Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsBest Currently Available, but Much Better Cables on the Horizon
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 21, 2011
I have mixed feelings about these cables. Yes, they have unprecedented clarity and range, but they are silver, which is chock full of small hadrons. If, like me, you are an audiophile particle physicist, you'll know that small hadrons degrade the transmission of audio signals by decohering individual notes, particularly quarter tones that have been reflected off of acoustic surfaces. Additionally, the quality of silences is tranquil, but not peaceful; Philip Glass's note-free "4'33" fails to achieve the the subtlety of a live performance.
Siltech makes its Emperor Crown cables by annealing gold to silver, but I'll be honest, it wasn't worth the $40,000 dollars. My friend, a top researcher in physical acoustics, set up an experiment that confirmed what I expected; the Siltech only performed better on sounds outside of the range of human hearing, so I put them on the stereo that my Alsatian uses (my Pharoah Hound didn't seem to care; I suspect his hearing may be inferior, so I had him neutered). Since the Siltech cables have the same small hadron problems described above, they aren't a real improvement for humans.
Now, that doesn't mean that these cables aren't good; it's just that even with the right speakers and amp, you'll get suboptimal sound. It might sound nearly as good as if you were in a concert hall, but minor acoustical imperfections will limit your enjoyment. Are you sitting 18 feet from the piano at 7 degrees down, or 20 feet and 9 degrees down? Was the pickup in that acoustical guitar an EMG, a Seymour Duncan, or a cheapo Fishman? With these cables, you won't be able to tell, and if you're an audiophile like me, you need to know in order to enjoy the music at all.
The good news about these cables is immediately apparent: they're reasonable priced, and anyone who is serious about music will certainly be willing to fork over a few thousand for appropriate cables. After dropping about $1M on a Kharma Grand Enigma speaker set, it is just a wise investment to get cables like these.
However, they're only an interim solution, again due to the prevalence of small hadrons. The REALLY good news is that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is up and running again. They're making anti-hydrogen right now, but the long-term goals are anti-copper and then anti-silver. Once they are able to create these antimatter elements and keep them stable for more than a few microseconds, we'll finally be able to get cables with large hadrons and few, if any, small hadrons. Not only will these cables transmit quarter tones accurately, but the large hadrons will ensure sonic accuracy of silence by properly managing the strange and top quarks on the electromagnetic signal. If you are reading this, I don't have to tell you how much improvement that will make, and you should wipe the drool off of your face. Now, these cables will be complex, since they'll have to be encased in magnetic bottles to prevent them from coming into contact with regular matter, but they will be able to transmit otherworldly sound. For now, we have to make due with regular-matter cables.
To sum up, using an only semi-precious metal keeps these priced reasonably, but small hadrons degrade the sound quality. Cables made from anti-copper and anti-silver produced by the LHC will solve this problem; it's possible that we are only a couple of years from the best EM audio cables that can be produced using the physics of our universe.
