Some comments here based on the last few posts:
Once again, what is "hooded"? Does this imply constrained dynamics or maybe a clipped-off top end or ....? Neither of these were my observations with the AA. Again, my experiences were the opposite; the presentation was simply too forward and fatiguing rather than a coherency across the band.
The Opis speaker cables I have were played on my system for nearly 2 months before I did the shootout to the AA speaker cables. I would put a fair estimate of hours on the Opis at 150 hours. I have no idea how many hours the AA had before I auditioned them. If they had minimal usuage, I could have indeed judged them before their break-in time.
Unfortunately, breaking in speaker cables requires listening to music. And if the sound is terrible, you have to put up with it. I would have a most difficult time breaking in the AA speaker cables. Other cables like ICs and PCs I can do 24/7 with no sound coming from the speaker. So it would be nice if Purist could pre-burn-in these cables and thus give us a good first impression of these. One of these days perhaps I will get an opportunity to hear the broken-in AA's but for now, the Opis works incredibly well and I have no interest to change them out. There was absolutely no dynamic compression with the Opis. As for midrange subtraction, I did not experience this either.
Rzado: I do not pay too much attention to terms like yin(g) and yan(g), the totally worthless "PRAT" or the trendy here-today-gone-tomorrow, "continuousness", etc. I simply seek a balance, or better term, best-compromise, of dynamic contrasts, frequency-extreme coverage and the issues of dimensionality such as decays, portrayal of space, harmonic textures, etc. Since the time I first heard the ARC SP-8 and then later bought the SP-10, I have been a decays and bloom fanatic; the dimensionality issue has been #1 for me ever since. And from all the systems I have heard out there, only a small handful of them do it for me in this area. But two local audio gurus and a few others out-of-state who have much knowledge on the CAT, Aesthetix and SoundLab products have given me a lot of advice to pay more attention to the other sonic attributes. My system now has resolution like I never could have imagined because of the help from these people.
The CAT JL-3 Signature amps do dynamic contrasts and resolution like no other amps I have heard. But combined with the CAT preamps, this is simply too much of the same direction (analytical) for me. I find that the Aesthetix Io and Callisto preamp models do the dimensionality like no others I have heard. It is no surprise that the Aesthetix/CAT pairing results in an awesome integration. These driving the SoundLab A1 speakers make for an explosive, tonally coherent and 3-dimensional presentation. The primary source is Clearaudio Ref TT with either the Clearaudio Accurate or Koetsu RWS cartridges.
I ran the above system for much of last year with a mixture of NBS & MIT PCs and ICs and tried and tried to find a speaker cable to mate well. The emphasis was midrange warmth with only mediocre resolution and dynamics. With the system fully loaded with Kubala-Sosna Emotion cables, the performance took a major leap forward in coherency, frequency extremes and dynamics. There was for me however, a slight loss in the involvement of the music as the NBS had some characterizations I very much liked.....the decays and ambience. And this was why I investigated the Purist (mainly the Dominus) to bring back some of the involvement I had before but not to give up the newly discovered capabilities. You can read my detailed post on this topic in the Kubala vs. Purist thread that was started a couple days before.
One trap I want to avoid is to choose cables for the purpose of "synergizing" the tonality of my system. If I have to do this, I have issues elsewhere that need to be resolved. This was a lesson learned during the Kubala-Sosna cable audition. Changing cables for me should be to find the "best compromise" of the sonic attributes I mentioned above.
John
