Steve Toy
03-08-2010, 11:44
The Mark Grant story for me began with a notion of wanting to get back to basics regarding those bits of wire joining different hi-fi boxes together. Over the years I have grown weary of endless circular objectivist/subjectivist debates about whether a piece of wire between two such boxes could possibly make a difference to the noise at the end coming out of the speakers. My own experience of this began, like most people as I imagine, with hoping that it would not. That way you can save yourself lots of money and focus your hi-fi expenditure entirely on the boxes themselves using the freebie connectors supplied.
Hi-fi dealers, advertisers and reviewers alike all pressed upon inexperienced punters like myself the need to set aside some of our overall budget for your speaker cables and of course those pesky little interconnects. One magazine even suggested a ball-park figure of 10 percent. This doesn't sound like an awful lot when your starter system costs well under a grand new, but it starts to make your eyes water as you upgrade and the total spend is over, say, ten grand.
At this point allowing yourself to believe that they make no difference whatsoever becomes kind of comforting, especially when there are scientists and people in the music and recording industry supporting this view as well as a chap called Rudi who, after ten yeas or so has still got $1 million US to give away to the first person who can identify different interconnects in blind tests on his premises.
Interconnects are on the market for silly money, the kind that would buy you a brand new car and people are actually gullible enough to pay such prices thinking that so doing will transport them at least closer to audio nirvana. What fools! But they are free to squander their hard-earned as they see fit, aren't they? Hearing is believing, especially at that kind of money.
It is easy to regard the entire cable industry as one of snake oil when you consider that no interconnect could possible cost anywhere near the tenth of the retail asking price of a new car to manufacture. Thus we have two polarised viewpoints - one that regards spending such vast sums on wire to be worthwhile and the other that says you are a fool for lining the pockets of a charlatan.
However, I'd like to suggest that there is a middle ground where common sense can prevail and we can evaluate an interconnect swap subjectively in the same way we would a box swap, secure in the knowledge that we are not being fleeced. Of course we need to consider the issue of expectation bias, which exists for sure and always needs to be acknowledged, but I think the kind of cynicism which results in the expectation bias being inversely proportional to the asking price also needs addressing...
My own experience was telling me that unfortunately different interconnects did make a repeatable difference to my enjoyment of recorded music. I even found certain well-known and highly regarded wires to render my system at the time unlistenable to my ears. There was not really any such thing as a good interconnect, there were simply those that buggered up the signal less than others or in ways that I found more acceptable and detracted less from my enjoyment of music. Surely, anyone viewing interconnects differently would only either be bestowing some cables with actively magical properties, thinking they are sprinkled with fairy dust or some such on the one hand, or on the other believe them all to be identically perfect, lose no signal and allow no noise to be added either. My gut feeling is that common sense prevails somewhere between these two absurd extremes.
As I upgraded my system it became necessary to keep upgrading the interconnects too in order that my system did not irritate me after the initial hit of the new box had worn off and it had become clear that the system hierarchy was somehow audibly out of kilter. At the end of 2006 having gone through various including from Chord and Nordost I was running two pairs of Siltech SQ28s costing £800 in total. This was roughly in keeping with the 10 percent of the total system ball park figure at the time.
Anyway, back to "back to basics," a friend and I in late 2008 noted that there were suppliers assembling and selling the kind of cables used in the recording industry from the likes of Belden and Canare. They presumably did the job and could be purchased retail for no more than around £20 a pair. My friend had ordered some from Blue Jeans, a US company but pointed me to the Yorkshire-based mail order company called Mark Grant Cables and I ordered two pairs from them.
In a phone conversation with Mark he agreed to send me three different types of these cheap but not nasty professional interconnects that he assembled himself. All I had to do was try them all and select the ones I preferred before returning the others and paying just for the ones I kept.
The plan was that if any of the three did the job as well as my £400-a-pair Siltech SQ28s I could sell the latter and put money in my pocket. To my surprise all three were actually better. They made the Siltechs sound rather flat and slightly muddled at the top end in comparison. I swapped back to the Siltechs just to be sure my ears/brain weren't deceiving me... Nope. Definitely flat and muddled at the top end!
