August 1, 2009

First Impression of Silver & Gold

This is an old post of ours in the blog we previously contributed to.

Today, an amazing thing happened in my household....

Well, I think many married audiophiles have the experience where their better halves tell them that they listen to their music too loudly, or where they feel the music played on your system is ear-pokingly bad that they will leave the room once the system comes on, right? (many say the fairer sex have better or more sensitive hearing, I agree)

But today, my lovely wife sat beside me and we listened to more than one hour of music on my hifi system, she told me she enjoyed the music and she even commented on how good the sound quality was. Nothing had changed actually - I played the same CDs at the same volume level as before, we sat in the same place, I had the same system components - except one thing: I inserted the Siltech Signature Series G6 Forbes Lake SATT interconnects into my system.

Their 1m length did not allow me to put them between my CD player and preamp without having to rearrange my equipment, so I put them between my preamp and monoblocks, just to get an initial impression. When the music started, we could not stop! I played one track after another and we had a very enjoyable time. We played a variety of music – jazz vocals, some virtuoso violin music and some drum tracks (my wife never ever sat through a dynamic drum track with me, this is a first).

I’ll comment more on the Forbes Lake’s sound quality in the full review for AVXpress after my extended listening sessions later. It is suffice to say now that my initial impression is that they improved my system’s musicality, heightened its resolution, made the bottom more articulate, and smoothened the highs without slowing the music down or dulling it. There are many other sound aspects I would like to comment on, but I should not let the cat out of the bag too early, especially not before I have a full handle on their performance, so I beg your patience. :-)

I’ll do some run-in on them for the next few days, and start some serious listening, I expect to hear more improvement. I’ll also compare their performance between pre-power and between CD-pre.

I absolutely look forward to this ‘chore’.

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