It’s been a challenging few weeks since undergoing decompression and fusion surgery to fix my dodgy neck. For the next few months, I’m unable to handle heavy equipment, so I’ve found myself spending a good deal of time sitting in my chair, contemplating ways to stay engaged with the hobby, and life in general.

The journey toward recovery has been challenging thus far. While there has been some modest progress, everyday activities such as lifting a gallon of milk with my left arm remain impossible. As a result, handling heavy power amplifiers and loudspeakers is currently beyond my capabilities, and it’s likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

However, with all this extra time on hand, I saw an opportunity to dive into an audio-related project that ought not to be too taxing physically, or at least that’s what I thought. Little did I realize that even seemingly simple tasks in the audio reviewers’ realm can present their own unique challenges and complexities when one has recovery restrictions and physical limitations, but I became eager to channel my energy into something productive and rewarding, regardless.

So I figured that while I’m laid up recovering I could bash out some cable reviews. 

The first review, focusing on the Iconoclast OFE 4×1 RCA interconnects, had been in the works since early December 2023, two weeks before my surgery. With most of the writing already completed, I seized the opportunity to tidy up the draft and share it with my fellow audiophiles here.

The second review centered on a pair of Iconoclast 4×4 XLR Interconnects, and it commences below, with many of my notes and observations conveyed unedited and as they were written down in first person and in the present tense.

It’s quite possible, looking back, that a cocktail of fairly potent medications played some part in the writing process and what emerged.

So let’s back up to where it all started, at around 3.00 am on Tuesday, January 9th as I sat in my comfy chair, unable to sleep and waiting patiently for sun up.

“I can’t get comfortable, I can’t sleep. I can’t help but wonder whether the constipation I’ve been enduring since last Friday is a consequence of the pills prescribed for muscle pain, the pills prescribed for taming muscle spasms, or just the fact that I’m spending twelve hours a day sitting on my backside in this bloody chair.

Wondering what suffering I might have to face next, my mind wanders to the long list of potential side effects I’ve been preparing myself for since starting on these meds:

Weight gain…
Seizures…
Cramps…
Infertility…
Death….

And of course, constipation.

I ponder a short list of tasks that I could physically undertake in my condition without throwing out a connecting rod, it’s not much of a list:  I could pet the dog, comb my hair, adjust another cushion, or tighten my neck brace. But then, a thought begins to emerge from the soup that is my mind. Cables…Interconnect cables…..Hmmm… light in weight, easy to move….

A cable review! I could write a bloody cable review!

It hasn’t been all that long since my last cable review and it feels a lot more recent than my last bowel movement.

[sarcasm]I love writing cable reviews, they’re so mentally stimulating and fulfilling, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. And my readers will love me for it. Everybody loves a good cable review.[/sarcasm].

So as the hours drag on towards daybreak and the prospect of another day of misery beckons, I decide to spend the next few days reviewing the pair of Iconoclast’s 4×4 XLR interconnect cables that I bought a few weeks back, before going under the knife. 

WEDNESDAY – DAY 1
10.00 am

I need to hit the ground running and caffeine will provide the necessary brain fuel so I put my order in with Her Indoors and ten minutes later I’m drinking a nice cup of Twinings tea brewed by the skilled hands of my partner and better half (Her Indoors).

I spend a few minutes catching up with the latest news before I get started and I scroll through my phone looking for the latest happenings at the Mexican border crossing. Soon I find my way to ‘The People of Walmart’ Facebook group, where I see the usual photos of people shopping in their pajamas and I’m happy that nothing untoward took place overnight that I hadn’t been made aware of, and that all appears well with the world.

I sip my Twinings and wait for the system to come to life and warm up a little.

10.45 am

The Iconoclast 4×4 XLR cables have been broken-in for exactly 200 hours. This is the minimum requirement according to psyc101dude, a guy I follow on a popular audiophile forum. I give thought to the cable’s metallurgy, it’s UPOCC copper, and I pull from memory that the OCC part refers to “Ohno Continuous Cast copper”, which is 99.99998% pure. I ponder how information like this comes to mind yet I can’t remember where I left my reading glasses.

