Some time ago
@Rayon posted about his experience with Shunyata Venom cabling, which got me curious. Few weeks back I had the experience with AQ Niagara 1200 and Blizzard cables that left me shocked.
So naturally I decided to get my hands on some high end XLR interconnects and see how deep the rabbit hole goes ... and I still don't know how deep it goes (lol), but I know that it is real and it goes really deep!
So first of all, I echo experiences
@Rayon had, May + Bliss + TC not only reacts to power a lot, but also reacts to the interconnect in pretty extreme ways. I went through a few "reasonably priced" studio grade interconnects I had in a box over the years, each one of them sounded slightly different, but differences were around 2-3% I would say, nothing drastic, some had a bit leaner mids, some a bit fuller mids and treble and so on, but you could easily say "all cables sound more less the same" and stop there ... and if it wasn't for
@Rayon s post and my recent experience with power I would've probably stopped there ...
But I found a good deal on 2 AQ XLRs, AudioQuest Sky gen2 (silver cores, old construction) and AudioQuest Earth (high end copper cores, modern construction) in used market for about 350 euro a piece and I bought them. One thing to note, I learned that Sky can often be counterfeit (it's very common actually) ... after close investigation I have reasons to believe mine could be authentic bc it passes all tests and seems to have silver cores, but you can never be sure unfortunately with Sky in particular so let's keep that in mind.
So the sound difference between Earth and Sky is MONUMENTAL. First of all Sky is relatively muted with soft top end and really spacious fleshed out mids and good bass. It sounds as smooth as the smoothest "studio grade" cables I had, but with a lot more filled out mids and good bass. It plays really well with TC, not even tracks with the most offensive treble sound offensve on the TC, it is very smooth, and it also enhances the midrange fullness, so it gels very well with the TC. Sky sounds quite similar to the best "studio grade" cables I have, there is a jump in SQ, but it's not a huge difference, I would say 5-7%, probably worth if if you want the system to be smoother and fuller.
Now Earth ... that one blew me away, I was expecting maybe a sightly diffferent sound to the Sky, maybe even warmer bc it's copper ... hmm ... well, it sounds completely different! probably 20-30% different. Earth in comparison is sharp, it has ridiculous amount of air (sharp air), very strong bass, almost overpowering, in general everything sounds a bit closer than on Sky but it's A LOT clearer, crisper, and a lot more extended. The difference is monumental, it's not a veil being lifted, it's like plugging in a different headphone all together. It presents "air between instruments" in such a striking way, I've never heard anything like that before. There is a drawback with TC though, the treble can get very sharp and on recordings with any hints of sharp and offensive treble it is pretty much unlistenable ... on the flipside it pulls out insane detail from tracks with soft and muted treble. Also bass can get overwhelming on this cable ... I'm not sure I said "oh that's too much bass" often in my life when it comes to dynamics and slam, but with this if there's a lot of bass in a track it can get out of control at times ...
... so ... shocking right. 2 cables with a few years of engineering progress between them, one solid silver (potentially counterfeit bc you never know) and one 99% authentic high end copper ... totally, I mean TOTALLY different sound from just changing the cable. Crazy!
If you want the best for dynamics and some planars, I would honestly look at a higher end tube amp. I have HA6a, but it has quirks, so maybe a different EL34/KT88 amp would be better, or a 300B amp, or HA6a if you don't mind quirks like possibly higher noise floor and not the best volume control.
also it depends on your power environment in general, if you already have really clean power then you may not see much gain or even get detrimental effects in extreme cases ...
