AntiCables - first impressions

Well, I've finally decided to move back into the world of cables, having settled with Naim NAC-A5 for the past two years. I'd decided a while back that I wasn't going to spend big bucks this time around, as sure as fate I'd end up with either a tiny difference in sound quality and a disproportionate amount poorer, or buying a cable that I'd like but find that it won't be easily hidden. That last bit's important, y'see, given the fact that these days I have a wife to factor into the equation.

Having read in another place about these cheap, slim wires, and how many people were replacing big, expensive brand cables with them, I figured I'd give it a shot. After all, for the sake of £100 or so it was a risk that sat easier with me than blowing £1000 on a similar length of decent branded cables. You know the ones!

So, the cables have arrived today in a rather smaller box than expected. Inside were four 16' lengths of red wire and four matching jumper cables (my speakers are bi-wire but I wasn't about to risk 2x the price for eight 16' runs without dipping a tentative toe in first of all).

So, the first impression I got was that this wire isn't your normal cable. Most cables, even solid core DNM cable, is pretty flexible; its own weight will cause it to change shape. Not the AntiCables. They are easily molded into different shapes, but of themselves they aren't 'floppy' or particularly 'soft'. In fact, at first glance they look similar in dimension to the wire that coat hangers are made from, though not nearly as stiff. However, the first obstacle was getting these babies into a reasonably neat pair of runs, per side. Eventually I plan to route the speaker cables under the carpet or floorboards, but for now I wanted to get up and running to hear for myself if they really were the giant-killing speaker cables that many have claimed.

Before carrying on, I'd better give a little bit of detail on my system. It's a system in flux, due to the non-presence of my Resolution Audio Opus 21 cd player, which is away getting (hopefully) repaired. So, CD duties were placed upon a four year old Marantz DR6000 cd recorder with occasional fussy tendencies. For this reason, I'm unwilling to make the call on how these cables stack up in absolute terms - as the Marantz trails the Opus 21 in all areas and it's difficult to assess things like bass solidity, extension, transient speed and so on when the player is arguably not the last word in these area. Bring on the Opus, though that might take another week or more. The rest of the system comprises a Heavy-kitted SPacedeck into a Dyna P75 phono stage, a NOS kitted Eastern Electric MiniMax pre and power amp and a pair of rather sexy Audiophysic Avanti mkIII loudspeakers.

Because my stand-in cd source is limited in its capabilities, and because I haven't yet reset my deck since moving it to route the cables, initial listening is only really a comparison of the difference a speaker cable can make to a system.

With the NAC-A5, it's pretty clear to me that the Marantz isn't any great shakes at bass, detail and is not very transparent. The Opus 21 is (from memory) considerably better in all of these regards and so it ought to be, at 7x the retail (comparing new prices, here, not s/h; the DR6000 is discontinued and a good unit, in my case modified lightly by the addition of an after-market powerchord (captive stock one having been removed). Despite this, the Marantz isn't embarrassed by the rather up-market amps and speakers. They allow it to show its colours without it making a fool of itself. They're not so much flattering to it as accommodating.

Substituting the AntiCables - and you must bear in mind that they're brand new, cold (from shipping) and no doubt need breaking in, and also that these are really just my initial impressions and nothing more rigorous - reveals a surprisingly capable cd front-end. The flabby bass isn't so flabby, though I've lost a little bit of bass weight with the AntiCables. From the lower midrange up, however, the AntiCables are quite surprisingly good. Miles better than the A5. Things have, as it were, snapped into focus. Focus is perhaps the best word for it: it's as if the A5 were a little bit like a soft-focus lens on a camera - flattering more to the plain than the beautiful, by omission and 'smearing'. Not that A5 is a bad cable - to many, it's the bees knees - but that the AntiCables are quite simply, on initial listening, way out ahead. The hifi attributes are certainly there - air, imagery, layering, texture, timbre, tonality and clarity - and the boogie that A5 excels in is intact. I suppose it's like going from 35mm film to medium format - the basics remain but there's just more to see, more detail and creamy tonality.

That said, I'm not 100% sold on the cable: there is, at present, a curious sense of lightening in the bass, and I'm not so used to this hyper-detail, which is all the more extraordinary given the modest front-end. Tonight, I will set the TT and have a proper listen with a truly great front-end, to see where the land lies with regard to analogue. However, I'm seriously impressed. The bass issues could simply be that I need to reconsider my speaker placement or toe-in, or a figment of break-in. The rest reminds me of my Nordost SPM days - insofar as moving from a DNM Reson via Red Dawn to SPM (all s/h) - brought improvements in detail, air, resolution, timing - but the difference here is that (a) the AntiCables do it for a fraction of the cost, and don't have that slightly lean sound that the Nordost cables did (at least up to SPM) in my experience. SPM was lean but muscular; the AntiCables may be more balanced than the pricy (now discontinued) Nordost cable, though this is all from my memory of a different system with different speakers, so I'm not going to be so bold as to suggest the AntiCables are better than the SPM - but they're certainly closer to SPM and the high end cable sound than they are to the cables around their own price range.

More tomorrow (post vinyl) if you're interested (and perhaps you should be, it might have a similarly revolutionary effect on your system!). Then again, perhaps the Emperor's New Clothes will be revealed when I hook up the cakestand...

