[Review] my favourite online review ever.

the cd5 is a good cd player... IF you listen to certain types of music (mainly rock and upbeat electronica - which i do listen to quite a lot of) however one of the things i found after i got into hi-fi was that my cd collection went from about 100 cd's to well over 1000, many of which did not fall into these categories. unfortunately i took a number of these cd's round to friends to listen to their systems, held a few source bake offs at my place and so the rot set in. unfortunately my tastes are so diverse ranging from dave brubeck to banging happy hardcore, via trance, prog rock and strangeness like aphex twin and susuma yokota, finding a system that would play all of these almost diametrically opposed styles was difficult. add to the fact that sm had corrupted me by exposing me to the joys of big cone speakers when listening to bass heavy music and i had a limited budget meant the task was even more difficult. i heard an audio synthesis system at a show and was entranced so i knew what source i ultimately wanted, then i decided to take a chance on the speakers - figuring that if i was diy-ing them i could play with more variables without stuffing their value - plus it was the only way to get big cones without spending a fortune. once that was decided on i auditioned a bunch of amps including an induction psu driven aloia (great with accoustic, terrible with anything with balls), a big solid state vincent (the polar opposite of the aloia) and what i eventually went for, the valve / solid state hybrid vincent which seems to play everything i throw at it well.
i did a bit of fiddling with wires - and settled on short runs of chord odyssey 2 from amp to speakers and long-ish homebrew interconnects terminated with bullet rca's. after that my system hasn't changed.

 

We all know by now that most cable Manf. overcharge for their wares. They somehow have the opinion that cabling should be approx. 10% of system cost, if not more. It makes sense to them. The materials are not the issue in price IMO, its the labor and R&D [ bullshit] they say. Also a Manf. rule of thumb is to price your product at retail for 5 and one half times your cost.
Several years ago I made a go at manf. powercords. My total cost was $26US in material and one hour labor. Say $46 total. I sold them for $150. When I went to two famous dealers to audition my cable I was shocked to hear their response to my effort. They both agreed that it was a good product, however it beat out several cables they had in stock that cost much much more. They told me to raise the price of my product to equal the others in price. Why? They stated they could NOT sell what they had in stock if they demod my cable at $150US.
Its all a game. Mostly bullshit IMO. Thank goodness for people like Zanash who at least provide bang for the buck and from what I read here a good cable to boot. How refreshing nowadays.


rollo