Her Indoors is always helpful in locating misplaced appendages. Yet were I to ask her opinion regarding adequate break-in time for 99.99998% pure copper wire, and what her thoughts were regarding the technical reasons for such things existing, she’d be practically useless. I pat myself on the back.

Examining the cables closely I do note the absence of the usual directional arrows printed on the heatshrink or cable jacket and this observation causes me some consternation, as I believe it’s crucial to ensure that cables are installed in the system with the signal flowing according to forward molecular alignment. I remember trying to elucidate this theory a while ago on an audiophile forum, where I quickly became the subject of ridicule. When asked to support the alignment theory with some form of a research article or scientific paper, I could only think to photograph the arrows on a pair of Audioquest speaker cables I had at the time and submit the JPEGs for peer review. It didn’t go down well.

I feel myself starting to drift. It’s too close to lunch now to start moving things around, so I take a break and go make a well-deserved sandwich.

2.30 pm

Feeling satiated I settle in my chair and fiddle with my phone to load up the dCS Mosaic app. Rather than mess with CDs, which can become tiring and irritating quite quickly, I’ll use my dCS Rossini and its network functionality to stream some tunes from Qobuz. It doesn’t sound quite the same but to get me warmed up and in the mood, it should be just fine.

The blue LEDs on the Rossini Player/DAC come to life on a prompt from my phone and I’m reminded just how much technology has changed since I bought my first CD player back in the mid-80s.

I’m thinking back to a time before the turn of the century when suddenly a text alert appears on my screen from Hifi-Shark. An Audio Research GS150 power amplifier has just been listed for sale and I’ve been looking for one of these for ages. Forgetting my physical limitations and the fact that there’s no way I could even unpack the thing, I begin to fumble around in my wallet for my credit card, when yet another text alert appears on my screen. This time it’s from Her Indoors with a link to a website on “How To Retire In Columbia With No 401K”.

Retirement has been something of a contentious issue since I crashed our portfolio, so feeling emasculated and shamed I put the credit card back in my wallet. I can’t help but wonder why she’s texting me from the next room and why she couldn’t just holler; and, where is Columbia exactly?…  I’ll have to do some mansplaining later about the benefits of opening a private pension account versus donating it all to the government, and how was I supposed to know that bitcoin wasn’t the same as real currency.

Feeling a little deflated I survey the room and can’t help but notice the vast array of audio gear I’ve amassed in the last few years. Were I a successful reviewer like some of those fellows on YouTube, for example, I might expect to see a mix of items I’ve purchased alongside some bigger and shinier items sent to me gratis by manufacturers with hopes of securing a favorable review. Alas, that’s not my reality. All I have to show for my reviewing endeavors is an ‘Audiophile Speaker Calibration’ CD with Chinese liner notes, that I completely spaced on returning.

I dwell on the fact that at least everything is paid for as I sip the last of my tea. The caffeine is doing its job and my mind is awash with ideas and I feel positive about the way this is going, when suddenly my thoughts are grounded by a flashback to the earlier forum/cable debacle. My reputation had been trashed just for voicing an opinion on a technical topic without sufficient supporting evidence, and I need to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen with this cable review. While the forum misstep might seem trivial and inconsequential, the fallout from the event was life-changing for me, as soon after I went into therapy. Not the physical variety that I’m having to deal with now as I recover from neck surgery, but the one for stuff in the head department.

You see, I was grappling with existential questions and personal struggles, not just with the system but in other aspects of my life, too. I’d been listening a lot to podcasts by online figures such as Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, and reading more and more forum posts from people like psyc101dude. I came to believe that freewill is an illusion and that our actions are determined by factors beyond our conscious control. You know how those voices just appear in your head from nowhere? Right?

Looking back I now realize that my capacity for rational decision making had become shaped by extraneous biological and environmental factors. This lack of freewill became evident in my purchasing habits, as I accumulated increasing credit card debt while continuously expanding and upgrading my audio system.

Thankfully, I sought professional help to get things back on track but my recovery was curtailed when my therapist ceased communicating with me after just six sessions. Leaving his office after what I thought was a particularly fruitful discussion on the effects of peer pressure on consumerism, he bade me farewell and assured me his secretary would call to set up the next appointment, a call which never came. The bloke ghosted me.

It’s almost 4.30 pm now and I feel the liquid reward for a hard day at the office beckoning.

