I had both the Sony made Kimber and the direct Kimber Axios here in the house to use with the Z1R and WM1Z. The difference is not inconsequential between the two with the Axios easily demonstrating its superiority. Actually the stock cable holds up quite well comparatively speaking vs. the Sony Kimber. I would say the people should either stick with the stock cable or jump straight to the Axios - some may find the Sony Kimber version to be more of a side step.
The Z1R continues to amaze me - its scalability is incredible. By scalability I refer to the ability to dramatically improve depending on the cables, and most importantly, the source which is used to drive it.
Coming from two channel it is the last part, the source used, which rings most important. It is commonly accepted wisdom in two channel land, at least where I hang out (flat earth UK brands such as Linn and Naim) that one should spend the bulk of their budget on the SOURCE. The smaller part of the budget goes towards the speakers. This was one of the prime selling points of the Linn LP12 turntable. Think about it - the music, the information, is contained in the vinyl grooves. If you do not maximize the equipment to ensure that you are extracting all there is to get from the grooves, getting all the music out, then the best speakers in the world will never be able to make things sound better - if you are leaving some of the music trapped in the grooves. Quite simply put the speakers cannot make out something that is not there. So it is useless to spend huge money on speakers - and less on the turntable. Spend your money on trying to get as much music as possible from out of the grooves.
Much in the same way things are identical when assembling a headphone system. One can have the best headphone available - a Utopia, a Stax, the Z1R - yet a Mojo is only capable of extracting a certain amount of information from the audio files, a Hugo even more, a WM1Z yet more, and finally some of the uber DAC's - DAVE, Linn DS etc. - which can extract ALL of the music there is in the files - music which lower DAC's such as a Mojo leave behind.
So - getting back to the point at hand - what impresses me about the Z1R is what kind of performance it gives me out of a Mojo - how said performance gets that much better with the WM1Z - and finally the dramatic leap which comes when using some of the uber DAC's.
The Z1R is capable of many things - its only limiting factors are the source used, and other ancillary components such as the cable etc.
So if people only hear the Z1R with the stock cable out of a Mojo (maybe even with MP3's instead of FLAC files) - then they are missing so much of what this headphone is capable of giving - and they should temper/qualify their opinions about its performance accordingly.
