Cable Reviews

This becomes obvious in works that emphasize precision timing—such as the art of flamenco, and in the music of its preeminent practitioner, Paco de Lucia. Flamenco has a remarkably complex rhythmic structure—the legacy of Moorish music's collision with the even more Eastern traditions of the gypsies. In Andalucia last summer, I became fascinated by the strolling players and their partners who accompanied them with precise and intricate hand-clap patterns. After a week or so, I concluded that these patterns were metrically too complicated to be committed to a score—reinforcing Percy Grainger's belief that so-called "primitive music is too complex for untrained modern ears." (footnote 3)

I came home from Seville with de Lucia's 1969 Fantasia Flamenca CD (Polygram Iberica Philips 842 953-2), a virtuosic reverie on flamenco roots. In "El Tempul," resguiedo (chords strummed so furiously that they sound like solid bursts of static) alternates with emphatic melodies that are punctuated with the golpe (the technique of tapping the face of the guitar with the ring finger). Even perfectly portrayed, the piece is hard to follow—de Lucia has lightning-fast technique, which means that essential musical components, like thunder, lag behind the event. The Transparent Reference cables have proven to be indispensable in sorting out what's happening, and when. I took this CD around from room to room at the Summer CES; most systems, even those composed of state-of-the-art components, tended to blur these details. I might even go so far as to say that I have never heard them presented correctly in a system that did not contain the Transparent cables.

Spain was also instrumental in helping me to comprehend—sort of—the whole issue of how the resonant point affected musical meaning. While I went to Iberia to get away from my regular life, including things audio, I found that my thoughts were never far from musical matters. How could they be in a country filled with music and bird song? And where there was music, how could I not obsess over hi-fi? One Sunday afternoon, at an organ recital in the cathedral at Cadiz, I had an epiphany. As I listened to the lingering decay of a final chord, it struck me that there was, perhaps, in physical resonance a concrete (ahem) analogy to the electrical phenomenon.

Thurston Dart, in The Interpretation of Music, points out how much compositional style depends upon where the music was intended to be performed. "Musical acoustics may be roughly divided into 'resonant,' 'room,' and 'outdoor.' Plainsong is resonant music...Perotin's music, in fact, is perfectly adapted to the acoustics of the highly resonant cathedral (Notre Dame, Paris) for which it was written...The forms used by Mozart and Haydn in their chamber and orchestral music are identical; but the details of style (counterpoint, ornamentation, rhythm, the layout of chords, and the rate at which harmonies change) will vary according to whether they are writing room music, concert music, or street music." We could go even further and maintain that acoustics have driven musical development—would Bach's music have sounded anything at all like it does if Thomaskirche at Leipzig had not been remodeled when the sermon became a major element in the Protestant service? With a mean reverberation time of 1.6 seconds, Thomaskirche was ideal for large choral works (such as the Mass in b): the string parts would have been easily heard, and faster tempos were possible compared with a vaster, more reverberant space.

Just as reverberation in space obscures change in pitch and meter, it occurred to me that the electrical resonant point—falling well into the audio frequencies—tends to obscure them on a signal level. Reduce its presence in the midst of the fundamental frequencies and everything becomes clearer and better articulated. Reduce noise—the inevitable random effect on adjacent frequencies—and you exponentially increase your ability to hear into the musical event.

What's the connection?
The Transparent Audio Music Link Reference interconnect is handsome stuff. Clad in black mesh wrap, the pearl-colored insulation gleams through, revealing directional cues printed on the cable. Six inches from the end of the cable (away from the source end) are the 3"-long, 1"-thick network cases. Terminations are Transparent's proprietary locking-RCA plugs—they're durable and sound good, but are a pain to use. Lock them on to inexpensive, flimsy RCA chassis jacks—which I emphatically do not advise—and you might remove the grounding sleeve when you disconnect them. But even if you use them with practical, sturdy connectors, these 3" terminations are connected to cable that's not all that flexible. You need lots of room behind components, and you need to give yourself lots of slack in the cable—it doesn't react favorably to being kinked (but who does?).

