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I got the same results

Posted by pburant (A) on April 4, 2003 at 10:53:29

In Reply to: REVIEW: VH Audio Flavors 1, 2, and 3 Cable posted by smallpond on April 3, 2003 at 16:46:49:

I've now had a Flavor 1 and a Flavor 2 in my system for just over a week.

I started by running the Flavor 2 to my B&K AV5000 amp. Immediately my system had better impact, better extension of both lows and highs, and more detail. It also had more distortion, but more on that in a minute. I next ran the Flavor 1 to my Sony DVP-S9000ES with essentially the same results as with the Flavor 2 and the amp. If anything, the cord swap on the CD player yiilded more definition/resolution than the cord switch on the amp, and the cord swap on the amp yielded more impact (probably an effect of more accurate bass/less tonal distortion combined with better power delivery to the amp for better transient response). Overall, the magnitude of the changes to each component was about equal, which was, in my experience, about twice the magnitude of any IC upgrade I've made. I should mention that the stock cord on the Sony was much better than the stock cord on the B&K - I ended up using the Sony cord on my B&K Ref20 preamp.

I mentioned distortion earlier - along with the positive characteristics brought about by these cords was a fair amount of distortion, most noticeable in the lower to middle treble region. The best way I could describe this distortion is it sounded like each of my main speakers had an additional tweeter mounted on top of them, playing at very low volume compared to the mains, and these tweeters would also be constantly rotating (very quickly) to point in slightly different directions (maybe a left right sweep of 5 degrees). This distortion destabilized the imaging of my system - all the images were in the right places, but there were hints of the images (call them ghost images if you like) on either side of the main image, but to varying degrees at varying times. The overall sound of the high end was also a bit 'tizzy'. There is good news, however...

I immediately recognized this distortion as the sound of an un-broken in cable. It is distinctly different than the type of distortion you get from a cheap cable in the way that it manifested itself to varying degrees at different times, and also in slightly varying ways (the fact that the image was slightly instable). Although my system sounded better than ever before, I quickly decided the best thing to do would be to put a disk on repeat, turn the volume up and go away for awhile. Sure enough, a few hours later there was still a touch of tizziness, but the images had not only stabilized, but were more defined than ever before. The stage had definitely widened.

I left the system playing overnight and the whole next day while I was at work. After 24 hours, it hardly sounded like the same system. The positive attributes I had initially gained had been magnified, and the distortion had disappeared, yielding a system with far less apparent distortion than before the cord swaps. For the first several minutes of listening, I didn't realize that I hadn't turned my subwoofer back on since the night before - there was that much more impact and extension to the bass.

I highly recommend these power cords to anyone thinking of an upgrade. I don't have the experience to compare these cords to other aftermarket cords for you, but compared to my stock cords these are easily worth twice what they cost.

I'm a happy customer.

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VH Audio

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