Believe it or not, I had my previous set of cables for over seven years. They were the Magnan Type Vi balanced, MIT Digital Reference, AudioQuest Sterling bi-wire speaker and Synergistic Research power cords for my Theta, Krell and Dunlavy set-up. I chose them after a massive search and auditioning period and was quite content because I could finally distinguish an instrument in a David & David song as being a guitar with the 50% silver speaker wire.
A year and a half ago I began another upgrade period and bought a Stereovox HDXV digital cable, along with a Conrad-Johnson D/A-3 DAC. That DAC being single-ended, I began another massive cable search and auditioning period that lasted three months.
I ended up, quite unexpectedly, with a complete recabling with Sonoran Plateau cables from Star Sound Technologies (www.audiopoints.com). They were only $500.00 a set for interconnects, digital, speaker and power cords, a lot cheaper than anything else I tried. The kicker came when I discovered as soon as I auditioned the Sonoran cables that my 'guitar' in the David & David song was clearly a synthesizer.
I have a feeling that I'll be dying with these still hooked up. The reason I say this is that even though they are copper and not silver, they are faster and clearer than anything else I tried, and I'm talking up to $2,000.00 a set cables. I'm hearing distinguishable instruments and tonal colors that I never heard before.
I think the secret is in the steel micro-bearing shielding, because you can lay the cables on top of each other and it doesn't affect them. They also seem to act consistently with any equipment, at least everything I've gotten through this upgrade. I went from Krell to Musical Fidelity to Herron, Theta to Musical Fidelity and Dunlavy to B&W Silver Signatures and everything is still fantastic with these cables. I even prefer and use the Sonoran copper speaker wires over the Kimber silver speaker cable that come with the Silver Signatures.
It's actually a good feeling to be so content and comfortable with the cables that I can think about upgrading equipment and adding a turntable and phono pre-amp, and not even consider the issue of cables.
