Art Dudley Listening

Accept only one product because you can judge with accuracy only one system variable at a time, and because you are not a publicist but a journalist, and because a reviewer should not allow her or his home to be used as a storage facility for expensive, high-markup accessories that will, within a year or two, be replaced by second-generation versions of same (footnote 2).

Step 3: Before installing the new cable or interconnect, play a few selections on your music system as is, paying attention both to the way the system sounds and to the success with which it does or does not communicate the emotional, intellectual, and physical gist of the music.

Next, install the new cable or interconnect in place of its predecessor and listen to the same selections. Relax, but take notes—a tricky balancing act. Try to enjoy yourself, but be brutally frank with yourself about the differences you do or do not hear. Then, leave the new wire in your system and go do something else for a couple of hours—anything but listen to or even think about music. Then go back to your system and play some recordings you haven't heard for a while. After you're done with that, reinstall your original wire, relisten to the same tracks, and make more notes.

Do all of that several more times over the course of the next few days, taking care to change up the order: Sometimes the thing you listen to first has the upper hand, and sometimes the act of changing over and listening again seems to confer an advantage. You want to filter out such artifacts of the testing regimen. Keep your notes simple and honest. Then, after a week or so, go back and look for patterns.

Step 4: Write—but write like a journalist, not a copywriter. Practice the craft of attribution, and try not to be too disappointed when that turns out to be something many readers do not themselves grasp. Instead of saying, "This cable incorporates separate conductors for male and female electrons," you must say, "According to the manufacturer, this cable incorporates separate conductors for male and female electrons." Feel free to note your accordance with or incredulity at such claims, as appropriate, but don't go overboard: Assume that most of your readers are smart enough to sort those things out for themselves.

Put yourself in the position of the reader: Try to imagine what he or she wants to get out of your review. Of course, all writers and editors imagine their readers somewhat differently, so it's natural for each of us to come up with a different way of addressing the challenge. My thinking is that readers want to know what's technically special about the product, they want to know how well it's made, they want to know what it sounded like and how well it played music in my system, and they want to know whether or not I think it's worth the money. Those are the questions I try to answer.

Step 5: Duck and cover.

I wasn't kidding when I suggested that some people do not understand attribution, just as some people don't understand self-deprecation, humility, the possibility of harmony between people of differing viewpoints, sonnets on man's inhumanity to man, or humor. Because people cannot recognize, let alone appreciate, that which does not exist within themselves in at least trace amounts, the mere act of reporting on, say, a manufacturer's views on cable burn-in will get you tarred, in some quarters, as an apologist for same. Pity them, and thank God you had teachers who stressed reading comprehension.

If you write a purple paean of love to the cable you're reviewing, liken the audibility of its distinctions to those encountered when upgrading from an Edison cylinder player to a system that runs on electricity, and—best of all—make up an entire new performance parameter for which listeners must listen, you will be hailed in some high-end circles, even as your piece provokes howls of anger from non-audiophiles, especially those who consider themselves technologically savvy. On the other hand, the latter group will praise your piece if you declare that the sound of the review cable was indistinguishable from that of a pair of wires extracted from a rusty screen door, but they will cast your verdict in a negative light—momentary lapse of dementia, revenge for a company that doesn't advertise, whatever lie they feel like telling that day—to telegraph their disdain for anyone and everyone who would dare to review gear based on listening. High-end audiophiles, on the other hand, will fall into a funk as deep as their soundstage, and will henceforth banish you from their hearts and minds.

The best approach is to forget about pleasing one side or the other and simply tell the truth: a course of action that quite often pleases no one.

The horse we rode in on
At the top of my list of reasons for writing about a BIS interconnect is the company's generally low prices. Not only do I enjoy writing about products that people stand a chance of affording, I dislike being saddled with a product that's more expensive than the one I already own, yet that appears to offer little or no chance of even matching the performance level I already enjoy. I don't shrink from writing negative reviews—but in a case such as that, what would be the point? I was also impressed by Bernard Brien's genial, soft-spoken approach, and by the fact that he not only agreed to send me only one product, he actually followed through on that promise. I won't say that's precisely rare in cable and accessory circles, but my expectations have been confounded more than once.