THURSDAY – DAY 2

10.00 am

It was another listless night and my neck hurts and I still haven’t dropped the kids off at the pool.

While yesterday’s progress might not be described as brisk, I do feel that I’m well on the road to nailing this thing, and with some mental fortitude today, I should hopefully stay on task and get this stage of the process wrapped up quite soon.

Picking up where I left off I fire up the Rossini and the Mosaic app and I get a familiar playlist loaded. As music fills the room I take stock of what it is that I’m doing:

1 – I have an XLR cable pair that I am reviewing. The cable is made by Iconoclast Cables and it is their 4×4 XLR UPOCC Copper Interconnect in a 4′ length.

2 – It is connected between the balanced outputs on my dCS Rossini Player/Dac/Master Clock and my Veloce Audio LS-1 Linestage. The LS-1 Linestage talks to their matching siblings, a pair of Veloce Audio Saetta Hybrid monoblocks, which grip the ProAc D40R speakers with some authority.

3 – My dCS Rossini Player plays CDs and plays nicely as a network player – it can suckle from Qobuz and also a USB hard drive that plugs into a SonicTransporter on the network, with handshaking and serving duties facilitated by minimServer.

So far so good.

I have 3 sets of XLR cables in mind for comparative purposes and these are from Straightwire (Virtuoso), Harmonic Technologies (ProSilway II), and a pair of Cardas (Cross).

Leaving my chair I enter the dining room from the dedicated music room through the 6′ wide doorway to collect the three sets of cables I have pegged for comparison with the Iconoclasts. I use ‘dining room’ here in the loosest sense as the room serves a dual function, neither connected in any way with food consumption. The room is home to Audio System Number Two, the backup, and also provides storage space for various odds and ends related to audio that I’ve collected over the past 40 years or so. Her Indoors once tried to stake a claim to the room and for a while she had it in mind to use it as an actual dining room, envisioning it as a space for social gatherings. I believe that she fantasized about donning a posh frock, hosting dinners with neighbors and friends, and engaging in lively conversation and witty repartee. But that was before I went mental.

It takes some time to extract the cables from several plastic totes, each having accumulated a lot of assorted wire and cords whose origin and intended function escape me. Emerging with the 3 sets of cables extracted, I feel every bit the audiophile with the expensive cables draped around my neck – I’m primed, stoked, and ready for action.

It’s 11.45 however, and time to break for lunch.

1.30 pm

I settle into my chair with serious features and I feel every bit the professional reviewer, bolt upright, both feet on the ground and one hand resting casually on each knee. But something doesn’t feel right. It takes only seconds to realize that my neck brace is causing my head to tilt upwards at an unnatural angle and I can’t visually address the soundstage with the head-on gaze that I’m used to and that it deserves. I adjust my cushion position over and over but I can’t get it to work so I power everything down and break for the day.

Friday

9.30 am

Wearing a neck brace doesn’t exactly result in incapacitation, but it doesn’t help much when squirming around on one’s stomach behind a filthy equipment rack trying to switch out cables. Flipping over on my back I can’t angle my head down to see anything properly, so it’s all done by feel and instinct. Red to yellow, green to brown, blue to bits.

Moving around hurts quite a bit, but it’s worth it and my neurosurgeon did recommend that I stay active. The same guy who said post-surgery recovery would be a breeze.

I’m moving cables in and out of the system skillfully and efficiently, stopping in between changes to observe the audible effects. I’m in my zone now, it’s what I do, what I was built for. I hear things that I haven’t heard before and that other people likely couldn’t hear, the tiniest details revealing themselves to me. At times it’s almost palpable.

With the Iconoclast cable, the sound is ethereal, transcendent, and prodigious. From the nuanced timbre of the midrange to the thunderous depth of the bass, every note is rendered with a cohesion that speaks to the meticulous engineering behind this cable. It’s not just about the sum of its parts; it’s about the gestalt of sonic excellence that elevates the listening experience to unparalleled heights.

I ponder the mind of the person who could create such a thing and I’m coloured green with envy. I flash to a post-apocalyptic scene where the cable designer is sitting cross-legged in a cave entrance providing counsel and wisdom to the New Earth’s leaders who queue in a long line down the hillside awaiting their turn.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this cable is far superior to those that I’ve selected to do battle from my various totes. 

