System:
Speakers: GoldenEar Triton One.R
Amplifiers: PS Audio M700
Source: Mytek Brooklyn Bridge DAC
Previous Speaker Cable: Nordost Blue Heaven LS
Accessory: Audioquest Fog cable lifter
All it took was three seconds, and I found myself sitting up, listening intently. Something BIG was happening. The impact on the sound was HUGE, in a GOOD way.
The placement of instruments and voices were imaged in a rock solid position. Nothing fuzzy, no "the sax is somewhere over there". Nope. That sax was RIGHT THERE. You could point right to it. And the room? Not mine, but the room the music was recorded in. Equally well resolved. Before, with my Nordost Blue Heaven LS cables, rooms were best resolved when there was some sonic queue, like a hard percussion hit generating an echo slap. Now, you could just hear the room in every note. Almost to the level of feeling it. A major step up in the "you are there" feeling.
All of that I heard in one song. And I was shocked when I checked to see the resolution of the digital song I was listening to. It was 44.1/16. Wow! Never has simple Redbook sounded SO gorgeous, with such wonderful detail. I would comfortably bet a lot of money that I was listening to MQA or 192/24. And all that was just the first song I was listening to. When the 2nd piece started playing, I did not bother listening to more that a few bars. It was not necessary. Being likewise laser focused in, resolving the room, and sounding sonically spectacular, my demo was over. There was no need for more. The Fideliums were keepers.
In my forty plus yeas as an audiophile, swapping in a piece of gear for evaluation, and having it be SO good - so dramatically and unequivocally better - that A/B'ing is not even necessary, is a rare event. It's happened to me only three times, this being the third. That's not even once a decade.
The thirty day return policy, plus a good read of the background audio conductor physics paper on the Silversmith Audio webpage, caused me wonder if it might be really possible that clearly unusual speaker cables - costing just a shade more than the fine pair I already had - might be audible. Boy, am I glad I tried, for these Fidelium cables have - forgive me for the overused metaphor - taken my system to a wonderful new level. Wow.
On a final note, my first order was for a set that turned out to be longer than I needed (8ft). So after I boxed up the cables to return for exchange for the shorter pair (6ft), I decided to listen to the two songs I evaluated with again, using my original banana-terminated Nordost Blue Heaven LS cables. Without the Fideliums the soundstage collapsed, back to a less well defined space, with less well place instruments and voices. More importantly, the music was just less "musical", for lack of a better word. It's as if a tremendous amount of the foot-tapping joy just had been sucked out. NO doubt about it, the Fideliums are keepers.
