Nordost cable evaluation.

I shall now "eat my hat".

Quite a while ago Sean was expounding on the virtues of flat wire speaker cables. I was skeptical. Rather than trying to talk me into submission Sean simply offered to send me some wires to check out. It being summer, I have been very slow getting around to testing these wires, but today I did it.

There is not the slightest doubt that Nordost Flatline Gold MK II, three meters, is dramatically better than a similar length of AWG 14 stranded "speaker wire". I was concerned that I would not be able to hear a difference, or that extensive listening would be necessary, but it was immediately obvious that the Nordost cable was better.

To test the wires I threw together a temporary system consisting of a pair of Dynaudio Gemini monitors and a pair of Kenwood LO7M power amps. I used a Tandberg 3008 preamp (which has a MONO switch and BALANCE control) and a HDCD recording of Mozart Piano concertos played on my Denon 2900 (Mod) player. One speaker was connected with a Nordost cable, and the other with ordinary AWG14 speaker wire. After checking that all signals were working properly, I pushed the MONO button, and swept the balance control left and right. In a matter of seconds I knew the Nordost cables were better. The sound was just clearer, and more "open". It was not subtle.

Of course I confirmed the results by swaping channels around, in case(for example) one power amp or speaker was working better.

This doesn't mean that the Nordost cables are the best: after all they were compared only with elcheapo 14AWG stranded. But it does convince me that speaker cables are not all created equal. I guess I need to upgrade.