The Transparent Audio Music Wave Reference speaker cable looks substantial—to say the least. The main cable run, again clad in black mesh, is 1" in diameter. The network casing is a hefty 11" by 3" by 2", from which protrude a pair of 1!0-long flexible wires attached to the thickest and most substantial spade lugs I've ever seen. If your speaker or amplifier manufacturer has used nonstandard binding posts, you'll have one bear of a time trying to spread the forks of these connectors. I don't know what to suggest here, since it's obvious that these are extremely-high-quality connectors, but I did need to mention it. If you use stand-mounted speakers, the network box is left dangling from its short wires—not to worry, Transparent will provide you with a Velcro harness to attach the box to your speaker stands, providing strain relief.

The Music Wave Reference cables are not designed for bi-wiring—a relief, as doubling the price of this cable takes us into cost-no-logic territory. Transparent makes specially networked bi-wire runs, or will provide suitably high-quality jumpers. Once they warned me against bi-wiring with this cable, I just had to try it—and they're right: don't do it. I did bi-amp the MartinLogan Aerius with a pair of Conrad-Johnson Premier Eleven As and two runs of Music Wave Reference, and it was heaven! But add up the tab and you come up with $7000 worth of amp and $8000 worth of speaker cable, all driving a $2000 speaker. Still...

We know what it costs, but what is it worth?
Here we are, back at that sticky cost question. There's no way to get around it—these babies are expensive. Taken out of the context of the high-end world—where we try not to deal with the ultimate logic of price tags—they might even be construed as obscenely expensive. Certainly that's how my friend Randy, the one with the college bills, sees it. I can't justify it on that level, nor will I attempt to. But if we leave the real world of mortgages and school loans and retreat back into high-end fantasy land, I can say that I don't know what they should truly cost, simply because I've never heard anything else that can do what they do.

I asked Karen Sumner to comment on the subject of cable pricing, and she said, "These products take a long time to build from start to finish—our cables are quite labor-intensive. The physical relationships of the components in our networks need to remain stable and constant—which is the reason we need to pot the networks—and this means that assembling them requires a lot of skill and training. I liken it to making hard-wired tube amplifiers—which aren't inexpensive, either.

"Scale factors in, too. We use very few off-the-shelf components, and that means that we pay through the nose for them. And while customers hate to hear that they're subsidizing R&D, we spend a bunch of money on components so that we know firsthand how our cables interact with the equipment our customers are using. We pride ourselves on how much we actually listen to real-world systems in order to know what is going on out there."

What we play is life
This has been a lengthy discussion, especially considering that some of us still deny that there even are cable differences. But I consider Transparent Audio's Music Link Reference interconnect and Music Wave Reference speaker cable benchmark products; for me, at least, they've completely raised the level of the category.

This doesn't mean that they've cornered the market on audio purity—God knows, and I know, that I haven't heard everything out there. I am intensely interested in (and now have for audition) the latest generation of MIT products; I'm sure the differences are instructive. Nor am I convinced that networks are the only true path; no cable could appear more different from the Transparents than Kimber's KCAG and 4AG designs, yet the Kimbers have impressed me in short-term auditions.

Disclaimers aside, the Transparent References have done as much—or more—for my musical enjoyment and understanding in the last year as any product I've ever lived with. Ultimately, you will have to decide for yourself whether the performance justifies the price. I'm sure I know what your ears will tell you, but your wallet may well have the final say.

Yet look at the benchmark products of the audio past: both Quad loudspeakers, the Marantz 10 (which, when the manufacturer tried to keep its cost in line with other tuners, may have bankrupted the company), the Linn LP12, the Mark Levinson ML-2, Audio Research's SP-11, the Levinson No.30 and No.31. In their respective eras, people questioned whether their costs could be justified—yet all are now, quite rightly, revered as quantum steps forward, advancing our expectations of the possible. These two products from Transparent Audio seem destined to join that illustrious list.

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Footnote 3: I mentioned this belief to David Chesky, when he returned from a stay in Seville, and his response was unequivocal: "Oh, no—I went back to my hotel and stayed up all night writing them down!" That's the difference between a composer and an ordinary person.