I found very slight differences between the three types but settled on ones labelled "Canare video cable." All three seemed neutral in tonal balance and as such would show up deficiencies or mismatches in your system for what they were without masking them or acting as a tone control. These very slight differences between them seemed to be down to definition/timing not tonality.
Meanwhile my friend was deriving similar results with his Blue Jeans offerings versus his Transparent leads at nearly a grand a pop. I took my Mark Grants for him to hear and we both preferred them to the Blue Jeans. Despite the fact that they looked virtually identical they seemed livelier without straying into stridency. Apparently the difference may be attributable to Blue Jeans using their own design crimped connector that they call Taversoe, they look very similar to the Canare but are slightly different on close examination. My friend also picked the "video cable."
Anyway, Mark hinted that he was working on another version which would have additional screening and would therefore likely perform better. He eventually designed his own and rolls of the cable itself were eventually manufactured to his own specification. An early prototype was used in the AOS setup at Scalford Hall in March 2009. The final version became available in the autumn of 2009, was called the G1000HD and retailed at £75 for a 1 metre pair with a 30 day return refund policy.
G1000HD
http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/2902/g1000hdconnectors003.jpg (http://img704.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors003.jpg/)
From Mark's website:
"This is a high purity copper cable, not silver or silver plated copper.
The cable has been produced to my own design to an extremely high tolerance.
The central conductor is a single solid core of high purity copper, this is surrounded by low density gas injected dielectric insulation and a dual layer shielding system consisting of two layers of dense coverage high purity copper and a very flexible clear sheathing.
The connectors are Canare phono RCA (Canare part number RCAP-C53). They are crimped so no solder is used. This is one of the reasons the cable performs so well."
Ok, £75 is a bit more than twenty quid but these interconnects still prove to be a veritable bargain for the performance on offer. There are no pseudo-scientific claims made by their manufacturer, just sound engineering and workmanship using good quality components. Over the standard £20 interconnects the G1000HDs remove even more background hash that in itself adds distortion and brightness to the upper registers. The result of such removal is even more precise imaging and better resolution of harmonic detail and decay of notes into space. Voices in particular gain more presence and subtle vocal inflections are more easily heard. These were my own experiences and I could go on but this interconnect is already well documented elsewhere. It was stated that it simply was not necessary to waste much bigger sums of money on interconnects by other manufacturers with fancy connectors. Sound advice indeed but it dig beg one question:
What would happen if you put such fancy connectors on the ends of G1000HDs?
First of all it would add to the cost but perhaps not as much as other manufacturers may wish to charge you for this privilege...
In May, two pairs of G1000HDs with Neutrik Pro-fi connectors on each end arrived through the post for me to try and to connect between the Acoustic Precision Eikos CD player, based on the Pioneer PD-S904 player from the mid/late nineties that I was borrowing at the time and my pre amplifier, a grounded grid valve design prototype by Anthony Matthews using 3 ECC82 valves and also the latter to my power amp, a Copper chassis 30 Watt Class A KT88 push-pull valve amp. The Eikos CD player has been in my system since early April now but I've been given the opportunity to buy it and I'm grabbing this chance with both hands because it's one of the best CD players I've heard at any price. As well as playing music impeccably it'll certainly show you precisely what interconnects plugged into it are taking away in terms of signal or what they are adding in terms of noise.
G1500HD (shown as G1000HD) with Neutrik Pro-fi connectors
http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/3484/g1000hdconnectors002.jpg (http://img714.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors002.jpg/)
Talking of noise, a Spice Girls CD belonging to my wife was in the disc tray. Ok, I'd put it there and I know there will be some music snobs who like to spend a lot more time than I do dancing about architecture and who will now be scoffing,
"He said the Spice Girls! Uhuh, uhuh!!!"
The reason why this disc was in the tray is because of one track that I like - Saturday Night Divas. Apart from this track I find everything about the Spice Girls to be irritatingly brash, in-yer-face and devoid of any talent and I held this opinion of them back in the day when I was still in my twenties. This self-styled "Girl Power," or rather, more likely styled by their producers, epitomised the era of talent-less celebs which began in the late nineties with the Spice Girls and later gave us Big Brother and worse still (talent-less) Celebrity Big Brother. Ok, Mel C went on to make a very good solo album Northern star, Gerry Halliwell continued to play the role of the talent-less celeb on yo-yo diets or something and Ms Adams married Mr Beckham...
