Cable Reviews

When no one's watching, it's easy to express your opinion. When tens of thousands of people are reading over your shoulder, it becomes more difficult. In fact, it can be downright creepy—especially when what you're thinking sounds like one of those grand, all-encompassing (over)statements you yourself tend to distrust. You don't want to be wrong; on the other hand, if you're too much of a wuss to express what you reallythink just because someone might take it as grandiose, then it's time to give up.

My review of the Audio Research VTM200 monoblock power amplifier elsewhere in this issue drove it home to me big time: Cables are important, and even more important is getting good cable advice from someone who knows and understands the gear you're using.

When Audio Advisor's Wayne Schuurman contacted me about reviewing the Vincent">http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/1108vincent">Vincent Audio KHV-1pre headphone amplifier, I felt confident that I had everything I needed to handle the task, owning, as I do, both the AKG">http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/806akg">AKG K701 and Sennheiser">http://www.stereophile.com/thefifthelement/605fifth/index1.html">Sennhe… HD-650 headphones, which have long been my references. That oughta get 'er done, I thought.

Ray Kimber founded his enterprise in the late 1970s, and for the last half-century has withstood the ravages of this difficult market. He first got involved in cable technology while addressing the problems of induced interference in audio connections where high-power installation lighting was involved, especially early thyristor-controlled systems.

It's always a jolting, life-renewing Ka-BLAM when a new experience shatters your preconceptions of the order of things. From the moment you realize your dad isn't running right alongside you as you fly down the sidewalk on your first two-wheeler, to when you become a made man, these experiences forever alter how you view yourself and the world around you.

As Mick Jagger has sagely observed, things are different today. Now I don't get complaints only when I give a bad or mixed review: I get complaints when I give a good review, said complaints coming not from the reviewee but from his competitors.

In a related story, America's park rangers and amateur videographers report a near-epidemic of wild animals getting their heads stuck in carelessly discarded food containers. In one such instance, a six-month-old black bear cub in Florida scarcely avoided death when a glass jar was removed from his head, after being stuck there for nearly two weeks. Employees of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, who saved the cub, named him Jarhead, for all the obvious reasons.

I should have seen this coming: Less than a year after the last time I railed against the darkness of cable reviewing—the indignity of crawling around behind my equipment rack, the tedium of comparing one wire to another, the frustration of trying to wring from the experience some fresh and hopefully entertaining observations, the horror of dealing with manufacturers whose hunger for good publicity borders on the vampiric—I have once again invited into my home a cable manufacturer and his wares.