Can you explain what you thought the differences were in the sound?
Ivor, the £116 seemed to me expensive, but I paid it to end the hassle of not being able to get the audio system working properly in the new house - thick black sugarally hawsers cluttering the place up, and one speaker sitting in an inconvenient place, were not a permanent proposition. I didn't pay it in any expectation of a better sound. (If I'd back-converted the speakers and returned to single wiring I might have been half-expecting a
poorer sound, but I didn't - the new cables retained the biwiring configuration of the old ones.) I can't remember now what the Linn cables cost, but they weren't cheap either.
I can't explain the nature of the difference. Just - my ideal would be for my system to sound like St. John's, Smith Square, at an actual concert. Or even better, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Not going to happen. But the system now seems to be closer than it was before, and further away from the portable tranny.
Well--that's why I say that your testimony is interesting. It could be, of course, that the change made a real and audible difference (who knows--perhaps there was some flaw in the old wires, perhaps some flaw in the way they were connected etc. etc.). It's also possible that while you weren't consciously expecting a difference you were unconsciously hoping for one. It's also possible that it is something as mundane as having not had the thing playing for a while made you exaggerate in your mind your dissatisfaction with the sound, so that by contrast with your expectations it suddenly blew you away. There's no doubt that different placement of speakers in a room can contribute enormously to aural differences--and being able to place the speakers differently was one of the main reasons for the cable change, right?
Or, it could be all in the cables themselves: but to test that you'd need to set up a blind test--which would be difficult, I imagine, with your set up. Still, possibly worth a go if it might lead to the MDC.
If the improvement had been simply a comparison between the old house and the new one, I wouldn't necessarily have been all that surprised. One way and another it had been nearly a year since I left the old house. who knows how many explanations for things being different might have been found. Speaker placement in particular.
However, I'd tried the system in the new house with the old cables. The only difference was that the right-hand speaker was about a foot or two further forward than it should have been, due to the length of the cable. And I was fairly underwhelmed by the sound quality, just not particularly surprised.
In fact, speaker placement isn't that different. One on either side of the fireplace, about the same distance apart in both houses. The reason the old cable wasn't long enough was simply that in the old house the gas fire was wall-mounted without a hearth, and the cable ran neatly along the skirting board, while in the new house there is not only a marble hearth protruding into the room but a chimney breast about 18" deep as well, and the Linn cable was not only too short but too inflexible to run neatly round this.
So the main differences are that the speakers now have a chunk of masonry sticking out of the wall between them (while before the wall was flush), and as I haven't yet bothered to fit the wall-mounted speaker stands they are just sitting on a couple of low tables - same distance from the wall, as they're intended to be wall mounted, but a little lower.
The tables were constant between the recent test with the old speakers and the new setup, but the chunk of masonry wasn't entirely - as I said, because the cable was short, one speaker was positioned forward, in front of the line of the chimney breast.
I'm doubtful that the presence of the chimney breast between the speakers is capable of having a strikingly positive effect on sound quality - especially as I was still struck by the sound quality last night when I turned on Radio 3 at my mother's request - as it happened, she was sitting in the optimum listening seat, while I was in a bad position, much closer to one speaker than the other. But I still thought, wow, that's terrific.
The tables, rather than the speaker stands? Well, let's just say I'm not rushing to screw the speaker stands to the wall. However, when I tried the system in the new house with the old cables, the speakers were on the tables, and I wasn't impressed.
I think it's more likely that there was some sort of fault with the Linn cables. I just don't know what it could have been, given that nothing seemed to be broken and they were apparently very robust. But since I threw them away when I bought the new ones, who knows - and further testing isn't going to happen either, for that reason.
Just a final thought. Supposing they'd been plugged in wrongly before, with the treble output connected to the bass and vice versa, on one or both speakers? I'd be dubious about the possibility, but who knows - it's a long time since I wired the system up in the old house, and when I threw it together in the new house originally, perhaps I wasn't as careful as all that. (I was certainly careful when fitting the new cable.) Could that have made a noticeable difference, caused poor sound reproduction? I could reproduce that simply by switching the banana plugs round with the system as it is. Might be worth a try, just to satisfy my curiosity.
Rolfe.
