Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Are You Kidding Me?

Last Saturday I hosted our local group of 20 audio enthusiasts. We started with a BBQ and cocktails on the patio. Then moved to the living room for some serious listening.

My 2 channel system:

Montana PBN EPS2 speakers
Micro Seki table with MA505 MK 1 arm
Hana low output moving coil cart with shibata stylus
Musical Surroundings Phononomena II+ phonostage
Jadis JPL preamp
Conrad Johnson MV60SE KT120 amp upgraded by CJ with teflon caps, etc.
2 EP300 balanced power conditioners
Various Pangea power cords.

Sound was wonderful.

Then we decided to swap out the Pangea AC14SE power cord to the Jadis with a $300 Nordost. No discernable difference. Then we tried a $3000 Nordost. My goodness, but everyone agreed the music sounded better.

We listened to Shelby Lynne's 45 'Just a Little Loving.' It starts with some dramatic drumstick cracks.

The highs were smoother, the cracks more defined, soundstage was discernably wider and deeper.

Then we tried the Isotek $600 cable, which everyone agreed sounded even better. Finally we tried the homemade cord of our tesident electrical engineer, Alex. Solid core silver wire (2 strands) braided around a solid core ground wire. Furtech connectors.

The result was, 'YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME!' Alex is making a pair for me. Without going into a lot of description, except to say the drumstick thwacks made you jump, the highs were airier and smoother. The mids, glorious,the music was sensational!

Not done with shattering the expectations of those who came in dubious about the difference between power cords, he opened a box with some $6000 Transparent Cable speaker wire and swapped them in for my Belden 9497 much loved by our Japanese audiophile brothers.

HOLY SAMOLIES!! These cables are bi wired pythons. The sound, true high end glorious!!!

We also compared the Axiom M5s with a pair of mini Graham BBC speakers. The Axioms acquitted themselves very well.

We are going to do a comparison with some B&Ws, Keffs, and Sonus Farbers. The Axioms will be the least expensive. I'm sure they will do very well.

Those who came as disbelievers left at around midnight. They left as believers.

They trusted their ears.

Partial Playlist

Shelby Lynne, Just a Little Lovin' 45
Zoot Sims Plays Johny Mandel
Bennett Brubeck the White house Sessions 45
Phil Collins, Hello I Must Be Going
Tbe Best of Chico Hamilton
Getz Gilberto 45
Janice Ian, Breaking Silence 45

What a great selection!

Interesting.

Every so often I wish that one of the people making super-premium interconnects could make a super-premium switching box to make A/B testing easier

I agree with you there! I emailed Pierre Sprey from Mapleshade with that suggestion. No reply.

Well then. Very scientific and leaves no doubt in my mind.

No, it was not scientific.

On my part, and that of several other participants, there was no expectation that swapping out power cords to the preamp would make any difference. It did and the improvement was not subtle.

We haven't had a good hijacking in a while...

I picked up 2 small boxes of interconnects from a guy off facebook. All new unopened packiaging but clearly old stock. The kind of packing you can't reseal, the cut your finger opening it kind.
I kept 8 or 9 matching brand /series/packaging cables including a long sub cable and gave as much away from other brands.
All for $10.
My memory is bad the cost was uber cheap.

Before

Some are double stacked

There are a bunch of cables branded AR. Audio Research, Acoustic Research. The most interesting are those made by Avi Rabinovitch, they may be from Israel. Any of the ARs are decent. Quality is not necessarily price dependent. I'd hold on to them.

Wow, I have trouble wrapping my brain around how power delivered over the last 3 feet thru an uber expensive cable of "better quality" than the 28 miles of cable between my house and the hydro electric damn is was generated from can be any better than a generic cable of the same quality of cable. Can a superconductive power cable suck more power out of the wall than it can physically deliver?

What magic is happening inside that cable to clean up the power from the outlet to your AV gear or what is generating such noise inference in your power in that last 3 feet?