Gramophone Dreams

I have this friend, a smart, good-looking young physicist from Argentina. Naturally, I call him "Gaucho." He lives in a glistening-white steel-and-glass apartment overlooking lower Manhattan. I visit him regularly, usually with a group of audio friends, mainly to compare recordings, drink wine, and talk hi-fi.

One day, unexpectedly, Gaucho invited me over to listen to his system—just me—so that I could tell him what I "really think" of his system's sound.

His digital source is Roon into a dCS Rossini DAC and Master Clock. His record player is the latest SME 20/3 turntable with an SME V arm and a Dynavector XV-1s moving coil cartridge, which feeds a van den Hul Grail SE transimpedance phono stage. These fine sources feed a 25W Kondo (Audio Note Japan) Ongaku integrated amplifier, which drives a pair of Avantgarde Generation 2 Duo Mezzo horn loudspeakers.

The day I visited Gaucho, it was snowing, and the big flakes swirling past his floor-to-ceiling windows put me in a pleasant, dreamy mood. While I sat on the white couch sipping black tea, he played three digital recordings followed by three LPs. I was listening mindfully but not critically, hoping to get a feel for the character of sound energy coming from the horns.

After the third black disc, he stopped and asked me quietly what I was thinking about the sound. I told him that the main thing I noticed was how all the recordings sounded equally nice, but that both digital and analog sounded strangely the same: ethereal, slightly generalized, and lower in density and contrast than I imagined they should. Had he ever noticed anything like that? He said, "No, but it sometimes feels like there are holes in the music. Not centerfill or soundstage extension—it's just this feeling that some notes have somehow disappeared."

While Gaucho played the next recording, I walked around the room to see how the system sounded in different places. Then I put my ear close to the mouth of each horn, listening for distortion. Finally, as I examined the components on his equipment rack, I noticed that he had connected both sources to the Ongaku with midpriced AudioQuest Water interconnects ($850 for a 1.5m pair) and his $90,000 Ongaku to his $60,000 Avantgarde Duos with nearly free Canare 4S11-based speaker cables he had terminated himself.

Having spent the 1990s as the US distributor for both Audio Note Japan and Avant Garde horns, I asked my friend why his dealer didn't push him to use Kondo's silver cables. He replied that the dealer did sell him Kondo's cables and that he still had them—but in this new apartment, with this new rack, the Kondo cables were too short. He bought the AudioQuest and Canare cables because he didn't want to spend even more "stupid money" for longer ones. He said he'd been using these wires for four years and was completely satisfied with the sound. Then he reminded me that he was a physicist, and that expensive cables didn't really "make sense" to him.

Further discussion revealed that Gaucho's too-short Kondo silver KSL-SPz speaker wires (which sell for $5k per meter-pair) were in a closet, easily accessible, and actually would reach the speakers, although they would have to be exposed on the floor in front of the fireplace. I convinced G to put them in "as a science experiment."

After the first side of the first LP, I asked my friend if he was noticing any difference. "Yes," he said. "The sound is much calmer, and the tone is much richer.

"It's weird, but for some reason, I am fairly sensitive to tonality. When it's right, I notice right away, and it invariably makes me smile." "Of course!" I responded, "To me as well. Tone is everything." Then Gaucho asked me what I heard.

I said that the difference was not subtle but that he should leave Kondo's wire in for week then put the Canare back. "Then phone me and tell me what you've learned."

Within 48 hours, my friend had purchased two 1.5m lengths of Kondo's soft, supple, silk-sheathed Ls41 interconnects at $7500 each and was text-bombing me with purple prose. "The fully Kondo-wired system has flow, like one of those minimalist Japanese ink paintings. It is complete, integral, gentle, and perfectly detailed. I keep coming back to my sense of completeness in the sound; I don't know why. The best analogy I can come up with is umami, the flavor that unites flavors."

Gaucho never put those other cables back in. Before that prescribed week of listening was over, he had spent more than $20,000 on silver wire.

The next time I visited, I asked my physics pal how spending all that money on audio wire squared with his science brain. He looked at me seriously, not smiling. "I am a physicist and know everything we hear can be measured. But what should I measure to fully characterize a sound system? What is a complete set of measurements that would uniquely allow me to identify good sound? That I do not know. What I do know is that scientific pursuit is about accurately describing what we observe, not aligning observation with model-driven expectations." What I imagine is that, whether sleeping or awake, my senses are inputting massive amounts of data—of which my conscious self appears to notice only a small, carefully edited fraction.

My spiritual side reminds me that I am what I give my attention to. Knowing and believing this, I try to notice what I notice and to assemble that data into the biggest, clearest picture I can, without prejudice. In audio, that means I am constantly struggling to step back and listen more objectively to the "sound of sound": trying to notice how different qualities of sound affect my ability to connect with and focus on recorded musical content. I also know that it has taken me a lifetime to know only a little about what I should listen for.

So: If some newbie audiophile has not learned to spot shifts in tone, dulled or sharpened transients, or the distortions in force, momentum, and density that audio components routinely inflict on sound systems, we shouldn't scold them. Instead, we must encourage them to listen and compare. Like Gaucho did.

To still-suffering cable deniers, I offer encouragement. Experience has taught me that meaningful differences in component sound character are never subtle—that they will be obvious to all experienced listeners and that a truly great-sounding audio system will sound conspicuously good to everyone in the room, including newbies.

Unfortunately, with audio cables, particularly interconnects, the sonic differences are not always conspicuous. The colorations that interconnects impose on system sound are generally caused by—and rendered less invisible by—whatever components the cable is connected to. That's the bad news.

The HoloAudio Serene line preamplifier
The good news is that the more electrically benign and sonically transparent those boxes are, the more easily we can recognize how much and in what manner the cables are affecting the sound.

This became obvious during the last year while I was comparing a group of top-shelf DACs. At first, I was playing them all through my long-term reference Rogue Audio RP-7 line-level preamplifier, which I always regarded as extremely open and neutral-sounding. I enjoyed the RP-7's natural focus and superbly balanced tone. But after I removed it and connected the dCS Bartók and the Mola Mola Tambaqui DACs directly to the Parasound Halo A21+ amplifier, I realized that my BFF Rogue was imposing a slight, gray dullness on the sound. I set it aside for a while.

When I began auditioning source components without volume controls, I switched to Linear Tube Audio's Z10e integrated amplifier. It drives my Falcon Gold Badge speakers well, plays music with elite charm, and allows me to double-check my assessments with any headphone I choose.