Insert the minimalist Nordosts in place of the chunky CFM hosepipes and you might expect to lose weight, body and substance. In fact, it’s more of a side-step than a step back. It might lose a little sheer heft, but the bass tightens and focusses, with increased transparency and definition, faster dynamic response and more clearly defined space between notes. You gain a more developed acoustic, more presence and immediacy in place of stolid substance. There’s a vitality and vibrance in the music that breathes life and energy into proceedings – and that’s the key.
For the first time in this process, the recordings start to sound, if not lifelike, then like life. I’m not saying that they are indistinguishable from live performance, but they speak with that same voice, an unmistakable sense of human agency and purpose. The ability to reproduce these qualities from a recording is what makes the equipment in this system special, each a class-leader in its own right. But it’s the cables’ ability to release that quality from the system and into the room that makes their contribution so vitally important. Whether it’s the cut and thrust, the intimate instrumental jousting of the Vivaldi, the musical give and take of the Adderley band in action, or Trifonov and his mentor Babayan, egging each other on to greater and greater intensity, greater and greater heights, the intent and purpose behind the performance is as dramatic as it is unmistakably human. Many systems, way more costly and ambitious than this one, never achieve this level of communication and engagement, simply because they are hobbled by not doing the basics right. Get those infrastructural issues right to start with and not only will your system, even a starter system, deliver from the off, the benefits (or otherwise) of any changes or upgrades will be clearly apparent. No more expensive, sideways steps – just more music, more of the time.
Real world value: counting performance that counts…
While we’re on the subject of cost, let’s take a quick look at the relative price of the cables we’ve been playing with. This is a complex system with a lot of boxes. It needs more cables than most. Add up the Blue Heavens, with one long set of speaker cables and two short ones, eight power cords and three sets of interconnects and it winds up around $16,000. That’s a little more than the Crystal Cable interconnects I was using, on their own! The Isotek power cords are not expensive, but the CFM cables are, while the SternKlang interconnects are roughly twice the price of the BH3s, the power cords, three-times the price. I didn’t add up the total cost of the mix-n-match loom, but it was substantially more than the Nordost cables. If the Blue Heaven’s performance benefits don’t get your attention, that price differential certainly should. Nor should you look at your system and cables and get complacent. Maybe most of your cables come from one or two companies, but the real benefit of a coherent cable strategy only arrives with the final piece of the jigsaw. You’ll get improvements along the way; nice improvements at that. But the whole thing only comes together when the loom is complete. Bear in mind too, that this exercise never entered the digital or network domains, where more gains are to be had…