Saturday Night Divas begins with a cascading synth effect that pans from left to right and back again along with the chorus. Each pulse of this cascade could be heard much more distinctly. It was a no-brainer and I was barely a few seconds into the track and still at the intro. Then the percussion joins in and finally with the first verse a rather stonking bass line. The measure of the percussion, notably high hats was just perfect and in time with everything else.
A great pop song was now even better. Ok, I hate the Spice Girls as I've said but this was '97, just before the days of loudness wars, compression and MP3. The recording quality is actually rather good and the easy rhythms made for a foot tap-tastic listening experience.
Anyway, I decided to try some proper music. Beth Rowley's Little Dreamer and Katie Melua's new CD The House were duly spun. I derived a more involving listen from both these excellent female solo artists. More pace, rhythm and timing derived from improved leading edge definition as a result of these better connectors did not come at the expense of subtlety and emotion or the body and decay of notes; it wasn't simply a case of reproducing metronomic percussion.
Late in June my wife and I went to stay at the home of Dimitri, a fellow hi-fi/music enthusiast, in the South of France for a few days. I took with me both pairs of these Neutrik-terminated G1000HDs with me as they aren't exactly heavy and sit nicely at the bottom of a suitcase. Dimitri already has the standard Canare-terminated ones so the comparison was to be quite straight forward. Similar results were obtained although the improvement in definition perhaps didn't extend as far down the frequency range as I derived in my own system. This may be due to a very slightly fruity (not straying into boominess though) quality to his bass with this splendid Logitech Squeezebox, Croft Series Seven pre/power amps and a rather WAF-friendly pair of Sonus Faber floorstanders. Good interconnects like these are not going to radically alter the tonal balance of a system and if they do, there's definitely something wrong with them!
Replacing the Canare plugs and adding 25 quid to the price of the G1000HDs was definitely worth it and it was good to hear this improvement in two rather different systems. There aren't many upgrades out there for just £20 and here's the really good news:
If you've already shelled out for a pair of standard G1000HDs, provided you can send them back in working order you get a pair of these for just the difference in price. If you don't derive any improvement just send them back. Either way, all you have to do is send back the pair you don't want within 30 days for a full refund. All you pay is the cost of return postage plus your bus fare to the post office.
I don't think Mark could make the whole ordeal of trying these things out for yourself any fairer than that!
At the end of June another couple of sets of G1000HDs arrived through the post, this time with WBT connectors. My friend who had already tried WBTs told me I had a pleasant surprise in store and that these connectors would make as big an improvement again as the Neutriks had a month earlier. So with considerably high expectation I rather carefully plugged them in. WBTs come with an outer cover which screws onto the inner core in order to establish a tight contact with the socket. In order to avoid damaging either the plug or the socket at the rear of your equipment, when you want to remove them you need to remember to unscrew this cover first.
If there was any improvement at all it was very subtle. Perhaps the top end was a touch more refined but if anything the Neutriks were maybe slightly more involving. Any difference at all was negligible and given that these WBT 0147s more than double the price of the original Canare-terminated G1000HDs they are simply not worth the expenditure. Suffice to say, my expectations had not been met.
G1000HD with WBT 0147
http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/5259/g1000hdconnectors001.jpg (http://img137.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors001.jpg/)
However it turned out that the WBTs my friend was using and had been raving about were not the same ones. He had the Nextgen 0110 cu and they were likely to be a different beast entirely. At £200 for a fully-assembled pair of G1000HDs with these connectors, the connectors alone costing over £100, they ought to be good. In the grand scheme of things £200 is still a lot of money for a pair of interconnects but it's still well short of even mid-priced leads from the likes of Nordost, Siltech or Transparent.Two pairs duly arrived last week for me to try and this time I had to be even more careful connecting them than with the 0147s. There is a screw-on outer cover just the same but instead of gripping two metal clasps with a narrow gap on each side, there are three clasps equally spaced with wider gaps between them that grip the socket. Two of them are plastic and one is a copper conductor. The assembly looks quite flimsy and you need to tighten the outer cover just enough for the connection to be secure but not enough that you might break the clasps. My guess is that the use of plastic is perhaps to decouple the connection from vibration.