John

 

This is all very interesting and thank you for a good post on your initial impressions. I'm currently having a re-think on speaker cables, having proved to myself that cables do indeed make a difference (I always thought that they did, but I need to make sure it wasn't just part of my 'belief system', so I made some cables myself using good quality studio cable and good quality terminations ~ I'll just say that there was a significant difference between them and the Odyssey I had been using). I like the detail & air that silver type cables can provide but I don't like the harshness that I've experienced with them. I'd like to stay with copper, so if Anti Cables can provide the detail withour the harshness then I may well have to try them out!

What is your view on how good the coating is? As I'd probably be using these twisted together, do you feel there is any danger of a short?

I also note that Anti Cable are stating that no probelms exist with unequal lengths. Do you (or indeed any other forum member) have any views on this? Unequal lengths would certainly save even more money!

Well, I await your further thoughts & insights with great interest.

 

Not a fan of unequal lengths.... I like to load the amp the same so the psu's giving the same effort on both channels. Though I can't say I've heard the difference...its more a comfort blanket approach. Nice review by the way !

 

Good questions. The coating is supposed to be pretty tough, and tye instruction sheet talks about twisting them together though at present I've just run the two wires per speaker close together. My eventual plan is indeed to twist them, but I'll do that just before running them under the carpet. I don't feel there's any danger of a short unless the coating was damaged in some way, and I think it's pretty hard.

As far as unequal lengths go, I considered it, and emailed to ask for more details. Basically the answer is that ideally equal lengths makes most sense, but running one side shorter than the other doesn't have quite the same effect as doing this with regular speaker cables would have. For what it's worth, in a second system (Linn Classik and my old Royd Doublets) I'm running 2m and 4m lengths of DNM Reson speaker cable (odd lengths left over from days of yore) and I can't hear any difference*.

I've been running the cable now for a few hours, and I'm trying not to be too enthusiastic, as I've done this before and then realised that the 'new and different' wasn't necessarily 'better'. But what I will say is this: any cable-skeptic members who don't believe that differences exist between cables should pop by - I know people talk about 'huge differences' when in fact they are really subtle, but this is something beyond that. Put another way, it's a big enough difference to my ear to make me hear things for the first time that I didn't knowingly notice with the Opus21/A5 combo. Why this should be I do not know - the Opus 21 is a much more detailed and capable player, so I can only guess that I've not really heard what my system can really do until now**.

At this point in time I'm as happy as a dog with two... well, you know. However, I'm reserving final judgement until my Opus 21 returns (fixed) and I've had a chance to listen longer term. What I will add is the hype appears to me to be entirely justified - and that's rare.

John

* it may exist but if it can only be identified by super-critical listening I don't care, for in this second system all it generally does is allow my wife to listen to the radio and we pipe the Freeview box through it.

** or, I could regret writing this tomorrow morning when I realise it's all a smoke and mirrors trick. Only time will tell, but I do feel these cables might well be the biggest bargain going.

 

The red coating sounds similar to the stuff on the cables I use - allegedly military spec aircraft wire (very slim silver plated copper with extremely thin but seemingly robust insulation). In fact having looked at the anticables site they look quite similar due to their small diameter, but are obviously not the same construction.

At $1.25/foot (as it says on the website) unterminated, it could be an inexpensive experiment!

 

Yes, you reflect my naturally cautious view. However, the electrical difference between each output due to inequal length of cable would be:

Resistance: 0.0254 ohms
Inductance: 2.4uH
Capacitance: 0.384nF

the above are extremely small. I'm not enough of an electronics engineer to know how much, if at all, the amp would be affetced by such small differences. Comments, anyone?

 

I use a rule of thumb developed on a well-reasoned web page somewhere: for all non-weird cable designs (reasonable resistance, capacitance, inductance) you won't go wrong if the lengths are unequal by a ratio of no more than 4:1. If you need to see the source, you could search on google for suitable words. For the question of different propagation time, I wrote a spreadsheet to satisy myself that we are talking possibly micrometers at worst with a 10:1 length difference.

 

Good to hear that something or other has snapped into focus, and the boogie that A5 excels in is intact. More to come, no doubt, once they have burned in.

 

I think you will find that's it's the same Kapton military spec cable that's had an outer layer added. I bought some last year and I must say it makes a very good interconnect as well. Ideal too for making replacement Naim interconnect leads, although getting through the tough as nails insulation is by no means easy.

 

you should wait more than 400 hours for getting solid, tight and natural bass and you should not move your cables in burn in time periode. i think cables are so important for soundstage, pace and extension.

 

No, no. At least 5000 hours. 400 is barely lukewarming the extensions.

 

i'm sorry
it's my experience with van den hul revelation cable.
be sure it's true
sound break after 300 hours and will be full harmonic over 400 hours

 

I use cable from here:

http://www.iplacoustics.co.uk/ipl_cables.htm

I use the SC2/HU1 combo as suggested, just had a certain 'rightness' about it over my Chord Odyssey, which went for a very good price on ebay (3 times what the IPL stuff cost me).

 

Yes, and this cable differently. I stick by 5000 to make sure extensions good.

 

Do you have to keep an accurate time or can you just guess??

 

Accurate stopwatch.

4999.9 hours - no good at all; 5000 hours - 'snaps into focus with good extensions'.

 

ahhhhhhhhh I see

 

And what then? Do they over-burn? You have 59min's of listening time before having to replace them and start again?

 

Then it gets better for a week, then worse (no boogie) then a bit better, then(cont page 94 of the Naim Forum)