JADE AUDIO Cables

I too have heard the claim that speaker cables should be 8-feet lengths but this never made much sense.....no more than digital cables need to be 1.5m instead of 1m. Afterall, how long is a speaker cable in an active speaker or a digital cable between the transport and dac stages of a cdp?

I am quite surprised that JD has invited me to return to his manufacturing facility. Last time I destroyed an antique table lamp and a few months before I wiped out a mobile hanging down from the ceiling in the back of his room. I suppose he will require me to stand out on the front porch to evaluate his speaker cables so as nothing else ends up in the landfill.

I have an even better idea.....why not bring the 4' and 8' pairs over here and we can finally hear them in my system? And in fact, why not voice them here! Afterall, with just a few tubes here, I hardly have any colorations in my system. 8-) And I can more readily accommodate 4' pairs as each amp is 3 feet from its associated speaker. So hey, next weekend? Don't forget Lucinda.

John

Hey, you two keep me posted on the 4 ft vs. the 8 ft results. Hey JD, any chance of you moving to Pennsylvania so that I can be you guinea pig instead of John Fox (the other John)? 8-)
I do find that my tastes run very similar to both of yours, so I'm waiting to 'hear'. I did not realize that John was such a 'clutz' though. Honest JD, if you move to PA I won't break anything. :)

Cheers,
John

I have two stories about the length of speaker cables. One comes from long ago and Bob Fulton also of Minnesota fame. His were the first special speaker wires that I ever bought although that started a long series of trials. His speaker wires were 57 inches long! Why? Because he had taken various lengths to the Minneapolis zoo in the babbon area and played alarm calls recorded by him. Only when the speaker wires were 57" long, not longer and not shorter, did the babbons react. I bought some. Although they were yellow, they were identical to welding cables I had used and sounded like them. I never cut welding cables to 57" , however.

The other story is much like this. It comes from my experience with the Omega Mikro charged speaker wires. This company sought to remove all insolation material, and refused to make speaker wires shorter than 8' long. When I asked, I was told nothing more than because shorter did not sound as good. This is also the company that still has two power cords, the Red and the Blue, which sound quite differ one from the other on most components. The power cords differ only in that the ribbon draw on the red goes from the wall plug to the IEC and then back. The blue is the opposite. Having heard this, I trusted them on the speaker wires.

Norm

I finally got a chance to get a sneak preview of the Jade speaker cables.

For the last year or so I have been using PAD Opis speaker cables. These have a great tonal coherency to lock in well between the CAT JL-3 amps and SoundLab A1 speakers. The Opis retain that strong PAD characterization of dynamic contrasts. The PAD Aqueous Anniv spkr cables were non-linear in my system with peaks and valleys all over the place.

After trying many spkr cables in the $1-2k range, the only other cable that worked well here was the Coincident xTreme, but the Opis outperformed this in dynamics .... otherwise they perform nearly identical here. I had several of these cables here at one time last year to play for a couple weeks.

Enter the Jade this week: Tonality is nearly identical to the Opis but the Jade has a little more extension in the low end and clearly more reach into the top. This latter difference allows for decays to last a bit longer and give the impression of more air to the notes. This was an 8-feet cable that had several hundred hours of use.

I then tried a 4-feet pair of the Jade cable with no burn-in time. Tonality was very similar but not as extended in either direction. The projection was much reduced which lead to a somewhat flat performance. A return to the burned-in 8-feet pair brought back the openness. All tests were done with the souped-up APL Denon into the Callisto with 2 pairs of Jade Hybrid ICs. PCs were a mix of Dream State and Stealth Dream.

The outcome of this mini audition indicates that this cable may need some serious burn-in. The 4-feet pair will be burned-in on a cable burner for a week or so and the test will be repeated to determine how the 8-feet and 4-feet pairs compare here again.

As it stands now, the Jade 8-feet cable was a very nice step above the Opis. One thing I have noticed here is how much less spkr cables differ vs. ICs and PCs. The difference between the two top ICs I have had here, the Indra and Jade Hybrid, have very dramatic differences from source to pre or pre to amps than the above differences between the Opis and Jade spkr cables. And the same with PCs into the APL Denon CDP and Running Springs Haley PLC: the Dream State PC in these positions is a much bigger step ahead of the Stealth Dream PC than these spkr cable differences. So there is clearly a priority here as to where to invest money in cables.

Osgorth: Oh and yes, that mystery IC was the GG Revelation. It did not work out well for me here at all.....whether straight out of the box or over 150 hours of continuous signal for nearly 7 days. Oh well. Leave it to me to wreck a perfect record! I was very appreciative to get refunded from Steve.

John

Thanks John, things that make me go hmmmm. I also demo'd the 8 ft burn in pair of Vermeil and was very impressed. I await your further testing after the 4 ft pair is burned in. I'd really hate to go to an 8 foot pair, not just because of cost, but my amps are right next to my speakers, and I'd have to coil the wires (alledgedly a no-no) just to take up all the extra slack. I suppose I could run my right monoblock to my left speaker, and switch i/c leads, though this seems a bit odd too.

Cheers,
John