G2000HD with WBT nextGen 0110 cu (shown as G1000HD)
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/4920/g1000hdconnectors005.jpg (http://img6.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors005.jpg/)
With Francis Cabrel’s Des Roses et des Orties in the disc tray I pressed play...
Nice! Timing was up several notches, tiny pauses and inflections were a sheer delight and the accordion on the track “Madame...” now had a lovely rasp to go with the already pleasing tone. He sings, “Madame n’aime pas l’accordion...” just as the accordion kicks in and sounds vibrant and so real. How can she not like it, miserable cow?! The bass doesn’t go down an extra octave or even a half-octave or other such nonsense but the rhythm of the bass lines now has an extra element of complexity that I hadn’t hitherto perceived. The bottom end now has a more solid foundation that tells both its own story candidly and with conviction as well as driving the rest of the music along in tempo with it, which in turn is presented in a fashion that enables the listener to derive the pitch of each note much more easily.
The overall effect is a wonderfully coherent and compelling listening experience. I’m finding myself listening to tracks wishing they could go on a bit longer. I guess I’ll just have to play them again. I breezed through Mary Chapin Carpenter’s The Age of Miracles and also Beth Rowley’s Little Dreamer. As well as listening to tracks I was previously perhaps skipping past, I also noticed that the soundstage was a touch deeper. I derived a heightened sense of instruments being in front of others and vocals were placed centre-stage with more precision giving a greater impression of intimacy.
In all, expectations have been exceeded by the Nextgen 0110 cu connectors. Are these interconnects worth £200 in the context of my system? Yes, every penny. I’d have to spend more elsewhere in the system for a similar level of improvement in my music listening enjoyment. Fortunately, as I already own the original Canare-terminated G1000HDs I’m entitled to a full refund on their return so the upgrade cost is actually only £125 per pair.
The purpose of this opening post is to give people the opportunity to try these out for themselves. Objectivity here can be obtained through a body of consensus of people willing to try them rather than measurement or listening under testing conditions.
G2000HD
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/2715/g1000hdconnectors004.jpg (http://img820.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors004.jpg/)
http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/8356/g1000hdconnectors007.jpg (http://img694.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors007.jpg/)
System:
http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/5070/g1000hdconnectors008.jpg (http://img819.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors008.jpg/)
http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/1986/g1000hdconnectors009.jpg (http://img839.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors009.jpg/)
Speakers: Heco Celan 700.
Hi-fi dealers, advertisers and reviewers alike all pressed upon inexperienced punters like myself the need to set aside some of our overall budget for your speaker cables and of course those pesky little interconnects. One magazine even suggested a ball-park figure of 10 percent. This doesn't sound like an awful lot when your starter system costs well under a grand new, but it starts to make your eyes water as you upgrade and the total spend is over, say, ten grand.
At this point allowing yourself to believe that they make no difference whatsoever becomes kind of comforting, especially when there are scientists and people in the music and recording industry supporting this view as well as a chap called Rudi who, after ten yeas or so has still got $1 million US to give away to the first person who can identify different interconnects in blind tests on his premises.
Interconnects are on the market for silly money, the kind that would buy you a brand new car and people are actually gullible enough to pay such prices thinking that so doing will transport them at least closer to audio nirvana. What fools! But they are free to squander their hard-earned as they see fit, aren't they? Hearing is believing, especially at that kind of money.
It is easy to regard the entire cable industry as one of snake oil when you consider that no interconnect could possible cost anywhere near the tenth of the retail asking price of a new car to manufacture. Thus we have two polarised viewpoints - one that regards spending such vast sums on wire to be worthwhile and the other that says you are a fool for lining the pockets of a charlatan.
However, I'd like to suggest that there is a middle ground where common sense can prevail and we can evaluate an interconnect swap subjectively in the same way we would a box swap, secure in the knowledge that we are not being fleeced. Of course we need to consider the issue of expectation bias, which exists for sure and always needs to be acknowledged, but I think the kind of cynicism which results in the expectation bias being inversely proportional to the asking price also needs addressing...
