily, primarily due to all of those "rave reviews", i had no problem getting my money back out of it.

Then again, i've also used silver that i never new was silver. It simply sounded marvelously transparent and full bodied, making me think it was simply a most excellent copper cable. I didn't know it was silver until i pulled it apart to see what made it "tick" and why it was such a good sounding cable. Needless to say, i was quite shocked to find silver conductors, not copper cabling inside.

Obviously, not all silver is created equally. Sean
>

Sean:

I don't disagree with anything you wrote.

And you'll note that my remarks referred to "good silver" (whatever that is).

I think there are some myths out there about silver. Six-nines copper is actually more expensive. A lot of silver does sound awful. One prominent high-end designer, who does not care for silver, claims that it "rings".

I know that I love my Kimber Select silver. It sounds natural, open, and anything but bright.

If you would be so kind as to e-mail me to identify the silver cable with the "rave reviews" that no amount of cooking could fix, I'd be much obliged!