It has been a very productive morning despite several breaks for medical attention, but it’s Friday afternoon, and time to stop for the weekend, I’m exhausted. 

Over the weekend I have an epiphany.

I’ve been going to excruciating lengths to create this review for my (two) readers, a review of what is, without doubt, an audiophile-quality interconnect cable. I’ve quite literally put my body on the line. At any time during my shenanigans, something internally could’ve snapped and I might not be here to finish up the review.

But it occurred to me over the weekend while using the restroom (yes!) that in the world of audiophilia, few topics spark as much debate and fervor as the discussion surrounding audio cables. With promises of improved sound quality and heightened musical fidelity, cables often find themselves under the scrutiny of eager reviewers and enthusiasts like me. However, when one is laid up recovering from surgery one has ample time for introspection, and it became apparent to me that the practice of reviewing audio cables is fraught with challenges and limitations that render such evaluations largely futile.

One of the fundamental issues plaguing the endeavor of reviewing audio interconnect cables is the inherent variability and subjectivity of sound perception. Each individual possesses unique hearing acuity, along with preferences, and biases that influence their perception of sound. What may sound sublime to one listener could be underwhelming or even grating to another. In this regard, attempting to provide an objective assessment of audio interconnect cables proves to be an exercise in futility, as the reviewer’s subjective experience inevitably colours their evaluation. 

Plus, the sheer diversity of the audio interconnect cables available on the market exacerbates the challenge of conducting meaningful comparisons. With countless brands, models, materials, and construction techniques to choose from, and of course MSRPs, the range of options can be overwhelming. Were I to dig deeper in my totes I could probably produce a further two, three, maybe even four sets of quality interconnect cables to throw into the mix and make this review relevant to an even broader range of people. You might have found your way here searching on Google for ‘Iconoclast’, or ‘Cardas’, or even ‘Twinings Tea’, and you might leave here thinking “I must get myself a pair of those [insert here] cables”, based on the opinion of some clown whom you’ve never even met. It doesn’t make sense.

Cable hopping gets even more contentious when you consider that the electrical interaction between a cable and the components within a particular audio system introduces another layer of complexity. A cable that excels in one system may yield lackluster results in another, making it nearly impossible to draw generalized conclusions about its performance. 

Ultimately, the efficacy of an audio cable hinges not on its objective technical specifications or the accolades bestowed upon it by lunatics like me, but rather on its ability to synergize with the components in a given system and cater to the listener’s personal sonic preferences. As I’ve said elsewhere when reviewing components, “This is my system, my ears, and my tastes, thus this review is valid only for entertainment purposes”.

Rather than placing undue emphasis on reviews and recommendations, I encourage you audiophiles to trust your ears and engage in hands-on experimentation to find the cable that best complements your system and satisfies your auditory sensibilities. And on this point of experimentation, I can promise you that spending ever-increasing sums of money on cables, or on anything else in your system for that matter, brings no guarantee of a step up in performance and user satisfaction.

In fact, I can say categorically and with the benefit of over 40 years of experience in this hobby, that if you’re shopping for cables up to an MSRP of say $5,000/pr, you’ve as much chance of finding a $500 pair that sounds the best in your system as you do a $5,000 pair. If all you take from that sentence is sufficient encouragement to shop around and try a wider range of products at varying price points, and to TRUST YOUR EARS when you hear something that sounds good, then I’ve made my point and done my job.

To reiterate and to summarize: while the allure of seeking out the perfect audio interconnect cable, or any other system cable, is understandable, the practice of reviewing such cables is fraught with inherent limitations and subjectivity. Our biases and preferences as reviewers can easily become a problem for our readers and the buying public whom we influence.

So rather than fixating on the pursuit of sonic perfection as dictated by someone who works topless from his mother-in-law’s basement, try to prioritize personal experimentation and satisfaction in your quest for improving your system, and learn to trust your own ears. The only opinion that truly matters is your own, and if it sounds good it is good.

Thank you for reading.

CAH Owner/Editor

Owner, Editor, designer, and writer of articles and papers on such diverse topics as audiophile industry products, law and legal, natural health industry, and executive recruitment.

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