Anybody tried 20th Anniversary Purist cables?

Some comments here based on the last few posts:

Once again, what is "hooded"? Does this imply constrained dynamics or maybe a clipped-off top end or ....? Neither of these were my observations with the AA. Again, my experiences were the opposite; the presentation was simply too forward and fatiguing rather than a coherency across the band.

The Opis speaker cables I have were played on my system for nearly 2 months before I did the shootout to the AA speaker cables. I would put a fair estimate of hours on the Opis at 150 hours. I have no idea how many hours the AA had before I auditioned them. If they had minimal usuage, I could have indeed judged them before their break-in time.

Unfortunately, breaking in speaker cables requires listening to music. And if the sound is terrible, you have to put up with it. I would have a most difficult time breaking in the AA speaker cables. Other cables like ICs and PCs I can do 24/7 with no sound coming from the speaker. So it would be nice if Purist could pre-burn-in these cables and thus give us a good first impression of these. One of these days perhaps I will get an opportunity to hear the broken-in AA's but for now, the Opis works incredibly well and I have no interest to change them out. There was absolutely no dynamic compression with the Opis. As for midrange subtraction, I did not experience this either.

Rzado: I do not pay too much attention to terms like yin(g) and yan(g), the totally worthless "PRAT" or the trendy here-today-gone-tomorrow, "continuousness", etc. I simply seek a balance, or better term, best-compromise, of dynamic contrasts, frequency-extreme coverage and the issues of dimensionality such as decays, portrayal of space, harmonic textures, etc. Since the time I first heard the ARC SP-8 and then later bought the SP-10, I have been a decays and bloom fanatic; the dimensionality issue has been #1 for me ever since. And from all the systems I have heard out there, only a small handful of them do it for me in this area. But two local audio gurus and a few others out-of-state who have much knowledge on the CAT, Aesthetix and SoundLab products have given me a lot of advice to pay more attention to the other sonic attributes. My system now has resolution like I never could have imagined because of the help from these people.

The CAT JL-3 Signature amps do dynamic contrasts and resolution like no other amps I have heard. But combined with the CAT preamps, this is simply too much of the same direction (analytical) for me. I find that the Aesthetix Io and Callisto preamp models do the dimensionality like no others I have heard. It is no surprise that the Aesthetix/CAT pairing results in an awesome integration. These driving the SoundLab A1 speakers make for an explosive, tonally coherent and 3-dimensional presentation. The primary source is Clearaudio Ref TT with either the Clearaudio Accurate or Koetsu RWS cartridges.

I ran the above system for much of last year with a mixture of NBS & MIT PCs and ICs and tried and tried to find a speaker cable to mate well. The emphasis was midrange warmth with only mediocre resolution and dynamics. With the system fully loaded with Kubala-Sosna Emotion cables, the performance took a major leap forward in coherency, frequency extremes and dynamics. There was for me however, a slight loss in the involvement of the music as the NBS had some characterizations I very much liked.....the decays and ambience. And this was why I investigated the Purist (mainly the Dominus) to bring back some of the involvement I had before but not to give up the newly discovered capabilities. You can read my detailed post on this topic in the Kubala vs. Purist thread that was started a couple days before.

One trap I want to avoid is to choose cables for the purpose of "synergizing" the tonality of my system. If I have to do this, I have issues elsewhere that need to be resolved. This was a lesson learned during the Kubala-Sosna cable audition. Changing cables for me should be to find the "best compromise" of the sonic attributes I mentioned above.

John

Could one use a cable cooker on these AA's to burnem in?

Guido,

I had the cables in my system for about a week (30-40 hrs??). I heard no change during my time with them......... If it's like Albert says, we may have been WAY off the mark.

BTW, my system is both yin and yang...... that's why I like it so much.

Jafox,

I certainly agree with you about the CAT amps and resolution - they are among the finest resolvers of low level detail I have experienced in my system.

However, it looks like we are talking past each other here. Yin and yang in my understanding always have been accepted terms for describing frequency response characteristics (i.e. there is no amibiguity in their meaning, such as with prat - which really is related to transient performance - or with continuousness, which I think relates to dynamic performace across the frequency spectrum). Typically, yang refers to a frequency response that is tilted toward the whiter side of the spectrum. The extreme of yang is clinical (or as you put it, analytical), cold, sterile (in fact, your identification of the CAT Amp and preamp combination is a perfect of example of the yang side). Yin refers to frequncy response that is tilted toward the warmer side of the spectrum - the extreme of yang is referred to as dark, fat, tubey, etc.

Thus, to rephrase my previous comments in more acceptable terms, my system tends to lean more towards the analytical side of the frequency spectrum than yours, which is why I think the Aqueous would work better in my system than yours. Further, your identification of the Aesthetix premps also matches my initial perception - I think anyone would say the Callisto is certainly more towards the yin side of the spectrum than, for example, the preamp in the DCC2.

I also agree that "decay" is important - although decay is also a result of transient performance, low level resolution, and, depending on exactly what one means by decay, microdynamic performance. It is these latter two qualities that are most important for me. If a system cannot provide resolution of low level detail, and does not excel at microdynamics, I become bored with it rather quickly. I thought the Aqueous did an exceptional job with these characteristics without leaning two far to the analytical side of the frequncy spectrum (and hence found it have the best balance of characteristics that are important to me).

As to the Opis, as I think about it, I probably committed the same error I cautioned against - I only gave them about 50-75 hours or so before I gave up on them. Did they change singificantly during break-in as well?

Well, I called Purist Audio today and spoke with Jim Aud (when the receptionist transferred the call he picked up!). Interestingly, he is aware of a long running discussion about the Aqueous going on somewhere on the web; I'm assuming this is the one he heard about.

He did indicate that the AA sounds not too good straight out of the bag, and takes more than about 250 hours or so to begin sounding really good. He admitted he's not sure why this is. His description of the initial sound of the cables was very much like what Cmo indicated in this thread. I asked him if it was okay for me to pass this info along and he said yes. He seems like a pretty nice guy.

BTW, I called Purist about some other stuff, and figured if I had Jim on the phone I may as well ask about this. I made sure I wasn't taking up too much of this time. He was very nice about it.