This is an interesting thread. I owned the Andromeda cables 3 years ago (for two years) and sold them (stupid, stupid, stupid!) and am now waiting for the Gemini speaker cables to arrive.
While I don't yet know how the Geminis stack up to their bigger brother, I DO know the Andromedas quite well and, although I sold them, had I known then what I know now.....they'd still be here. And they would have been the last cable I ever purchased.
I have also owned (after the Andromeda) Nordost Valhalla, Transparent and Goertz cables. The Valhallas, unless you have a speaker imbued with its own sense of "weight," lack enough body in the lower midrange, upper bass and midbass frequencies,a trait that allows transparency, but at the expense of the genuine richness of the "real thing." (This
is, of course, the tradeoff, since nothing manmade is perfect. Valhallas are also not the quietest cables by far. I understand why people love them, but I've never quite been "taken" by the Valhalla speaker cables, interconnect nor even the power cord, although I would say the power cord is the most advanced of the three products. It does have a see-through sense that seems to have more weight than either interconnect or speaker cable. It IS wildly transparent, though, so if that's what you cherish most, by all means....
Now, back to the Andromeda...
The Andromeda have terrific weight in the mids and bass. In this respect, they resemble the Rowland Coherence I preamp, which had stupendous body and weight from the lower midrange down. The Andromeda are exceedingly fast, without leanness, a feat in itself, given that it is also an extremely "see-through" cable. I remember when I first heard them with the Antique Sound Lab Hurricane amps, a First Sound Deluxe preamp, Arcam FMJ 23 CD player, Nordost Quattro Fils for interconnects, and a P.S. Audio Power Plant 300 with Hales Revelation 3 speakers. On the Mercury Living Presence CD, Iberia, the drumming was so see-through, I did a double-take, and I've had some killer components in the past: Versa Dynamics 2.3 turntable, Convergent preamp, THE Goldmund Mimesis 9 and all of HP's other favorite cartridges. Had I had the Andomedas at that time, there is no doubt I would never have bought speaker cables again, but that was 1995!
The Andromedas do not congest, do not cause -- nor
constrict -- in the treble, and have a harmonically rich sound to them. Brass genuinely sounds like brass, which means the mid-bass frequencies are in proper proportion to the upper midrange. There is considerable air around instuments and the air around the instruments has a liquid quality: the harmonics "float" through the silence. No mechanical sound or dryness mars the Andromeda's presentation. In this repect,it resembles the Jadis Defy 7 amp, circa 1991, which was flawlessly liquid without causing a concommitant "mirage effect": you could still tell exactly where instruments were located. Same with Andromeda cables. And it is excellent in conveying bass textures, so that standup bass sounds "thrummier" than a double bass, and cellos are rich and delicate, too.
(I frequently see comments about "bass," without any correlation to a live instrument or whether they mean upper bass or midbass. Between the two, it is much better, as most musicians know, to have a superior midbass range, as the midbass enables the sense of 3-D that so many of us love. The upper bass and lower midrange are important, too,
but without the midbass, forget having a completely 3-D presentation).
I hope the Gemini will at least approach the Andromedas, given that they are Shunyata's second generation cables. Although I have had Shunyata power cords, KC V2s, Black Mambas, Pythons, Python Alpha and VX, and now Python VX, and Taipan Alphas, I suspect the cabling to be as magical as the power cords, since I've had the power cords with other cables and not had quite the same sense of magic. Oh, it all sounds great, but "magic" goes beyond "great." Magic is more a sense of how-can-I-be-feeling-this-way, while great seems, to me at least, to be the proverbial job-well-done. Let me post after the Geminis arrive, but having been through some excellent cable, the exceedingly low noise floor of Shunyata products makes for tremendous ambience retrieval, as well as retrieval of low-level transients and their harmonics: music in completion, in contrast to music in pieces.