My own experience was telling me that unfortunately different interconnects did make a repeatable difference to my enjoyment of recorded music. I even found certain well-known and highly regarded wires to render my system at the time unlistenable to my ears. There was not really any such thing as a good interconnect, there were simply those that buggered up the signal less than others or in ways that I found more acceptable and detracted less from my enjoyment of music. Surely, anyone viewing interconnects differently would only either be bestowing some cables with actively magical properties, thinking they are sprinkled with fairy dust or some such on the one hand, or on the other believe them all to be identically perfect, lose no signal and allow no noise to be added either. My gut feeling is that common sense prevails somewhere between these two absurd extremes.
As I upgraded my system it became necessary to keep upgrading the interconnects too in order that my system did not irritate me after the initial hit of the new box had worn off and it had become clear that the system hierarchy was somehow audibly out of kilter. At the end of 2006 having gone through various including from Chord and Nordost I was running two pairs of Siltech SQ28s costing £800 in total. This was roughly in keeping with the 10 percent of the total system ball park figure at the time.
Anyway, back to "back to basics," a friend and I in late 2008 noted that there were suppliers assembling and selling the kind of cables used in the recording industry from the likes of Belden and Canare. They presumably did the job and could be purchased retail for no more than around £20 a pair. My friend had ordered some from Blue Jeans, a US company but pointed me to the Yorkshire-based mail order company called Mark Grant Cables and I ordered two pairs from them.
In a phone conversation with Mark he agreed to send me three different types of these cheap but not nasty professional interconnects that he assembled himself. All I had to do was try them all and select the ones I preferred before returning the others and paying just for the ones I kept.
The plan was that if any of the three did the job as well as my £400-a-pair Siltech SQ28s I could sell the latter and put money in my pocket. To my surprise all three were actually better. They made the Siltechs sound rather flat and slightly muddled at the top end in comparison. I swapped back to the Siltechs just to be sure my ears/brain weren't deceiving me... Nope. Definitely flat and muddled at the top end!
I found very slight differences between the three types but settled on ones labelled "Canare video cable." All three seemed neutral in tonal balance and as such would show up deficiencies or mismatches in your system for what they were without masking them or acting as a tone control. These very slight differences between them seemed to be down to definition/timing not tonality.
Meanwhile my friend was deriving similar results with his Blue Jeans offerings versus his Transparent leads at nearly a grand a pop. I took my Mark Grants for him to hear and we both preferred them to the Blue Jeans. Despite the fact that they looked virtually identical they seemed livelier without straying into stridency. Apparently the difference may be attributable to Blue Jeans using their own design crimped connector that they call Taversoe, they look very similar to the Canare but are slightly different on close examination. My friend also picked the "video cable."
Anyway, Mark hinted that he was working on another version which would have additional screening and would therefore likely perform better. He eventually designed his own and rolls of the cable itself were eventually manufactured to his own specification. An early prototype was used in the AOS setup at Scalford Hall in March 2009. The final version became available in the autumn of 2009, was called the G1000HD and retailed at £75 for a 1 metre pair with a 30 day return refund policy.
G1000HD
http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/2902/g1000hdconnectors003.jpg (http://img704.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors003.jpg/)
From Mark's website:
"This is a high purity copper cable, not silver or silver plated copper.
The cable has been produced to my own design to an extremely high tolerance.
The central conductor is a single solid core of high purity copper, this is surrounded by low density gas injected dielectric insulation and a dual layer shielding system consisting of two layers of dense coverage high purity copper and a very flexible clear sheathing.
The connectors are Canare phono RCA (Canare part number RCAP-C53). They are crimped so no solder is used. This is one of the reasons the cable performs so well."
Ok, £75 is a bit more than twenty quid but these interconnects still prove to be a veritable bargain for the performance on offer. There are no pseudo-scientific claims made by their manufacturer, just sound engineering and workmanship using good quality components. Over the standard £20 interconnects the G1000HDs remove even more background hash that in itself adds distortion and brightness to the upper registers. The result of such removal is even more precise imaging and better resolution of harmonic detail and decay of notes into space. Voices in particular gain more presence and subtle vocal inflections are more easily heard. These were my own experiences and I could go on but this interconnect is already well documented elsewhere. It was stated that it simply was not necessary to waste much bigger sums of money on interconnects by other manufacturers with fancy connectors. Sound advice indeed but it dig beg one question:
What would happen if you put such fancy connectors on the ends of G1000HDs?
First of all it would add to the cost but perhaps not as much as other manufacturers may wish to charge you for this privilege...
