Thanks for your reply Allan. It’s good to learn the technicalities, and I’m very aware of your experience and knowledge which manifests itself in your superb amplifiers. I’m sure I’ve thanked you, and I’m planning to buy a pair of your speakers because of the reduction in distortion they offer.
I bought your P452 initially as a temporary replacement for my Audio Research Valve power amp which did a fairly realistic impression of Mt Vesuvius, while saving to buy a new ARC amp. However, having now tried a new valve amp I rapidly concluded that I prefer your Purifi version which has vastly superior qualities in all respects. At one tenth of the price!
At the risk of making this post rather lengthy, I feel that I must justify the comments I made in my original post of this thread. It’s not a slight improvement I hear with these cables, it is indeed substantial.
I’ve been a professional classical (i.e. non amplified) musician all my life, have spent decades as a solo woodwind (flute) player in several professional orchestras and been soloist, chamber musician, have made many recordings, etc etc (see my website:
www.michaelscottflute.com)
It’s on record (pardon the pun) that a professional musician (while a student) needs to do 10, 000 hours of practice before being ready to face the public. At 3 hours a day, that’s about 10 years of practice - listening all the while and aiming for absolute perfection. My equivalent now to a normal 9 - 5 working day would be: morning, 3 hour orchestra rehearsal; afternoon: either another 3 hour orchestral rehearsal or rehearsal for something else; evening: concert performance. Often seven days a week.
This has been my life for over 40 years, with practice and teaching in any available spare time. All the while Listening to myself and those around me.
I might have to play a high note with a frequency of 1760 Hz (high “A”). But if I play 1759 Hz then I’m out of tune, and anyway that pitch needs to change in a different context. A split second later (literally) I’m part of a different chord, all the while Listening acutely to my colleagues of whom there may be 100 in a Symphony Orchestra. There can be no time lag between those 100 members on stage - zero, not even a millisecond or those wonderful recordings that audiophiles enjoy would be disasters.
The point I’m going to some pains to make here is that we use and have better, vastly more sensitive ears than most. We “Listen”, with a capital L. If I’m comparing Audio (Hi-Fi) then it’s with the real thing and not with a different amplifier / speaker / etc.
Sorry to labour the point, but I want to be taken seriously when I say that this balanced cable without screening sounds so much better than a screened one that I said I was “flabbergasted” by the improvements. The cables were otherwise the same as the standard screened version which I was previously using, being high purity silver, made by Robertson Audio Cables (Brisbane). I wrote to Warwick Robertson telling him what I thought and he took it upon himself to make an identical cable to try for himself. He was similarly surprised and impressed, indicating that he would like to include this configuration in his business. He even asked my permission, which I said of course was not necessary, as I know I’m not the first person to try it.
Surely the ear is the final arbiter? As I said at the beginning here, I have the utmost respect for your expertise Allen, but how do we reconcile the difference between the theory and empirical results?