Time for a review.....
I’ve spent a really enjoyable week listening to Dave’s speaker cables and his D3 interconnects. They were used primarily with a 4 watt Decware SEP amp playing CD’s running through a Schiit DAC with Omega Super 3xrs single driver speakers.
I think the strengths of my system are transparency, tone, microdynamics and imaging and the weaknesses are the obvious rolling off of the frequency extremes that single drivers produce and ultimate loudness/macrodynamics.
The cables that were substituted were Decware IC’s and Clearday Shotguns and my methodology consisted of quick A/B tests as well as sustained listening with the two different cables.
I first started with the speaker cables. The improvements I heard were pretty obvious and quick to discern. Right off the bat, I realized that Dave’s cables took an ever so slight hardness and glare out of vocals that the Cleardays were presenting. It’s something I’d not noticed before, but in Audio, it happens all the time, you often don’t realize a shortcoming until it’s addressed in a system change. The nice thing about this change was that even though Dave’s cables took out that edge, I didn’t lose any sense of air or open-ness. Sometimes that’s a tradeoff that has to be made and in this instance it wasn’t.
Maybe the biggest surprise for me with the speaker cables was the bass. I have to say, there were more than a few times where I smiled and thought…”I never knew my Omegas could deliver those low frequencies as nice as they are right now” Not too tight, and not too loose, but rather the bass was able to breathe in a new way. It was a shortcoming in my system before where I knew there were times when I thought the bass was just a little too tight or congested; it wasn’t rolling out into the room like I suspected it should and I knew there was room for improvement.
Another factor which really caught my ear was the way my system responded to micro changes in frequency. All of the sudden the variations in tone in a vibrato were more distinct or in a particular passage where a drummer was hitting a cymbal I could hear that every strike wasn’t identical and there were distinct variations in tone as the drumstick was consistently alternating it's stike on two different spots on the cymbal resulting in tiny differences in sound. It was startling to me to hear this and I did multiple A/B’s with my Cleardays to confirm that I really was hearing this new level of micro detail. My last example would be sounds way back in the soundstage. Sure I could hear them before, but now all of the sudden, there was some dimensionality to these notes where previously although they were just as noticeable, they were flat in image and presentation.
After I was comfortable with the sound of Dave’s speaker cables I then began switching out my Decware IC’s for Dave’s D3 interconnects. These changes were not so easy for me to describe. Unlike the speaker cables where I instantly heard improvements, I found it very difficult to quantify the changes between the IC's. Where the speaker cables took out a slight glare, the IC’s tended to just present the upper midrange in a warmer tone. With the Decware IC’s I felt like there was a little more airiness to the upper midrange whereas Dave’s IC’s had more of a softer glow. Neither was preferable, both were nice.
That said, for some reason, I always felt like I was on some level enjoying Dave’s cables more than my own IC’s. For about 12 hours of hardcore IC listening over many days, I tried to convince myself that I was imagining this, but I couldn’t. Time after time, I’d hear something and think…”oh, Dave’s cable is nailing this passage” and I’d substitute the Decware’s back in but I couldn’t confirm what it was that made Dave's cables make me stop and compare . However, during the eval period I never had the Decware’s in the system and felt like stopping and comparing like I so often was with Dave's D3s in the chain.
I actually PM’d Dave about it and my theory was that his cables might have essentially been doing everything just a little bit better making it (except for the upper midrange presentation discussed previously) difficult to pinpoint to one thing and nail down specific differences. I wish I could describe in detail why I responded so positively to the IC’s and although in the end I couldn’t quantify it, I really felt there was something intangible going on that I was reacting to and just didn’t have the time to really nail it down. Believe me, I didn’t want to like those IC’s. The last thing any of us wants is to hear something sound better and influence us to spend more money! My last thought is perhaps it was harder to discern the differences in IC's simply because the Decware's had a competitive advantage being designed by the maker of the amp specifically for his products.
So I just wanted to say thanks to Dave, as I said, I enjoyed the demo quite a bit and will be contacting him about placing an order.
