You’ll not be surprised to learn that continuous crystal solid-core silver conductors, wrapped in a unique dielectric construction don’t come cheap. Don’t be misled by the svelte dimensions of the cables. A complete system set of Future Dream starts to add up – quickly! A pair of 1m interconnects will cost you $5,200 USD, a 1m power cord $3,200 USD and a 2m pair of speaker cables $9,750. Do the sums on your own system and you’ll soon realise that this is no budget line. At these prices, Future Dream really does need to deliver something special – although at least you can be sure you are buying the genuine article. The acrylic ‘crystal’ that adorns each cable carries a serial number that can be checked with the factory, but easier even than that, each cable carries an NFC-tag that, scanned using the Crystal Cable app, identifies not just that specific cable but its production and sales history.
So much for the house keeping – how do the Future Dreams perform in practice? If you wanted to sum up their performance in a couple of words, those words would likely be “coherent” and “agile”. In a way, that should come as no surprise, given the elegant simplicity as well as the physical and material consistency of the cables, but it is also far from the complete picture – which is all about just how complete the musical picture is. I’ve been able to use these cables in a whole range of different systems as equipment has cycled through the Reading Room and I’ve quickly come to take their qualities for granted. It’s not difficult to break those qualities down, even without direct comparison to other, generally more heavily constructed cables, like those from AudioQuest. There’s a natural sense of scale and perspective to the Future Dream’s presentation, a coherent acoustic that holds the instruments stable and perfectly proportioned, with a clear sense of pattern and location. There’s also astonishing levels of timbral, textural and temporal resolution, testament to the low resistance of the conductors and low losses associated with the low-mass construction. Take those two things together and you have the magic mix, a cable that doesn’t just pass astonishing levels of information, it makes sense – and allows the system to make sense – of that information too.
There are no shortage of musical examples, with almost anything you play exhibiting the same sense of fluid communication and effortless separation. But smaller scale works really bring home the sheer intimacy the Future Dreams are capable of projecting. Anastasia Kobekina’s Ellipses (Mirare MIR604) has quickly become a house favourite, both for its superb range of musical expression and the ease with which it tells you just what a system is (and isn’t) doing. Running the AQ Mythical Creatures speaker cables and power cords with the WBY interconnects, the sound is warm, rounded and rich, but also sluggish and overly smooth. On the track Bachianas Brasileiras No5, the guitar and cello are musically divorced from each other, in tune but not in concert. The individual tonal character of the two instruments is collapsed together and their relationship less than explicit.