So I tried the 2m-long BIS Expression ($640 Canadian) in my system (footnote 3), more or less following the review procedure described above, and compared its sound to that of both my Shindo Silver interconnect and my Audio Note AN-Vx silver interconnect, each of which is 1.5m long. (A 2m Shindo sells for $2590, a 2m Audio Note AN-Vx for $2225.)

The Audio Note was beautifully, realistically soft, with timbral colors that were very slightly warm: nothing "silvery" at all about this silver interconnect. From top to bottom, music was in perfect balance through the AN-Vx, and I heard an excellent sense of touch, and beautiful timing and momentum. The Shindo Silver sounded very similar. Timbrally it was a little meatier than the Audio Note, but I doubt I could tell one from the other in a blind test: The distinction was exceedingly slight.

The BIS Expression sounded distinctly different from the other two: a greater distinction than that between the Shindo and Audio Note. Curiously, the BIS was consistently, notably louder, with good drive and momentum. It lacked the timbral and textural nuance of the other two interconnects, and, through the BIS, music never had quite the same easy, natural flow as through the Shindo and Audio Note. But the BIS consistently sounded pleasant and involving, never harsh or tipped toward one or the other frequency extreme.

During those comparisons, I played a few selections from Genuine Negro Jig, the debut collection by the Carolina Chocolate Drops (CD, Nonesuch 516995-2), relying in particular on Rhiannon Giddens's a cappella version of the traditional song "Reynadine." The BIS's comparative "loudness," though slight—on a par with the difference one hears between normal and phase-inverted playback—was apparent from the sound of her intake of breath at the recording's start, and the music itself was served in a similar way: slightly clearer, slightly more forward. Precisely the same qualities followed the BIS to other music, such as Jeremy Backhouse and the Vasari Singers' recording of the Herbert Howells Requiem (CD, United 88033), there the harmonic subtleties concealed within the grouped voices were revealed explicitly. And on the wildly ahead-of-its-time "Pastime Paradise," from Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life (CD, Motown 3746303402), the sounds of percussion instruments were more prominent than through the Shindo or Audio Note—though, again, the latter two allowed the music a somewhat more natural flow.

Again, without meaning to beat a dead hose: The sonic distinctions I've described were just about as small as small can be—which, notwithstanding my efforts to keep an open mind, was pretty much what I'd expected.

There now exist so many manufacturers of perfectionist-quality audio cables, and the newer companies seem so conservative in their designs (footnote 4), that there remains little justification for that hoariest of high-end audio clichÇs: that cables are best regarded as tone controls. I can scarcely remember the last time I heard cables so egregiously bright or so egregiously dull or so egregiously anything else that such a point of view had any basis in reality.

But I suppose that's progress, isn't it? As sonic distinctions recede into the background, differences of a more musical sort are more free to command our attention. So it goes in the world of perfectionist-quality cables, where the best choice is that which simply allows one's system to sing: to play music with realistic momentum, note-to-note flow, and the same ineffable naturalness that has always characterized the finest playback gear, of any era or price. And there the BIS Expression performed well—somewhat better, in fact, than its relatively humble price predicted.

Because BIS products aren't sold in any US shops, hobbyists on my side of the border must call the company's Laval, Quebec headquarters for the US prices of the various models described on their website. Bernard Brien says that home trials of standard-length (ie, non-custom) cables are available, so potential buyers can see which, if any, of the BIS cables or interconnects seem to jell with their systems. That is, of course, the best approach to selecting interconnects, speaker cables, and power cords from any manufacturer. As we say in our recent Special Collector's Issue 2015: Recommended Components: Audition as many products as you reasonably can. The key word is borrow—and although an essay such as this is no place for a specific recommendation, I believe that an Internet search on the words audio cable loan will turn up a dealer that will let you try before you buy.

---

Footnote 2: My wife refers to our interior-decorating style as Early Loading Dock.

Footnote 3: See the review of the Harbeth Super HL5plus loudspeaker elsewhere in this issue for details of system.

Footnote 4: One sees the same in other fields in which making the sale is more important than sticking to one's guns. On the surface, there are almost as few differences between new cable lines as there are between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush. (Worry not, O defenders of the nonpoliticization of Stereophile: I say that with equally generous disdain for both.)