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i was going to buy the starlight but now the forest sounds perfect at such a low price. a 30$ cable sounds better than 85-100$ cables? wow. if so audioquest must be a really good company. can you describe a bit what makes the forest sound better than starlight and gt2 and what about carbon sounds better than forest and how big is the difference?
Audioquest has been a good cable company for a long time - of course, so has Wireworld. (There I go again, right?
But yes, I did definitely prefer the Forest to the Starlight and GT2. What were the things that made me prefer the Forest? Let me give you a quick intro to my personal "philosophy of sound quality" if you want to call it that, so you know where I'm coming from.
Listening to music ain't rocket science. Don't make it harder than it is. Couple of really easy ways to tell whether what you're hearing is closer to what the artist intended:
- Probably easiest of all: You hear greater differences between the sounds of different tracks. There are virtually always differences between the sounds of two different recordings, and even between the sounds of different tracks on the same recording. If everything sounds similar, one or more of your components is either not passing along all the info it's receiving from the recording, or imparting a 'sound' of its own, or both. The converse is that the greater the differences between tracks, the more information your components are passing through from the recording, and/or the less sound of their own they're imparting - i.e., they're better components.
- You hear more realistic-sounding instruments or (especially) vocals. (Especially vocals since the human voice is the 'instrument' with which we're all most familiar.) Don't concentrate on whether there's good bass or treble; that way lies madness, because there's no reference for it in real life - no one ever left a Pavarotti recital raving about the quality of the 'treble.' In fact, don't concentrate at all. Just listen to whether the voice sounds natural. You likely hear people's voices every single day, so it's not hard at all to tell in an instant whether the voices coming from your speakers or headphones sound right.
- Greater emotion is conveyed by the same music. This is another simple test where concentrating too hard can be antithetical to best results. Listening to music is an emotional experience. All sorts of sound quality goodness is packed into the simple conclusion as to whether a piece of music moves you as it should. Are there good microdynamics so subtle vocal shadings and phrasing are communicated effectively? What about the handling of macrodynamics so crescendos make the hair on the back of your neck stand up? Effective reproduction of transient attacks so percussion instruments sound real and communicate rhythmic excitement? (This has been put in terms of "Does it have you tapping your feet?" Of course there's always some wag saying Hey, I'm not about to be tapping my feet to my Archie Shepp/Gregorian chant/etc. recording here. Yes, we know.)
So in that context, what did I hear from these cables? It's easiest to begin with the Furutech. It was substantially worse than the other cables. There was little real detail, almost a muddy quality, but always a pseudo-detailed "zippiness" or "twang" to the sound that over-emphasized things like fingers sliding on guitar strings. Everything sounded similar, and looking at my first principle above, we know that can't be good.
The Starlight was a good cable - voices and instruments sounded nice and natural, it gave quite a bit more "bloom" and drama to the sound in crescendoes, good soundstage. Nice listening experience, nothing really bad to say about it, and I could live with the cable if I had to.
The Forest provided more natural-sounding vocals in particular. I like my demos to include several recordings of vocals that aren't heavily produced, with the vocalist "out front" in a sparse mix - for example, Rosanne Cash's "The List," especially the song "500 Miles;" Alison Krauss's "Paper Airplane;" and Gillian Welch's "The Harrow and the Harvest." On these types of songs, the Forest provided more actual detail and microdynamics, making subtle phrasing and vocal shadings more apparent, so giving a more natural sound overall. There were better macrodynamics and transients, too, giving recordings more drama and emotional excitement. I could be happily satisfied with this as my USB cable.
The Carbon did all that the Forest had done, but more so. Even more natural sounding vocals, with better microdynamics. More detail in the vocals, e.g., lyrics were more easily understandable. On something as plainly recorded as Gillian Welch's voice on "Hard Times" from The Harrow and the Harvest, it sounds real, like she's standing in the room singing. Better, bigger soundstage (on tracks recorded that way - I have a recording called "Stay Awake," of artists doing Disney songs, and it has Tom Waits singing "Heigh Ho" so down and dirty you can feel the Seven Dwarves working all day in a mine with picks and shovels; if you get a soundstage higher than about 3 feet on this song, there's something wrong); greater localization of instruments so you can follow the instrumental lines better. More "bloom" and drama where instruments join in with the vocalist.
Between the Carbon and the Forest, IMO it just comes down to what you can reasonably afford. I could happily have kept the Forest in my system forever if $100 had felt like more than I wanted to spend on a cable. But in the context of my entire system, $100 didn't feel like too much, so I bought it. Of course, if it hadn't sounded a fair amount better than the Forest I would have returned it, just as I did the Starlight and the GT2. But it did sound better, so I kept it.
