Valkyrja speaker cable versis valhalla


Okay I am curious if anyone has heard these two cables in their system and compared them.

I currently have a valhalla interconnect between my amp and cd player.

I have the emmlabs digital cable between the dac and cdsd.

I own Wilson 7.0 puppy speakers and rowland 302 amp.

I am currently still using my old nordost red dawn version one speaker cables.

I feel my system is pretty sweet but as an audiophile I wonder whether upgrading the cable from the red dawn would make a palpable difference. I am loath to spend even more money and not hear a difference since the system is already pretty cherry.

Anyway I love the advice I have gotten on the audiogon over the years so fire away

thanks

Mike
karmapolice

Showing 1 response by gbmcleod

My comment cannot be directly addressed to the speaker cable. However, the interconnects in a manufacturer's line and the speaker cable are either very similar or else, the interconnect compensates for some 'weakness' in the speaker cable.
In this case, I have had Nordost Valhalla and Valkyrja interconnects, and Valhalla speaker cable. I have found that the Valkyrja interconnect is the equivalent of "Valhalla lite." It is the difference, in plainer terms, between ice milk and ice cream. In this case, particularly noticeable in the solidity of images themselves, which is a function of the midbass lightness (which exists in BOTH models). I have found the images with Valhalla (speaker cable) to be less solid than they are with, say, Shunyta Andromeda speaker cable. Also, one of the problems with this is that brass, as an example, will not sound as sonorous (rich, the way it sounds in real life) or as "weighty" as it does (in real life). I've puzzled over this quite a bit over the last 18 months. And then, in the December 2005 issue of TAS (which subscribers have), Jonathan Valin reviews Tara Zero interconnects/speaker cables and finds them to have much richer tonal color and declares that this exposes the Valhallas utter "insubstantiality" in terms of solidity. I'm going back to MIT interconnects, which I've owned over the years, since 1985. I have never found any other interconnects to match the richness of MIT, compared to real life. I do NOT suggest that Synergistic, or Tara or some others cannot reproduce brass correctly: only that MIT does it -- in spades. If your hierarchy is not "utter transparency," which frankly comes at the expense of tonal color, you might want to look into other brands. Transparency as the ultimate criterion is absurd:a French horn ALWAYS has a golden glow, even if you're in a bad room, and can only hear it vaguely at the back of the orchestra. For me, tone color is the criterion, but I lost my way over the years in the search for the most "transparent" cable. Don't lose yours.