curbfeeler

I would like one of the Phasure Lush^2 USB cable 1m. Please send a PayPal invoice to me at [email protected] Thanks, Stan Delles

"The preponderance of AQ cable may mean any number of things"<br /> I would suggest it means they spend a lot of dough on marketing. I have been disappointed by their products with frequency. In my experience AQ is purveyed by mid-level brick and mortar or large online vendors.

I placed two Quantum Qv2 in my system. One went on the open receptacle of the duplex that feeds the Quantum QB8. The other is plugged into the QB8. This arrangement is as advised by Roy Gregory. Initial impressions are that the bass is more propulsive, better articulated and more authoritative. All seems more coherent, continuous, flowing. Layering in depth is obvious. The sense of the space around performers is more audible.

I commend a couple of recordings to your attention. Klemperer conducting Das Lied von der Erde on EMI with Christa Ludwig and Fritz Wunderlich. Szell conducting selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn on EMI with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I owned the MG 3.6 prior to acquiring the MG 3.7. I bi-wired the 3.6. The 3.7 surpass the 3.6 in many areas. Greater low-level detail, better imaging, sterling octave-to-octave balance, propulsive pace, more articulate and authoritative bass, more coherent sound and more natural rendition of sibilance are some of the improvements. I don’t obsess about the lack of provision for bi-wiring given the results I’m getting. The 3.7 just seem to disappear, whereas with some material the 3.6 would call attention to itself. I use the 1 ohm resistors at the midrange and tweeter. There are familiar recordings that reveal imaging outside the left and right speaker positions through the 3.7 that were never obvious with the 3.6.

I’m using four Stillpoints OEM feet under each of the Myesound stands. See my post in this thread dated 8/12. Image specificity, articulation, clarity and bass authority are improved.

So are you using a 1 ohm resistor to pad the ribbon tweeter, the midrange or both?

What I had been using for interconnects was The Wire from Cryo-Parts terminated on cryoed Xhadow short RCA plugs without solder and The Wire soldered to cryoed Vampire XLRs using Chimera solder. Saturday I picked up the loom of Nordost Frey after it had been conditioned on the VIDAR at Nuts About HiFi. Sunday morning the cables were installed after the contacts were cleaned with 99 percent isopropyl alcohol and treated with Caig DeOxit Gold. The 4m speaker cables were elevated using Shunyata Darkfield Minis and adapted to the terminals of the Maggie 3.7s with Vampire banana plugs. This was necessary because the cables came with two Z-plugs per pole at the speaker end, and the 3.7 has only one pair of terminals. A 0.6m balanced IC went between the Bryston DAC and the Parasound JC 2, a 1m balanced IC went between the JC 2 and the Parasound Halo A 21, a 1.25m tonearm IC went between the VPI Classic and the Herron VTPH-2 and a 1m single-ended IC went between the Herron and the JC 2. Eager to hear what the loom could do I started with some selections from the music server. Corcovado from Getz/Gilberto came to mind. João Gilberto entered well to the outside of the left speaker, and the voice was fleshed out. All previous cabling placed him at the speaker. Astrud seemed more supple. Cymbal was more realistic. There was more wood on guitar and bass. Audience applause felt live. Next up was Pine for Cedars from Nice, Nice by Dan Mangan. Sibilance was more naturally presented, and there was more power in the voice and horns. When the big drum comes in it is more like a peal of thunder. Minotaur from Monterey Jazz Quartet Live revealed a more complete and coherent harmonic envelope in string bass and drums. The tambourine sounded fully fleshed out. Again the audience sounded more immediate. La Segunda by Sera Una Noche gave up a convincing portrayal of the venue and some lovely treble from flute and piccolo. The percussion was nuanced and compelling. Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper by Sequentia displayed treble purity and subtle touches on harp. Vocals had force, nested in a lifelike ambience. Ken Bauernfreund arrived around 2:00 to hear the changes to the system. He brought a couple of LPs which we soon spun. The spare Appalachian Spring from Keith Clark on Reference is one of the more successful efforts by Keith Johnson. Very good sense of the venue with a more proximate and immediate presentation of the instruments than KJ typically captures. Then the 45 RPM Rumours was up. Gold Dust Woman was the selection. It didn’t sound familiar. Particularly, the voices were in a warm, glowing aura, and the drumming had a deeper pulse than my 33 RPM WB, which we had to play right away. The 45 RPM could have been a different mix, so divergent was it. Hard to imagine that the mastering chain alone could account for the disparity. Ken requested Britten’s Simple Symphony on Decca, so I cued up the pizzicato movement. The acoustics of the Maltings at Snape were gloriously painted before us. The improvement in bass harmonics yielded subtleties such as the thwack and twang when a string is pulled away from the fingerboard of the double bass and let loose against it, and the thrum of the hall as the low strings play all at once. All this in the first few hours of play. By all reports the performance will improve as the cables settle with use. The new Maggie 3.7s are likely to continue to get better with time, too. To summarize the improvements in signal cabling: Coherent More organic, whole Harmonic envelope seems right Treble is pure Dynamic swing increased Great low-level resolution and sense of the venue Bass timbre is much improved Noise - what noise? Thanks to Ken for sharing his impressions of the system here. The whole question of bass reproduction is fraught with personal considerations. Some want to feel the abdomen and chest cavities resonate as the room is pressurized by the loudspeakers. As Ken is a drummer accustomed to feeling as well as hearing his instruments, a predilection toward bass extended in frequency and volume is understandable ;>) For myself, seldom have I felt the bass pulsating through my body at a live performance of unamplified music. Along a parade route as the larger drums passed a few feet from me I have felt pressurized, but in a seat at a concert venue not so much. What I hear live and unamplified is most often less bass-heavy than recordings. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. I want to hear realistic timbre and tone, or tunefulness in the bass. The artist is striving to achieve the sublime, and I need to hear the nuances communicated. I want speed with freedom from overhang. The Maggie 3.7s have opened a window onto that sort of presentation in the bass, hinted at by the 3.6s here but achieved by the newer model. As for extension into the bottom octave, most recorded material won’t plumb the depths anyway. I find bass of the Maggies adequate and satisfying. I’m not averse to trying a subwoofer, though I’m not highly motivated in that direction.

