Spatia Impressions

We decided to make the marker subtle for the first batches of Spatia's. I get a number of people telling me how ashamed they are with me for following the directional cable "crap", and that my reputation with them is now hanging in shreds...

The thing is I never believed cable direction could have any effect... until I tried it in a blindfold test, which was very difficult as I was doing the test on my own!

This was a few years ago. I made two headphone extension cables. One had the cable with print running from source to receiving equipment, and the other had the print in the other direction. I threw both on the lounge floor and turned the lights off. I fumbled about in the dark and found one of the cables and having worked in a darkroom many years ago, I had learned the knack of finding little things like film cartridge end caps by feel, so found it relatively easy to find the headphone amp and headphone jack plug and connect up.

I can't remember the exact sequence but found one cable to have a "muddled" sound and the other much clearer.

When we started doing the CuSat50 the cable had print on the jackets, but the current manufacturer of the stock cable supplies it unprinted. I therefore get the job of finding the right direction by ear. It is quite easy though. I often use Los Endos by Genesis. There is a climax that uses a stereo trick to squeeze the music to centre stage before expanding out again to a full sound stage. If the direction is wrong you simply don't get the effect. Also, in the wrong direction the phasing sounds all wrong as if a loudspeaker is connected red to black and black to red.

With the Lautus it is imperative to get the direction right because the filters have to be put on an exact distance from the source end.

Looking forward to your impressions tg.

Graham

tg wrote: Looked up the specs and sure enough, they are directional, got out a torch and examined each lead rather carefully and finally found the telltale blue wrap under the flexbraid.

On the Spatia links, I have switched from my usual biwired left and right speakers to single wired with links from HF to LF. Ellisdj pm'ed a bit on this as we have the same speakers and came to similar conclusions about the improvement the Spatia links give over the manufacturer's links, which are pretty good. The Spatia links open up the sound and there's more music to enjoy.