Yping - I've only developed my "keen ear" in the last few years.
That process required lots of listening to many varied tracks. Over that time
I have singled out tracks that are excellent for discerning changes in the
various "metrics"
E.g....
- bass depth and control - Nellie Furtado and pipe organ music
- image depth/width - classical music on the Tacet label
- details/clarity - Mike Oldfiedld's Tubular Bells
- dynamics - Steve Wind wood and Stevie Wonder
Once you have some tracks you are very familiar with you can then
establish a "baseline" for your system. Then when something
changes it's fairly easy to hear those changes.
You get the drift :-)
Anyhow - I'm very glad you also found the gZero10 to be an excellent
performer. They do bring out a very natural and full sound with lots of body
and a clarity that reveals some incredible details, imaging and venue
presence.
I've been impressed with 3, 6 and 10 IC's - all very adept performers and
suited to several budget levels.
I also own the gZero2 and gZero6 speaker cables - again, both extremely
adept performers. I think they were more impressive than the IC's in some
respects, in that they control the speakers incredibly well and provide an
extremely deep bass that also has some incredible details that other
speaker cables are just not capable of providing.
I use the gZero2 SC's on my home theatre system since it has a subwoofer
and the gzero6 SC's on my audio system. The major difference for me was
the extended bass on the 6's.
The gZero architecture and design philosophy makes a lot of sense I.e.
- protect the signal conductor from noise
- keep the neutral conductor at "zero volts" and noise free!
- use high quality conductor material of the "optimum size"
If you do that throughout your system then all you are getting is pure music
If you look at many other IC's the neutral conductor and the signal
conductor run parallel to each other - which means the signal conductor
induces noise into the neutral line (it doesn't take much), which in turn
polutes the neutral side of the attached components, affecting their overall
operation.
So by installing gZero products in your system you are not only getting the
best transmission of the audio signal, but also getting the best
performance out of your individual components.
The really interesting thing is - these cables work on components of all
performance abilities - e.g. my $500 DAC + gZero cables outperform DACs
costing considerably more.
So, are you going to get the 10's? :-)