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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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An Inmate emailed, "I still think it's funny that your Summer Of Love was 19 freakin' 92. But if you guys were 18, 19, and 20, that makes sense."
He and I exchanged emails about the early-90s, and he added, "You can quote me. Like many other Boomers, the early 90s was when we moved up from mass market electronics, and went into high-end audio. So maybe not Summer Of Love, but certainly an age of discovery."
To give an example of just how far we've come, he and I did not, at that time, have terminated speaker cables. He and I bought speaker wire off of spools! While he had Kimber 8PR and 4VS, I had AudioQuest F-14 and Type 4. Yup, you twisted the bare copper ends, and then inserted them into the connectors of our receivers, and Adcom/NAD-type amplifiers.
Again, during that magical summer of 1992, my hometown San Francisco friends were back from their respective colleges. It entailed learning from, and building upon, the failures and misses from the prior 1991/92 school year. Our friend Allison had just finished her freshman year at UC Irvine. Allison had straight dirty-blonde hair, and, at under 5' tall, referred to her body as a "duck pin."
We were listening to Howard Jones' In The Running. Here, he put away the new wave synths, and evolved into piano-driven adult contemporary. As Jones' "Fallin' Away" was playing, Allison pounded her fist on her own thigh, exclaimed, "It's complicated," and began her tale.
She and Stephen were in the same dorm, and had a class together. So they became study buddies. Each Friday and Saturday, Stephen would try to line up dates, or try to find girls at parties. Like clockwork, he'd come up empty. During the week, Allison would ask Stephen for a rundown. Despite their differences (for example, Allison was a WASP, while Stephen was Jewish), Allison started to like Stephen. Early in the Spring '92 quarter, Stephen once again struck out at parties. He sighed to Allison, "I wish they [the coeds] were more like you."
Yet, according to Allison, Stephen did not show any direct interest in her. She tried dropping hints, using body language, and making eye contact from various angles. She was frustrated that, as the girl, she wasn't "allowed" or supposed to make a move. So when Stephen mentioned the next upcoming dance/party, Allison tried to interject herself, and asked if she could tag along. Stephen went, "Uhhhhhh," but did not say no.
According to Allison, Stephen kept an arm's-length distance the whole night. When they got back to their dorm, Allison lost it, and shouted, "Stop being a bitch! Come here and f--- me!"
Apparently, Stephen froze, recoiled, stepped back, and stopped hanging out with Allison.
For months, I've been evaluating dozens of powercords, digital cables, and line-level interconnects. And all this time, we forgot about the Tara Labs The One CX speaker cable. It has just lain there, collected dust, sonically gotten out of the way, and allowed us to hear what was going on upstream.
If each upstream cable is like Allison and my other friends telling their relationship tales, The One CX is like the quiet room. That allows everyone, from the shy church mouse to the master orators, to open up, and reveal, in their own words, what went wrong, what went right, and what they were going to do next.
Because The One CX employs the BSM "Banana-Spade Module," with screw-in connectors, you will occasionally have to check for tightness. Sounds kinky, but isn't.
Spades will work themselves loose, so please periodically re-tighten them. Sounds kinky, but isn't.
Oh jeezuz. Let's set aside that I am Catholic. In 1992, Tara Labs came out with this awful ad. Psychologically, this made audiophiles freeze, recoil, step back, and not have anything to do with Tara Labs.
Yes, my friends compared ex boyfriends/girlfriends. So some speaker cable comparisons are in order.
Kind of like vinyl playback's distortions, once you hear the Nordost Valhalla's whitish, "scraped knees" coloration, you can't escape it. The clean Tara Labs The One CX is blessedly free of this coloration, and thus comes much closer to the ideal of NO cable at all.
The Shunyata Orion and XLO Signature 3-5.2 are both excellent, sounding almost like twins. But The One CX goes a few steps beyond even this exalted level. The One CX is even cleaner, and more open, liquid, lithe, and transparent.
It's kind of a toss-up, with the superb Wireworld Platinum Eclipse. The PE sports even better sparkle, and an X-Acto knife precision to imaging. The One CX counters, by being less stiff, and again, more open and see-through.
With COVID-19, the number of visitors has been greatly reduced. We used to have people over seemingly every other day. Be that as it may, ask a visitor to concentrate on the speaker cable. When she comes to Tara Labs' The One CX, she has a hard time describing it. Instead, she will talk more about how it disappears, allowing her to (a) move on to other parts of the audio chain, or (b) become in tune with whatever is playing. And yes, that means that, without any prompting, she will discuss past relationships. Instead of just a nebulous and ill-defined "it sucked," she may go into detail, name names, or go into a vlog-like story-telling mode.
When Allison returned to UCI, no, she did not have anything to do with Stephen.
-Lummy The Loch Monster
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Topic - Tara Labs The One CX, Part 7 - Luminator 22:29:38 08/14/20 (0)
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