MIT Love 'em or Hate 'em

I tried a pair of MIT interconnect cables with network boxes some time ago and was disappointed. Compared to Audioquest Diamond, the MITs had a quieter high end, and the music sounded much less dynamic. After a few hours, I developed the impression the music was being compressed, suffocated. Maybe they weren't adequately broken in, or I hadn't given them enough time to get used to them. After a few days, I couldn't stand it anymore and swapped back to the Diamonds. Sorry.

I own MIT's and love them -- but I needed to experiment with different types to get it right (finally settled on the ES version). Of course, how they sound depends on "your gear and your ear" (eh dautch?). I replaced my amps and speakers and will now experiment with new speaker cable. I may find nothing better, even with my new gear.

What I hate about the MIT's are the boxes. With the Oracle series, the boxes near the speakers are hard to work with and are very obtrusive (i.e., ugly). They provide me no joy, except for the neutral sound they help produce. By the way, the break in period is about a month.

Thanks, Ozfly! It's good to know my work is being appreciated! There's nothing worse than having to suffer for your art...

I hate to tell "unclecrusty" that he is wrong due to his seeming all-knowingness in his story but here it is: If you read the MIT white papers, you will discover that there is no filtering involved in the MIT speaker cables. It is funny to see what kind of wives' tales people can come up with and firmly believe them. Perhaps he was referring to power conditioners that are installed before the power reaches the stereo but this is not the subject at hand.

The MIT network boxes are there to correct not the stereo, but the cables themselves. There is no denying the fact that all cables are fundamentally transmission lines and can be modeled as such. This modeling includes all the little nasties that many overlook like inductance and capaciatance. These last two directly induce phase delay between the current and voltage, known as power factor. Voltage and current are the ingrediants of sound - you screw them up and the result is botched. The MIT boxes realign the two and in so doing, correct the power factor and phase delay. This is assuming that the power amplifier supplies corrected it also on their end - otherwise the cables correct for that too. As an electrical engineer, I have observed pitiful responses from "high end" amps in the lab since the designer equates good sound with circuit simplicity and in doing so jeoperdizes its very existance, but that is a whole other story....

Anyone interested in the gory details may contact me directly in the interest of keeping others from getting bored. Bottom line is I love the sound of my MIT cables.

Arthur

The common misnomer that networked cables (MIT - Transparent) are filtered - is incorrect. The networks are paralleled across the conductors, not in series. Their purposes are (1) group delay compensation, as mentioned above and (2) to help absorb/attenuate reflected energy so as to prevent it reaching back to the amp, the amp's feedback then attempting to make erroneous corrections based upon those signal reflections. This also smooths out the detrimental effects of the inherent reactance charactaristics of cabling, ALL of which is reactive to some degree or another, making ALL cables equivelant to filters in some way, and thus interacting with the reactive characteristics of both the source & the load. This explains why synergy is so critical when trying to optimize your setup, and why a particular cable set works differently when placed into different electrical environments. This is an unavoidable fact of life for any cable. It is gratifying to see that at least *some* such as Dautch actually comprehend what is going on in that respect. Others who may install a component or cable into their existing rig (previously optimized for a different matchup) and then experience less than stellar results, are quick to blame the new device as a bad one, obviously an oversimplified & incorrect assumption.
In my particular case, my rig took to MIT cabling like a fish takes to water, realizing a lovely combination immediately, which only improved over a 30 day interval as the cables were further used (the breakin phenomenon). Bruce Brisson definitely knows what he's doing, just very misunderstood.