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Curious How These Nordost Speaker Cables Do What They Do

For a day and a half I’ve been listening to Nordost Red Dawn Rev.II cables in my system(Quad VA-One and Dynaudio Excite X14),courtesy of a friend who is in turn demo’ing some ungodly expensive upgrade...My reference are the Acoustic Zen Epoch..What these cables have brought to my system are:
The first thing I noticed is the music seems to come easier,ie:a touch louder than normal at low levels and it’s so clean I find I’m listening louder..
wider,deeper,and sharper defined imaging and staging...deeper,better defined and tonally richer bass...increased low level detail retrieval...a treble that is not as easy on the ears but seems better defined,almost sharp and I can see where some systems could move way to far into bright with these cables...
So I attribute the cleaner/sharper tone to the addition of high purity silver to the cable but I wonder what it is about the materials and construction that allow the bass,imaging and staging changes and especially the ease which music seems to come now?Any comments(from those who have found cables do matter)and NOT from those who believe they are snake oil PLEASE!!!
freediver

Showing 2 responses by chefhat

chefhat
19 posts
 
Freediver, I see these cables come coiled in the box, but are you (and anyone else on here who has them) using them partly coiled or have you completely straightened out the cable prior to use?

Any coiled section in the cable could potentially act as a capacitor and additional capacitance will likely change the tone (eq) of your system - regardless of what your cables are made from.

Sadly, for this debate, the only cable rule I buy into is the longer your run, the stouter your cable should be. If your Nordost Red Dawn Rev.II cables are much stouter than what went before and your runs are long - i.e. at least 5 meters, then this may be a factor. Have you tried good regular stout copper cable as a test?
chefhat
19 posts
 
Blimey - that’s a bold statement by a manufacturer:

"Although the cable signal is an alternating current, small impurities in the conductor act as diodes allowing signal flow to be better in one direction over time. This effect is also called quantum tunneling, w hich has been observed in experiments over 25 years ago. Regardless of the purity of the metal used, there are still diode effects in all conductors."

Whilst Quantum Tunneling is offered as an explainaion for certain phenomena (and tunnel diodes do indeed exist), I haven’t seen any evidence to link impurities in metals with this effect. Either way, how would they know in which direction these impurites were arranged? I wonder how they came up with that??!!


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