| Don’t
even read another sentence of this; it’s a
complete and utter waste of your time. Why
anyone would listen to another person’s
opinion on the sonic attributes of a piece
of junk wire, or any wire, or any component
for that matter, is completely beyond me.
For
example, I spend half the day with one
finger poking around trying to dislodge wax
and other foul debris from my right ear. I
spend the other half of the day doing the
same in my left ear.
The most
commonly used word in my vocabulary, other
than ‘fuck’, is ‘what?’
Yes I’m
partly deaf, mostly in the right lug ‘ole,
but the left side gives me gip too.
So how
could I possibly offer a useful opinion on
how something sounds?
Well, the
law of averages tells me that there’s
another person somewhere on the planet with
the same level of hearing disability as
mine, the same musical tastes and tastes for
sonic presentation, and has a massive $60.00
to invest in a set of speaker wires. Hi bud,
nice to meet you, I said HI BUD, NICE TO
MEET YOU.
Sonorans,
Alpha-Core Goertz, Audio Insurgents, Purist,
Chord, Ixos, AudioQuest and Virtual Dynamics
cables have all featured in my system in the
last couple years, but none have tickled my
cochlea like the Magwires.
I
stole the idea for using Magnet wire from
Paul Speltz, and I give him full credit for
the discovery and encourage everyone to
flock to his website and buy his cables for
about $60/set plus shipping (www.anti-cables.com).
I was too
impatient to wait for Paul to make me a set,
so I paid $60 for a 100’ spool and cut my
own to length.
Paul
provides you with a professional finish on
his cables, your choice of bananas or spade
terminations. My take is that there isn’t
a termination in existence that improves the
sound, they’re for convenience only, and
so bare wire is best.
Using a
small file I scraped the lacquer from the
ends of each length of wire, a real pain in
the arse since with a biwire setup you’ve
got 16 ends to scrape and polish. Did I
mention that these cables aesthetically are
the most minimalist cables you will ever
find? Even AC cord or lamp-flex looks more
professional than Magwire. Yes, the cable
looks pretty ugly but then again so do
cables from Purist Audio, and they cost
$1000’s more than Magwire.
It’s
important for reasons of capacitance and
inductance to get the cables separated by
distance and off the floor. So using partly
opened CD jewel cases I was able to get them
about 3" off the carpet and about
2" apart, or so.
Some people
suggest it would be better to twist the
conductors +/- together, for some RF
cancellation, but that isn’t what Paul
recommends so that’s good enough for me.
Coming
right off the back of a $2200 set of Virtual
Dynamic Nite II biwires, I was pleasantly
surprised at what I heard in the first few
hours.
The VD Nite’s
were a big improvement over everything I’d
used previously in my system. The Nite’s
have a certain amount of energy that never
appears as a strident or forward sound, but
always underpinned the music with a sense of
life and emotion. Their weakest area was in
the bass, a little softer and less defined
than the Sonoran cables, which are the best
I’ve heard in the bass department. The
Magwire’s combined the virtues of both
Sonoran and VD’s and produce a detailed
and dynamic sound with liquid midrange and a
taught and extended bass.
An online
Guru of far greater intellect than I could
ever muster, was able to describe the sound
of the Magwire based on their electrical
properties, without ever having heard them.
Wow, I stand humbled, mesmerized and in awe
of such ability. However, the aforementioned
fuck-wit claimed that the sound would be ‘pleasantly’
rolled-off in the HF area, and generally
dull/lifeless through the rest of the
frequency spectrum. That couldn’t be
further from what I hear in my system, then
again I am deaf, as covered earlier.
There isn’t
a lot of point in digging too deep into my
audiophile phrase book for this review. If
you can’t take a gamble with $60, then you
might as well just forget it.
Seriously,
I find these cables detailed, revealing,
extended at both ends and liquid through the
midrange with tight and extended bass. They
stage as well as anything I’ve heard,
perhaps image focus isn’t as tight as with
the VD Nite, but it’s still pretty good.
These are not the master of all trades, but
they’re a pretty darn good all-rounder,
and for $60.00 what have you got to loose,
other than $60.00 ?
Rooze
June 2005 |
