PAUL McGOWAN: My first taste

Paul McGowan writes:

I am trying to remember the system at the time I made the switch from long speaker cables. I believe at that time Music Room One consisted of a pair of Maggie 3.7, a pair of Descent subwoofers, and powered by a Classic 250 amplifier. It was a hell of a good sounding system and before the introduction of the massive Infinity IRSV to the room.

BTW, if you haven’t watched the video of installing the IRSV, it’s a hoot. You can see it here. I apologize for the short ad YouTube forced on us after the video went near-viral.

I had been itching to try rearranging the room to test out an idea that had been nagging at me. A few guys in the warehouse helped me move the beast of an amplifier between the loudspeakers and I cobbled together a 30 foot balanced interconnect pair. Balanced, by the way, is the only way to go for interconnects longer than a few meters, IMHO.

PS Audio was making its own speaker and interconnect cables at the time and we had a short pair of speaker cables I used. We hadn’t long interconnects, I think the lengthiest we had in stock was three meters. XLR cables are easy to daisy chain, and three seemed to do the trick.

I was quite used to the way the system sounded and wasn’t prepared for what I heard. I figured the Mickey Mouse method of chaining together three balanced interconnects wasn’t such a good idea, but I assumed it would tell me something of the differences between what I was used to—long speaker cable—and what I now had—long interconnects.

I was dumbfounded. Instead of what I expected, a rolled off and lackluster sound, I got the opposite. Openness, spaciousness, much greater soundstage width and fuller timbre were my rewards. Huh?

It just didn’t make any sense. How could this be?

Honestly, and to this day, I have never adequately answered this question to my satisfaction. It still makes little sense.

 

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