Asr Electronics, Transparent cables

Well i have been demoing some transparent cable in my system for a while. I never had a chance to demo Transparent or a network cable. In my system page you may see my system and my current cables. For a long time i am using audioquest volcano speaker cables and audioquest sky interconnects. I am very satisfied with their performances. On every occasion i had tried different cables in my system. Because of the uniqe structure of my electronics, power cables never worked, there were no effect or unimportant effect on sound production(not in my old ear acute cd player, i am referring my asr artillery). I had many chance to try very popular cables in my system like nordost, stealth etc....short version they all have differences then aq, but none of them convinced me to change aq cables. My aq cables are not at the top level, but they have synergy and from what i had learnt from my experiences, hard to find better one.

Last month couple of my friends(very good ones :) ) offer me their transparent cables for a trial. They know that i did not find a reasonable and better cable then mines, but i had changed my speakers(rockport avior), their internal cables are transparent and probably reference line(not sure about it, any confirmation? )

My friends cables are in Reference and Opus line. Opus line is specially calibrate for equipment, reference line can be calibrate as low/high. Opus cables calibrated for audio research and esoteric, reference line calibrated for low(tube i guess). What these networks are doing can be find transparent Internet site. So none of these cables tune for my equipment. You have to evaluate my findings with this fact. IMHO tuned cable results would not be dramaticly different.

My first trial was with reference line speaker cable. From the first moment, system changed. It becomes more musical, each and every instrument has it is own space, darker background etc. Funny thing is, everthing I consider that as a strong point of my system, was better with this cable. It takes only 30 seconds to notice these differences. I keep the system like this for a couple of days, because asr needs time to get used to cables(funny/sad but true). Each passing hour, cable and asr getting used to each other, sound become more musical. I was very excited because if this ref. speaker cable make this difference, i couldnt imagine what would interconnects make. Well the outcome was different then i had thought. Ref. line interconnects did not make the same dramatic difference like speaker cables. But who knows, aq volcano and sky are different lines, they usually match with each other, maybe, but maybe sky has a higher place in food chain. Who knows, so i decided to try opus line(yes i am very lucky). Opus is the highest point in Transparent, so I expacted a clear winner......

Shortly, opus is better then sky and transparent ref. interconnects, but and its a very serious but, opus ten times priceier then both of the cables, and it is not playing ten times better(I am aware of diminishing returns but >). You may pick opus in a blind test, but i think nobody would pay 20k for this kind of better.

Firstly i was frustrated, but then imho solved puzzle. Asr's are very different electronics, their designer especially focus on(many things but one of them)background silence, and also transparent cables focus on this too. I tried opus, reference, sky between asr phono pre and asr amp. . I think transparent cables between two asr's can not do what they are suppose to do. Unique structure of asr's limiting transparent network abililities. If you look for the Phono pre's battery/power supply it has a immense buffering capacity to maintain stable/clear power. I think this feature is limiting the power of network boxes in transparent. I did not try any other network cable like MIT, but i have a strong opinion that the results would be the same.

I do not try opus speaker cables yet, weekend maybe, i have very high expectations from them, because speaker cable networks may do their job, asr is sending signal to them and rest is up to speaker cable.

This post is not a review or a question i am aware of that, but i do think it is an interesting(for everyone) and kind of important experience(for asr users). When this kind of thing happens, my first reference point is audiogon, and then search engines.. I think this kind of experiment deserved to be shared, because i did not find anything about the subject anywhere.....