Impressive as these changes are – and believe me, they’re pretty darned impressive – I couldn’t help wondering if the choice of ground wire might not alter or improve things still further? After all, it does everywhere else in the system!
First switch was to a pair of CAD ground Control cables. Sure enough, the musical presentation changed in a far from subtle way. As expected – and based on past experience – the CAD cables were sweeter and more rounded than the green Nordost wires, bringing an added space, dimensionality, warmth and colour to the sound, at the expense of immediacy, dynamic range and rhythmic articulation and urgency. This was a big enough shift to give some serious pause. Playing a whole range of different music, it soon emerged that the relative benefits are programme (and almost certainly system) dependent.
With that in mind, I moved onto the black Nordost QKORE Premium cables – with exactly the result I’d hoped for. The Premium wires brought all the transparency, dynamic resolution, snap and immediacy of the green cables, combined with the sweeter, more coherent and dimensional presentation of the CADs. But they also brought their own sense of added body, weight, presence, bass depth, power and articulation too. Bass lines on the black cables go deeper and with greater pitch definition, attack and more clearly spaces between notes. That definition and fluidity adds apace, clarity, body, shape and separation to the rest of the range, in just the same way that a good sub-woofer does.
inal option was the Telos ground wires. These were awfully close to the black Nordost leads, a little more laid back and with a bit more harmonic and textural detail, although lacking the inherent sense of pace and power that the Nordost wires instilled in the music’s nether regions. What the Telos leads did deliver was the quietest, blackest, most grainless background behind, around and between instruments and voices. Equally as impressive as the Nordost Premium leads in their own way, once again, this is going to be a system and programme related choice. Although I listened to a whole host of different music on the various cables, most of my listening was conducted using the ASR Emitter II Exclusive or the Kora CSA 1200 mono-blocs, both of which sit slightly slightly to the warmer side of neutral. Listening with much warmer, or leaner amps for that matter, would certainly impact the preferred cable. I’d certainly rank the Telos and Nordost Premium cables significantly above the CAD or standard Nordost green cables, in overall performance terms. But I can also see situations in which those more affordable options might actually prove superior. Depending on the system, the speakers and the music you play, preferences are going to come down to individual circumstances. What I can say is that, if you are investigating the grounding of your speaker cabinets – and if your speakers use metal cabinets, or a significant amount of metal in their cabinets/frames, then you should – choice of ground cable is going to be as important as the choice of the ground box itself. But one thing is abundantly clear; both are questions that it’s well worth asking.