In May, two pairs of G1000HDs with Neutrik Pro-fi connectors on each end arrived through the post for me to try and to connect between the Acoustic Precision Eikos CD player, based on the Pioneer PD-S904 player from the mid/late nineties that I was borrowing at the time and my pre amplifier, a grounded grid valve design prototype by Anthony Matthews using 3 ECC82 valves and also the latter to my power amp, a Copper chassis 30 Watt Class A KT88 push-pull valve amp. The Eikos CD player has been in my system since early April now but I've been given the opportunity to buy it and I'm grabbing this chance with both hands because it's one of the best CD players I've heard at any price. As well as playing music impeccably it'll certainly show you precisely what interconnects plugged into it are taking away in terms of signal or what they are adding in terms of noise.
G1500HD (shown as G1000HD) with Neutrik Pro-fi connectors
http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/3484/g1000hdconnectors002.jpg (http://img714.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors002.jpg/)
Talking of noise, a Spice Girls CD belonging to my wife was in the disc tray. Ok, I'd put it there and I know there will be some music snobs who like to spend a lot more time than I do dancing about architecture and who will now be scoffing,
"He said the Spice Girls! Uhuh, uhuh!!!"
The reason why this disc was in the tray is because of one track that I like - Saturday Night Divas. Apart from this track I find everything about the Spice Girls to be irritatingly brash, in-yer-face and devoid of any talent and I held this opinion of them back in the day when I was still in my twenties. This self-styled "Girl Power," or rather, more likely styled by their producers, epitomised the era of talent-less celebs which began in the late nineties with the Spice Girls and later gave us Big Brother and worse still (talent-less) Celebrity Big Brother. Ok, Mel C went on to make a very good solo album Northern star, Gerry Halliwell continued to play the role of the talent-less celeb on yo-yo diets or something and Ms Adams married Mr Beckham...
Saturday Night Divas begins with a cascading synth effect that pans from left to right and back again along with the chorus. Each pulse of this cascade could be heard much more distinctly. It was a no-brainer and I was barely a few seconds into the track and still at the intro. Then the percussion joins in and finally with the first verse a rather stonking bass line. The measure of the percussion, notably high hats was just perfect and in time with everything else.
A great pop song was now even better. Ok, I hate the Spice Girls as I've said but this was '97, just before the days of loudness wars, compression and MP3. The recording quality is actually rather good and the easy rhythms made for a foot tap-tastic listening experience.
Anyway, I decided to try some proper music. Beth Rowley's Little Dreamer and Katie Melua's new CD The House were duly spun. I derived a more involving listen from both these excellent female solo artists. More pace, rhythm and timing derived from improved leading edge definition as a result of these better connectors did not come at the expense of subtlety and emotion or the body and decay of notes; it wasn't simply a case of reproducing metronomic percussion.
Late in June my wife and I went to stay at the home of Dimitri, a fellow hi-fi/music enthusiast, in the South of France for a few days. I took with me both pairs of these Neutrik-terminated G1000HDs with me as they aren't exactly heavy and sit nicely at the bottom of a suitcase. Dimitri already has the standard Canare-terminated ones so the comparison was to be quite straight forward. Similar results were obtained although the improvement in definition perhaps didn't extend as far down the frequency range as I derived in my own system. This may be due to a very slightly fruity (not straying into boominess though) quality to his bass with this splendid Logitech Squeezebox, Croft Series Seven pre/power amps and a rather WAF-friendly pair of Sonus Faber floorstanders. Good interconnects like these are not going to radically alter the tonal balance of a system and if they do, there's definitely something wrong with them!
Replacing the Canare plugs and adding 25 quid to the price of the G1000HDs was definitely worth it and it was good to hear this improvement in two rather different systems. There aren't many upgrades out there for just £20 and here's the really good news:
If you've already shelled out for a pair of standard G1000HDs, provided you can send them back in working order you get a pair of these for just the difference in price. If you don't derive any improvement just send them back. Either way, all you have to do is send back the pair you don't want within 30 days for a full refund. All you pay is the cost of return postage plus your bus fare to the post office.
I don't think Mark could make the whole ordeal of trying these things out for yourself any fairer than that!
