MIT Love 'em or Hate 'em

I don't think it's sour grapes or anything, it's just sales. I own some Classe equipment, and when I visit a store that doesn't carry the Classe line, they are sure to tell me what junk it is. MIT was one of the first underground cables (not Monster) to make it big in the late 80's and early 90's. Many resented them, and rebelled when they became successful, because the anti-establishment had become the establishment. I've heard MIT sound wonderful in certain systems, I've even tried them in my system, without much luck. I prefer Tara Labs cables myself. To each their own.

I went from Kimber to MIT and am just amazed. At first they did not sound too different but after a few hundred hours, a very special sound creeped up and it impresses me very much. The imaging, soundstage, and bass are incredible. I just love mine and don't care what anyone says. People forget that components, cables, room, placement, and the listener, form a system. If any one part is different, you cannot compare two systems to each other. I use T2 biwire speaker and proline xlr interconnects. Arthur

Here's my 2 cents. MIT, Transparent, etc - these are filters (and don't give me that caca about how "wire is a filter too" and bla bla bla) - dude, these are filters - big ones, small ones, high pass, low pass, all pass, etc.

Now, if you've bought your rig because the quality of the components is high, how much "fixing" do you think that they'd need? I mean, if I had something like Wilson Audio X-1 Grand Slamms being pushed by a couple of Boulder amplifiers - I'd be pretty secure that my system doesn't need some filter box on it to "fix" the sound - I'd want wire that got the hell out of the way and let these incredibly high resolution components do what they were designed to do! Hell - I PAID huge bucks to have the best, why in the hell would they need to be fixed???

Now if I had some mid-fi rig that was weak, I'd want to filter the crap out of it and hopefully get it sounding ok by filtering out the nasty parts. Makes sense, no?

So there's a relationship here - an inverse relationship: The crappier your system, the more you need filtration, and the more expensive your filterboxes get. The better your system is, the less filtration you'll need until you get to real high end sound - where you'd probably want to get the dang filters out of the way and let your system escape the bindings and bloom into its full potential.

I think people tend to like filtered cables more because they get big, sexy boxes attached to their cables and that looks like its worth more and doing more for the sound than other wires. As far as I'm concerned filters can be a destructive gimmick ((because filters are by their nature "subtractive") that look good but limit the true performance potential of any truly high resolution system they are hooked up to.

And if this doesn't make sense to you, think about it this way: If these black boxes are so good, why in the heck don't the speaker companies and electronics guru manufacturers employ them in their components? I mean, I'm sure the filter companies would absolutely love to license their "technology" to anyone willing to pop a sticker in their speaker or electronic box ... but you just don't see it.

And if THAT doesn't make sense to you, what about the fact that you can go into JoBlow's HiFi and buy the "X" model of your favorite filterbox cable and hook it up to your rig ... only the filterbox company has no idea what you're hooking it up to, and JoBlow has no idea what you're hooking it up to - so how can this generic filter work optimally for your specific system? Answer: It can't. It's generic which, by it's definition, means it's not optimized/optimal.

OK - I'm done ranting.

I tried a pair of MIT interconnect cables with network boxes some time ago and was disappointed. Compared to Audioquest Diamond, the MITs had a quieter high end, and the music sounded much less dynamic. After a few hours, I developed the impression the music was being compressed, suffocated. Maybe they weren't adequately broken in, or I hadn't given them enough time to get used to them. After a few days, I couldn't stand it anymore and swapped back to the Diamonds. Sorry.

I own MIT's and love them -- but I needed to experiment with different types to get it right (finally settled on the ES version). Of course, how they sound depends on "your gear and your ear" (eh dautch?). I replaced my amps and speakers and will now experiment with new speaker cable. I may find nothing better, even with my new gear.

What I hate about the MIT's are the boxes. With the Oracle series, the boxes near the speakers are hard to work with and are very obtrusive (i.e., ugly). They provide me no joy, except for the neutral sound they help produce. By the way, the break in period is about a month.