I used the AP Oval 9's when they first came out. Ran them for well over 500 hours with music playing non-stop 24/7. They were connected to a high powered amplifier directly driving very low impedance, very low sensitivity full range speakers. There was no crossover to get in the way of what the amplifier produced and what the speaker tried to reproduce, making for the shortest, most direct path possible. That is, with the exception of "active" loudspeakers. Then again, one wouldn't need speaker cables for those anyway : )
Due to the very low sensitivity and very low impedance, i was forced to pass much more signal through the cabling than a normal person would have, just to get the speakers to "move". On top of that, these cables were previously used, so they had been "pre-conditioned" prior to my use. For how long or at what amplitude, i have no idea. In other words, these cables should have been "fully broken in".
After all of that, i found the top end of these cables to be phenomenally tizzy sounding. The treble was very smeared, bright and pronounced. On the other end of the spectrum, the bass was phenomenally weak, lacking in output and extension. The combo of these two gave me the effective sonics of a very large and high powered transistor radio. It was almost as if someone had taken a transistor radio, cranked the treble and turned down the bass. NO impact what so ever. To be fair here, the midrange was quite good and i didn't really have any major problems with it.
When i finally took the AP Oval 9's out of the system, my girlfriend ( at the time ) had just run up to the store and was not present. She had no idea what i was doing or what i was about to do. Upon returning back from the store, she walked into the room where this system was playing and asked "what did you do to the stereo?". I asked her "why do you ask that?". Her response was "because it sounds SO much better". In other words, changing the speaker cables in this system was HIGHLY audible, even under what were essentially "blind" listening conditions to a "non-audiophile". I can't remember if i had replaced them with some Goertz or if i was trying out some YBA Diamond speaker cabling at that time, but either way, whatever i replaced it with was FAR superior.
To be blunt, my opinion is that the AP Oval 9's were probably the most unlistenable speaker cables that i've ever had in my house. After hearing them at my house in my systems, i offered them to my Brother to listen to in his system to see what he thought of them. He refused and said that he was not going to waste his time. His next comment was that i should throw them out into the garbage, where they belonged.
Obviously, this is just my opinion, but YOU asked : ) Sean
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PS... Wonder how many people / AP users i pissed off with that one???
