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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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A month into my college career at UCSC, the 1989 Loma Prieta quake struck. It took away many of the local activities. In the aftermath and sorrow, many students would keep busy, by smoking, drinking, and having sex. The northern part of campus had "Elfland," a wooded area, in which students would use branches and stones, to make little huts or shelters. There, we could commiserate.
Or, sometimes, you'd just go by yourself, and not interact with anyone. You just enjoyed the serenity and isolation of the forest. I did not yet have any high-end audio products, but I did read about them in magazines. Without offering examples or reasons, many of these publications would say that "balanced is better," and "silver cables are bright." Regarding the latter, many audiophiles pointed to the Kimber KCAG as "proof." You thought to yourself, "As if ALL silver sounds the same way!" You felt that the magazines were being lazy and dishonest, and you could not wait, to try these products for yourself.
During spring break 1990, for my 18th birthday, I entered the realm of high-end audio, by getting the $300 Adcom GFA-535 power amp. Back then, a 1-meter Kimber KCAG was $350, more than the Adcom itself. That made no economic sense, you had to wait, and your head was filled with daydreams about the KCAG.
During summer of 1992, San Francisco's Ultimate Sound sometimes had demo samples of the silver-conductored Kimber AGDL or KCAG. Meanwhile, UCSC was razing Elfland, to make room for what would become, in the early-2000s, Colleges Nine and Ten.
In the mid-90s, you and your friends went to Honolulu, but you told them that the cost of the trip used up funds, which otherwise could have gone towards KCAG :-) Nevertheless, you went to the local Kimber dealer, Audio Directions Ltd. There, you asked Stewart Ono (AA's late UncleStu52) about the KCAG. He said it was a good match for the Conrad-Johnson gear he carried, but maybe not so much, for Quicksilver. He was loathe to call the KCAG "bright." He was more of the persuasion, that KCAG would not make the sound fuller, slower, or thicker. He said that the KCAG was "not tipped-up," that is, if the system's sound was rolled-off up top, that's what the KCAG would reveal. The KCAG, said Stu, could not magically make treble appear, or boost what treble was already there.
In the early-2000s, our familes wanted to replace their vehicles. Instead of a new minivan or sedan, many got the Honda CR-V or Toyota RAV-4 compact SUV. Cable pricing got so out-of-whack, $$$$ models blew by the KCAG. If an audiophile were so jaded, he could pass along his old KCAG to his offspring or other relatives. In this post-y2k era, brick and mortar audio stores fell by the wayside, if not into the Pacific Ocean. You and three old girlfriends got into the RAV-4, and headed for the coast.
As you parked at a beach, listening to BBMak's "Out Of My Heart" was pure magic. As you sat on the beach, the four of you joyfully sang "Out Of My Heart." You looked at each other, and then the weight of turning 30 fell on you. It was time to get married to your respective boyfriends/girlfriends. Honeymoon or not, when you went back to Audio Directions Ltd., Stu said that there was little or no demand for KCAG. He explained that customers on a budget still bought Kimber's PBJ or Timbre. But richer or more veteran audiophiles were buying Kimber's Select models instead. And he did state that, despite selling the Cardas record and PAD burn-in CD, true burn-in devices (he carried Hagerman) went way beyond what any software could do.
That sort of made you sick. Meanwhile, despite all the yummy food and drinks in Hawaii, one of your friends had food poisoning. So she went to Kaiser, answered questions, took labs, and went back to the hotel. The next day, she got a call. The nurse said, "Did you know, or were aware, that you are pregnant?" And all of a sudden, you stopped fretting about interconnects.
Okay, so not as perturbing as Elfland being razed, or as exciting as discovering that your friend was pregnant, in 2003, we got an audiodharma Cable Cooker. Sure enough, Stu was right; just 8 hours on the Cooker does more for/to the Kimber KCAG, than any amount or length of regular playing time. And as we learned in the last post, at the 3-day mark, the KCAG shows signs of being over-Cooked.
For reviewing purposes, we have the truly balanced (dual-differential) Simaudio Evolution gear. Some audiophiles will say that the balanced input sounds "quieter and smoother." But everyone else will see it as "lacking in energy, incisiveness, contrast, spark." No one could make these judgments, if the Cooked balanced KCAG had not been honest. Though the KCAG costs many times that of the 4TC speaker cable, the two do work well together.
As of this writing, I do not have a single-ended KCAG in-house. But we do have Kimber's Silver Streak-0147. In many ways, you could argue that the Simaudio 750D sounds more realistic via the single-ended RCA outputs. The RCA better preserves the contrast between music and silence. Therefore, the images appear more life-like, and set within a less hazy backdrop. You then can more easily make out little details, breaths, movements, and textures. Full credit to the Silver Streak-0147 and balanced KCAG for telling it like it is.
-Lummy The Loch Monster
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Topic - Kimber KCAG, Part 10 - Luminator 19:41:07 05/26/21 (0)
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