Adrenaline Impressions
I've had the pleasure of burning in the Adrenaline cable used for the Danish head-fi meet as well as briefly reviewing the cable afterwards in my own home. I will now share what I learned.
First of all, the cable is quite thicker than the regular stock cable, but it is still very flexible and solid feeling and not microphonic at all, unlike cables with Techflex sleeving which are much stiffer to handle.
The XLR connectors are of good quality and connects securely with the female/female adapter with Neutrik connectors that I'm using to connect my headphones directly to my balanced source. The connectors at the other end of the cable look virtually identical to the stock connectors with the exception that they're missing the tailpiece. This part was without a doubt omitted because it would prevent use of the thicker wire within the cable.
This does mean that you need to be very careful that you don't accidentally pull in the rubber-coated strain relief when disconnecting the cable from the headphone, otherwise you risk pulling out the centerpiece of the connector along with cable, leaving the outer metal shell of the connector sitting in the headphone. Please note that this doesn't harm the cable or headphone at all, because the centerpiece is firmly attached to the headphone cable itself and will easily slide back into the outer shell when reinserted. It's just something to watch out for.
So how does the cable sound? Well, this is the hardest part of the review, because we didn't do any direct A/B tests using the two balanced HD800 headphones present at the meet. Therefore I did the comparison at home comparing the balanced Adrenaline cable to my balanced stock cable with black Neutrik NC3MXX connectors with silver-plated pins.
I used a PC with RME DIGI96/8 PAD soundcard connected via AES/EBU XLR out to my Weiss DAC1-MK2 with female/female adapters on the balanced analog outputs in order to directly connect the HD800 to the Weiss DAC. Before the head-fi meet the cable was burned in for 149 hours using the IsoTek CD @ 90 dB measured with a RadioShack SPL Meter directly next to the left driver.
Going from the stock cable to the Adrenaline, the first thing I noticed was that the sound became a little bit more focused and tight and slightly more dynamic in its presentation, in particular the bass. It wasn't a night and day difference but it was definitely noticeable in my quiet listening room. The second thing I noticed was that the character of the treble had changed. Whereas the stock cable treble has a tendency to sound somewhat harsh at times, the adrenaline sounded a little bit easier on the ears but just as detailed as the stock, giving the overall impression of a slightly more comfortable listening experience. Make no mistake, though. The headphone is still very unforgiving, it just loses a bit of the harshness that may subtract from the listening experience.
At this point I would probably be expected to say something about whether the cable is a worthwhile upgrade. For me the changes are definitely desirable and there were no detractors making me want to skip the upgrade. That being said, to me the improvements weren't large enough to warrant the price tag. I would personally be more likely to go with a cable in the $300-400 range. However, I'm quite sure that many people won't think twice about spending their bucks on this cable when they've already decided that the sound of the HD800 is what they're after. In this case it might make sense to try to attain those last few percent of sonic bliss in order to bring out the best of these magnificent headphones.
I would like to thank Mark from Lawton Audio for giving me and the rest of the Danish head-fi meet the opportunity to try out this cable. It was a good learning experience and much appreciated. Thanks!
