How do I smooth out violins?

Along the lines of Brownsfan's comments on cable, which I suspect is fair comment. For a relative few bucks, you could buy Canare 11s4 speaker wire and Blue Jeans interconnect and for the near future eliminate cable issues as being a source of problems. These are excellent, if not benchmark, for cost effective quality. Neutral. And electrically speaking well spec'd cables. When you get the rest of your system down to 'excellent' then you can spend some money on trying to find something better. FWIW.

Brownsfan,

I wasn't trying to single you out in any way. I didn't go back and reread every single comment, but I thought I saw several poster recommend Cardas; that's why I used it. Also, if you take another look at my post, you'll see that I didn't say that either cable was good or bad. I only meant to imply that using cables to fix this, or any other problem, is generally speaking, not a good way to fix things you don't like in a system. Once in a while, you may get lucky, but more often as not you won't really fix anything with cables.

As to me having the AQ4 in my system, it was a few years ago, but I have. I didn't think it was as bad as you say but overall I agree with you. I didn't like them either. That said, I still don't think its the source of the problem. I apologize for any confusion in my post.

Zd, I think we are on the same page. I really don't like the change this buy that approach to spending other people's money. Luck is a poor plan A for making improvements in one's system. In the case of the AQ 4, I had direct experience with the cable and didn't like it. Inexpensive cables like anticable and signal cable were way better, so its not likely that loosing the AQ 4 would be a waste of money.

Zd542, while I don't disagree with you in theory regarding cables, in reality, I think everyone uses cables somewhat to 'tune in' a collection of equipment to suit their personal musical tastes. Many times I will see folks who swear by cables that many others will call 'bright' sounding, inevitably, these folks usually are running gear that many view as 'dark' sounding. Then there are others who swear by 'dark' sounding cables as the truth, when I look at their list of gear I see many 'bright' sounding pieces listed.

In the end, I feel that many of us generally arrive at the same destination, though we take many different paths to get there. Since there is no one single cable that everyone agrees is perfectly neutral, I feel that such an animal, a "perfectly neutral cable", does not exist. Therefore we are all tuning to some extent.

I have first hand experience switching from AQ to Cardas in many systems and am sharing my experience/opinion with the OP.Ultimately, this hobby is about our own expeiences and sharing with others what we have encountered. Not sure, why George Cardas would laugh at an person asking if his cables will calm down a bright system. I have talked with Mr. Cardas in shows and he has always been cardial. Has he laughed at you in the past?