hifi-advice.com - compensate or stimulate

When a component has a sound that's too warm for your tastes, should you use extra-analytical cables? And when a component is too analytical, should you just add warm-sounding cables? This is a difficult decision that's not clearly explainable.

In any event it is important to know your component's strong and weak sides and to know what it is exactly that you want to achieve.

Of course you can tweak the sound of your component in either direction but know that it's not usually a good idea to turn an analytical component all the way around into a warm and mellow one or vice versa. This will not go without drawbacks in other areas.

It also differs per category of component. For example amplifiers have a wide margin in which you can change particular sound characteristics without affecting the overall sound too much. CD players have a much more narrow margin. They operate on a tiny spot from which they easily tip over into either restraint or brightness and forwardness. Therefore it's best to buy a cd player that already fits your requests most closely instead of trying to tweak it afterwards.

With CD players therefore, stimulating their strong sides is often better than to suppress their downsides because suppressing always brings along tradeoffs in other aspects of the sound. A positive aspect such as a lively midband is easily accentuated by using a certain cable without introducing tradeoffs such as compression or woolyness. Of course you have to use good cabling because it is entirely possible to introduce treble hardness if you pick the wrong cable but this goes without saying.

Using parallel or serial filtering in the mains in order to tame a component's sound is often also a bad idea because invariably you also restrain the dynamics and livelyness and the sound becomes more dull and slow.

Adding colour to the system - or, why do highend systems need highend cables?

Officially this is a no no. You're not supposed to colour the sound, you should listen to an entirely neutral system. That's one of the reasons why tone controls have disappeared from highend amplifiers. I don't agree. I have this theory. When hifi was still in its infancy, amplifiers sounded all the same. Well, that's what people thought. But secretly they didn't. They actually all sounded different. But most were strong on character and they all added something to the mix. But more important than amplifiers were speakers. They invariably added resonance, thickness or colour to the sound. Because filltering was also still in its infancy, manufacturers used their ears when tuning crossover-filters. They also made up for audible transitions between speaker units by gently shelving the frequency curve. Many British speakers, and I am referring to KEF and IMF specifically here, had a lot of colouration and a dimpled midrange. But they also sounded sweet and seductive.

In these days, cables were considered unimportant. You needed a certain thickness for a certain length and that was all there was to it. Well, as I image it, that was indeed all there was to it. You didn't need expensive exotic cables to get a musical result.

But in the present, we have hyper-neutral equipment with historically low distortion levels. Speakers have gotten better and better and ever more neutral. Nowadays, if you buy a really highend system and use standard cables, you're almost sure to get an unsatisfactory sound. Now you do need exotic cables. Why? To disguise the overly visible electronic signature of the sound. Well, this is of course only a theory. And you can easily think of counterarguments in many situations. I for one feel that my (Transparant Reference) cables do not colour the sound. They do however provide the most fluid, organic and musical presentation I've heard in cables yet. Are there more exciting cables around? For sure. But invariably they sound more dry, too controlled. So...maybe my equipment is just too good? I did have Electrostatic speakers and now have Magnetostats. These kind of speakers tend to sound very open and uncoloured and therefore can use a system that is a bit more colourful than strictly neutral.

The bottom line is that you keep in mind that it's all about balance. The signal is electronic and if your equipment is too good you may start hearing that it is electronic and you may need to tone everything down just a notch.

As indicated, this is a difficult story to pin down, but as always, experimenting can really pay off so don't be afraid to try!

Read also:

Power Conditioning (Mains-filtering)