I tried a loom of Transparent cabling in the signal path of my system over the long weekend. The complement included balanced 2m & 1m Super ICs, a single-ended 1m Ultra IC and a 10-foot pair of Music Wave Ultra speaker cables. The speaker cable was placed on XTerminators to adapt the spade lugs to the Maggies’ banana receptacles. These cables had been in use at the dealership, so they had some time to burn in. They had not been on a cable cooker. All contacts were cleaned with 99 percent isopropyl alcohol and treated with Caig DeOxit Gold. The Transparent did many things well. Bass was well defined and weighty. The midrange was well articulated. Balance across the frequency spectrum was good. Sibilance was not coarsened. Where they fell down was: High frequency extension, or air. Pulse. Dynamic swing was somewhat diminished. Coherency. Continuousness. Things seemed less of a whole, slightly confused spatially and harmonically. The dealer had said the noise floor would be lowered and hence ultimate resolution enhanced. That did not happen. That may be due to the measures that were already put in place to minimize noise in my system. The samples were chosen to be comparable in price to Nordost Frey. I would conjecture that the networks used on the Transparent cabling were limiting performance, as there are all sorts of points in the design and construction of these cables for mischief: the layout of parts, circuit boards, soldered connections, parts quality, connectors chosen, dielectric and sheathing, housings. Needlessly complex, perhaps.

OK, Jim, dish ;>) Which cable cooker was used with disastrous results?

My local dealer will toast the Frey speaker cables and ICs, hopefully shortening the duration of their conditioning.

One of you go first. I'll be interested to read what you learn, especially with respect to disassembly and space available within the panel to accomodate parts. My pair of MG 3.7 are settling in nicely. Drums and string bass are very convincing. With padding resistor installed at both mids and highs the balance is very good. I'm taking a set of ICs and speaker cabling by Transparent from a local dealer for a spin this weekend, stuff that is roughly similar in price to Nordost Frey. I have a loom of Frey en route to hear after the Transparent trial.

UniCrystal TM OCC SILVER Hookup Wire http://www.vhaudio.com/wire.html Wrap a spiral of this silver wire around the lead of the resistor to provide an extension. Or would that be too inductive? ;>)

That is annoying, isn't it? Reminds of Mel Brooks take on the handing down of the Commandments. I agree with Barry, give the Heimdall time to settle. It's early days with your new speakers.

Given some of the horrific wiring I’ve seen in homes, the addition of a dedicated ground would seem to be fairly benign in practice.

It’s not simply explained but it is easily heard. In my recent experience the HiFi Tuning fuses had been installed on the pair of MG 3.7 after the fuses and fuse holders were cleaned and treated with Caig products. When the fuses were reversed in the fuse holders no further treatment was given. I can’t imagine that there was any crud in the mating areas to remove or shift. Some think the situation of crystal boundaries in conductive materials could be responsible for directionality. We have accepted that interconnects and speaker cables are often directional without much in the way of explanation, and most of us have heard evidence of it for ourselves.