At the end of June another couple of sets of G1000HDs arrived through the post, this time with WBT connectors. My friend who had already tried WBTs told me I had a pleasant surprise in store and that these connectors would make as big an improvement again as the Neutriks had a month earlier. So with considerably high expectation I rather carefully plugged them in. WBTs come with an outer cover which screws onto the inner core in order to establish a tight contact with the socket. In order to avoid damaging either the plug or the socket at the rear of your equipment, when you want to remove them you need to remember to unscrew this cover first.
If there was any improvement at all it was very subtle. Perhaps the top end was a touch more refined but if anything the Neutriks were maybe slightly more involving. Any difference at all was negligible and given that these WBT 0147s more than double the price of the original Canare-terminated G1000HDs they are simply not worth the expenditure. Suffice to say, my expectations had not been met.
G1000HD with WBT 0147
http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/5259/g1000hdconnectors001.jpg (http://img137.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors001.jpg/)
However it turned out that the WBTs my friend was using and had been raving about were not the same ones. He had the Nextgen 0110 cu and they were likely to be a different beast entirely. At £200 for a fully-assembled pair of G1000HDs with these connectors, the connectors alone costing over £100, they ought to be good. In the grand scheme of things £200 is still a lot of money for a pair of interconnects but it's still well short of even mid-priced leads from the likes of Nordost, Siltech or Transparent.Two pairs duly arrived last week for me to try and this time I had to be even more careful connecting them than with the 0147s. There is a screw-on outer cover just the same but instead of gripping two metal clasps with a narrow gap on each side, there are three clasps equally spaced with wider gaps between them that grip the socket. Two of them are plastic and one is a copper conductor. The assembly looks quite flimsy and you need to tighten the outer cover just enough for the connection to be secure but not enough that you might break the clasps. My guess is that the use of plastic is perhaps to decouple the connection from vibration.
G2000HD with WBT nextGen 0110 cu (shown as G1000HD)
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/4920/g1000hdconnectors005.jpg (http://img6.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors005.jpg/)
With Francis Cabrel’s Des Roses et des Orties in the disc tray I pressed play...
Nice! Timing was up several notches, tiny pauses and inflections were a sheer delight and the accordion on the track “Madame...” now had a lovely rasp to go with the already pleasing tone. He sings, “Madame n’aime pas l’accordion...” just as the accordion kicks in and sounds vibrant and so real. How can she not like it, miserable cow?! The bass doesn’t go down an extra octave or even a half-octave or other such nonsense but the rhythm of the bass lines now has an extra element of complexity that I hadn’t hitherto perceived. The bottom end now has a more solid foundation that tells both its own story candidly and with conviction as well as driving the rest of the music along in tempo with it, which in turn is presented in a fashion that enables the listener to derive the pitch of each note much more easily.
The overall effect is a wonderfully coherent and compelling listening experience. I’m finding myself listening to tracks wishing they could go on a bit longer. I guess I’ll just have to play them again. I breezed through Mary Chapin Carpenter’s The Age of Miracles and also Beth Rowley’s Little Dreamer. As well as listening to tracks I was previously perhaps skipping past, I also noticed that the soundstage was a touch deeper. I derived a heightened sense of instruments being in front of others and vocals were placed centre-stage with more precision giving a greater impression of intimacy.
In all, expectations have been exceeded by the Nextgen 0110 cu connectors. Are these interconnects worth £200 in the context of my system? Yes, every penny. I’d have to spend more elsewhere in the system for a similar level of improvement in my music listening enjoyment. Fortunately, as I already own the original Canare-terminated G1000HDs I’m entitled to a full refund on their return so the upgrade cost is actually only £125 per pair.
The purpose of this opening post is to give people the opportunity to try these out for themselves. Objectivity here can be obtained through a body of consensus of people willing to try them rather than measurement or listening under testing conditions.
G2000HD
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/2715/g1000hdconnectors004.jpg (http://img820.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors004.jpg/)
http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/8356/g1000hdconnectors007.jpg (http://img694.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors007.jpg/)
System:
http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/5070/g1000hdconnectors008.jpg (http://img819.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors008.jpg/)
http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/1986/g1000hdconnectors009.jpg (http://img839.imageshack.us/i/g1000hdconnectors009.jpg/)
Speakers: Heco Celan 700.