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Cardas Clear Reflection Speaker Cable 4 Meter / Banana Reviews

5 Rating 1 Reviews
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Anonymous
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I have speaker cable experience with Canare 4S11, Worlds Best Cables, and one direct to consumer audio brand. I have not tried the Clear or the Clear Beyond. Of all those cables other than this one, I have experienced I guess resonance, glare, or sibilance problems in the upper end of the frequency range particularly with nice DACs. My conclusion is these Clear Reflections are basically perfect, and they don't really constrain highs or lose detail at all. (There's a presentation from Rob Watts (Chord) that suggests some impression of high frequency detail is actually noise). I don't think adding more Clear Reflections as interconnects in my system was a good idea though, as there's more tonal influence from the interconnects than the speaker cable. I've tried this out with more modern recordings, electronic music, and so on, and at most I'd say these are liquid-like, to say "smooth" would imply detail is missing, so I would say "not artifically edgy". All the interior detail is definitely there and improved from what else I've tried at as well. Bass is still all quite there, not muddy or anything like that. I don't think most people should probably go beyond this, since I don't think the "taming of highs" is high frequency rolloff but lack of problems, i.e. this cable works and detail or "energy" can sometimes be a product from an illusion of bad things. I think they are very nicely neutral already. Build quality is great, they are very stout but not stiff. If there is an impression of warmth, sludge, or high frequency rolloff this definitely goes away as they break in and things just get smoother and more liquidy, though I think they do take a bit longer than Cardas describes for "settling in", i.e. I don't think it's just a static electricity issue as the folks at Cardas theorized that causes speaker cable burn-in changes. In fact, with relatively clean interconnects, it's pretty clear there can easily be "too much detail" or "too much treble" with these cables as well. I think they are just "right", basically.
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Posted 6 days ago