I've owned a Euphoria cable for a couple of months, and I thought it was about time to do a proper comparison between my all-silver Euphoria and my copper and copper-silver hybrid Gladius.
My listening chain was:
DAC: Mojo Audio Mystique X SE
Amp: LTA Ultralinear+
Headphones: ZMF Caldera, Focal Utopia 2022 (using adapters, since the cables are terminated in mini-XLR), Rosson RAD-0 (using adapters), ZMF Atrium Closed
Cables: Focal/ZMF/Rosson stock cables (copper), Arctic Gladius (OCC copper and copper/silver hybrid), Arctic Euphoria (OCC silver)
Before I talk about how they sound, I want to address the size and weight of both the Gladius and Euphoria. They’re both very thick and heavy, so probably not fit for purpose for iems, but at the same time, they’re both soft and supple, and drape really well, so I didn’t really notice the weight.
I put my Utopia 22 on and started playing “
Strange Fruit” by Dominique Fils-Aimé. This is a great track to test female vocals, as Dominique puts her phenomenal voice front and center, and then layers of harmonizing vocals are layered around her. Moving from the stock cable to the Gladius, the tonality was similar but the Gladius had a little more treble extension and more texture in her voice. The biggest change from one cable in the next was the stage getting wider. I’ve been a tonality-first person in the past when it came to new audio equipment, not caring that much about stage. This time, however, I became captivated by all the backing vocals spread around me.
Excitedly, I tried the same stock-to-Gladius comparison with my RAD-0, another headphone with an intimate stage. With the Gladius, it was intimate no more. Moving onto “
W.M.A.” by Pearl Jam, it was wonderful to listen to the drum beats all around my head.
Switching from the Gladius to the Euphoria, I was pleasantly surprised to find the stage becoming even bigger, vertically and horizontally.
From a frequency response perspective, the Euphoria sounds more neutral/less warm than the Gladius. Playing my brightness test track, “
Kill V. Maim” by Grimes, my headphones didn’t sound brighter, but rather there was a layer of warmth removed from the mids, which actually made the music sound more natural.
This reminded me of my previous go-to silver cable, the Double Helix Molecule Elite, which I had been using with both the Utopia 22 and RAD-0, to reign in some of the warmth of those headphones. There was a very similar tone between the Molecule Elite and the Euphoria in the mids and treble, but similar to my experience with the stock cables, the stage became much smaller with the Molecule Elite. It makes me wonder if the weight of the mids and the expansive stage are caused by the massive amounts of wire in both the Gladius and the Euphoria.
Wondering what other differences I would find between my silver cables, I tried “
Ooh La La” by Goldfrapp. As soon as the pulsing synths kicked in, I was shocked at how much more body I could hear in the mids when using the Euphoria. Not sure which was more natural, but who cares, being hit by the wall of synths was something special, and I immediately started playing more and more synth-based tracks, from Gary Numan’s “
Are Friends Electric” to Daft Punk’s “
Giorgio By Moroder”.
Playing the same tracks on the Gladius, I got a similar sensation of more body in the synths than both the stock cables and the Molecule Elite, but less than the Euphoria.
And it was the same story when it came to guitar music. Listening to “
Wah-Wah” by George Harrison was wonderful using the Gladius, but when I switched to the Euphoria, the guitars became visceral, with added detail and texture, and I forgot that I was testing cables and spent an hour just playing guitar music through the Euphoria.
Once I recovered, I decided to try some bass tracks, starting with “
Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads and “
Bullet In The Head” by Rage Against The Machine. In both cases, the Gladius had more texture than the stock cable, and the Euphoria had more texture than the Gladius. Interestingly, the bass lines with the Euphoria were not just more detailed, but they also had more weight than with any of the other cables. The Euphoria destroys the myth that silver cables are thin and bright.
Moving onto everyone’s favorite sub-bass track, “
Chameleon” by Trentemøller, both the Gladius and the Euphoria went as low as could be, and once again, the Euphoria had just a touch more weight and texture in the sub-bass.
My findings were pretty similar for the Utopia 22, Caldera and RAD-0, where the Gladius had more treble extension and more weight/body in the mids than the stock cable, and the Euphoria had even more of everything. Unsurprisingly, I preferred the Euphoria with all of those headphones.
However, when I switched to the Atrium Closed, even though my test results were the same across all the cables, I found that I preferred the Gladius, and I think that’s because I don’t want to diminish the AC’s warmth or tighten up its laid back sound, so I didn’t appreciate the extra detail and neutrality of the Euphoria as much. One of those YMMV moments, where "better" is whatever makes you happy.
All in all, I’m glad I have both the Gladius and the Euphoria, because they sound different enough from each other that I can try both with a pair of headphones to see which one sounds just right. If I had to pick just one, I would of course pick the Euphoria but that’s because I directly compared them. Without that A-B comparison, I would have been very happy with the musicality of the Gladius, and I think it’s a bargain compared to many other much higher priced cables.
If anyone has gotten this far and is doubting everything I wrote above because “all cables sound the same”, I’ll finish up with a story about a meet I went to a few weeks ago, where I went to a friend’s house with a bunch of other friends. We all brought various pieces of equipment but I also brought the Gladius and Euphoria with me. It was enjoyable to watch their faces go from surprise to a big smile when they switched from the stock cable to either the Gladius or Euphoria, followed by the comment of “how does the cable do that?”.