Any knowledge on Zcable? - Page 3

I assume it has been burned in already, because it's a used Live V4. Like I mentioned in my first few posts, the whole point of getting the V4 was to see if Zcable really had something going here or if they were just full of marketing B.S., and if it turned out they had something good, I'd springboard up to their top of the line Live V5.

Truth be told, botchki's first post more or less really mirrors my experience so far, as of first impressions, and with what cables I have on hand at the moment. The first impressions were enough for sure though that I just simply had to audition the Live V5. My next couple of nights is going to be spent trying to find some weakness in the Live V4 through A/Bing...last night, I just kept it in the whole time because it was just, *WOW*. Much as I'd like to sprinkle "blow away" on every other sentence, I'm still of the qualitative and quantitative mind, so I'm going to try to get down to the "why" or "how" first before saying anything more. Lest we have VD all over again. I know wow factors can wear off easily, that's where I want to head next.

Yeah, the UPS man just handed me the package with the Live V5 inside 15 minutes ago. Now preburning them in on my Tivoli's line out for some instant gratification fun tonight.

The V5 will obviously require much further burn in. Out of the box it has a colder midrange than the fully burned in V4 did. I'm closing in on about 100 hours now, trying to get it up to 2-300 hours before saying anything about the V5.

The Live V4s I'm a bit more familiar with at this point...not conclusively, but enough to mention their obvious strength and perhaps some weaknesses.

The short and simple on what stunned me about the V4 is this: what I paid for it, and that it is far, far more revealing than all of the cables I had heard to date, surpassing even my previous resolution reference the Kimber Select 1030. Upon first listen, if you had told me the Live V4 costed $1k+, I wouldn't have even blinked. The amount of detail it reveals is what I would expect of a cable costing upwards of $1k+. I'm not equating this as a "bang for the buck", and I would expect say, the Valhalla, to be even more revealing. But, Zcable's Lives are definitely up, up there with the best of them at this.

I don't believe my system is ideal at the moment to audition the Lives. With some recordings, I'll end up with a feeling as though the background were too brightly lit. This is different from the system being quantitatively too bright. Instead of hearing a cymbal come out too harsh or loud, it's like observing a band playing before a sunrise; you get distracted by the bright background. I believe this could be worked around through synergy, as leaving two of the silver based Zu Mother power cords in my system combined with the V4 is lending the whole system a hyper detailed feel. Replacing the Mother behind the Arcam CD23 with a copper based power cord has already eased the system back into a more relaxed state. But now the problem is the copper PC brings the soundstage presence upclose, and the system loses the feeling of depth. Obviously a better copper PC is probably needed here. Replacing the Mother behind the Stax amp with a copper PC is no good...the bass becomes way too bloated and things get horribly blurred together.

And, that's where I currently am. I had a lot of people contacting me about how the Lives were, so I just wanted to toss something out. If I have any reserves at the moment, it would be whether the Lives will end up being too detailed for long term listening. I would without any reserve though consider the Lives worthy of going head to head with the best of them out there, limited only be system synergy and personal preference.

I'm actually right in the middle of comparing the V5 now to the V4 these days, with the V4 currently back in my system. It's probably best to reserve comments till after this comparison part is over. I can say the V5 is certainly very, very similar to the V4, and any difference is well into diminishing returns, i.e. not hugely obvious. The big kicker is whether the difference is really for the better...or for the worse. Again, I want to make absolutely sure of everything before saying anything about the V5.

Yes, Mark sent me a bunch of Z-sleeves to try in my system as well. I was actually the first recipient of them. I don't feel that they make a tremendous difference, other than blackening the spacing between notes and adding just a slightly better sense of PRaT.