Circle jerk. Tail chaser. At first, the 3-metre cable made no sound on my iMac. AudioMIDI and PureMusic recognized the connected Fore Audio DAISy1 just fine and got busy streaming to it. Alas, no sound. Reverting to my customary KingRex unmuted this situation. Huh? The Curious had no issues on my Win7/64 desktop setup whose DAC is deliberately USB 1.0 to need no driver. Aha? Back to the iMac, I tried the 24/96 DAC of the Aura Vita. Joy; though mute once again with the DAISy1 and also with an alternate 24/192 COS Engineering D1 converter.


Now I remembered the latter's USB 1.0/2.0 switch in the back. I set it to 1.0 which duly confirmed in AudioMIDI and PureMusic as being limited to 96kHz. Sound. Hola! To test my emerging theory, I flicked the switch during play, fully expecting it to interrupt. It did not. Checking back in AudioMIDI, the DAC still showed as 24/96. Even reseating the cable didn't revert to 24/192. Perhaps a full iMac reboot would have. Instead I went back to the DAISy1 now set to 44.1kHz in software. Sound. Next I killed PureMusic, reset AudioMIDI to the full 384kHz, then relaunched PM fully expecting silence again. Not. Now I could even upsample to 352.8kHz without issue. Ditto for the D1 which worked at a full 24/192. A true circle jerk.


I can't explain the iMac's—DACs'?— initial reluctance to do USB 2.0 over 3 metres. It'll remain one of those irrational PCfi weirdnesses. Like pimples, they come and go without explanation. But then I'm told that men like chasing tail. With Rob having also dispatched a 1-metre length for my desktop, I got busy running some non-stop signal into both to soften them up for judgment hour. On USB cable length, Gordon Rankin as the grandfather of USB audio is on prior record with this: "I would add one really key component to the list of time/timing errors/jitter, what is called 'turnaround'. All of these protocols are asked for some kind of response. The turnaround time is the amount of time the cable settles to allow the other end to start transmitting without the signal being corrupted. It has to do with capacitance, length and impedance." Bob had a related idea which he proposed to Alex Crespi of Uptone Audio's Regen; on how to maximize the performance of any 3m USB cable length. Alex's response: "Yes, you can put a Regen in the middle of a long run of USB cable. Being an active hub, it will act like a repeater. But you may be surprised that in many cases it will recover data well at the DAC end of a 3m cable (sometimes even 5m). Having the Regen right at the DAC results in best signal integrity and impedance match. Or, one could use two Regen, one in the middle of the cable and one near the DAC." Rob wanted to know whether I wished to explore that. Seeing how my pimple had gone already, I didn't want to complexify this assignment so politely declined.

Whilst still on break-in without lending ears, reader Joshua Jacobson checked in: "Picked up the Curious USB. Had some stock USB, a Furutech and Purist to compare. With these, I preferred the Purist as it gave some improvement in vocals (the downside being a slight suffocation in the highs and lows) but in all honesty, I would have a hard time telling them apart unless it was tracks I knew really well. So I was not expecting too much from the Curious and was even thinking I would try it out and most likely send it back and put to bed the notion of spending $1000+ on a USB cable. With the LIO and Boenicke W5+, there is greater analog sound and decay but the most shocking to me is the increase in depth. The improvement-to-cost ratio is through the roof. The only thing that comes close—not even tube rolling—is proper speaker placement and that's only because it is free." My hour of reckoning was still out but shaping up to be a fun show down.


I started on the desktop with Spotify Plus. That's lossy 320kbps compression. I wanted to know whether fellow MP3 streamers should get curious. True, many of their lot who happily throw away resolution by the bucket load (CD resolution is 1'441kbps) are content with 1/5th aka 256kbps MP3. Since I'd paid for Spotify + because they stream stuff which Qobuz and Tidal don't have, that's how low I'd sink into into the black pit of data dilution. Swapping between Curious and Telos wires netted a very small difference but nothing the MP3 crowd would appreciate. The Telos was a skoch warmer, thicker and fuzzier. But in general I thought that there simply wasn't sufficient data on hand to enjoy a conclusive edge either way. I moved to full-resolution Qobuz with the Sirba Octet's Tanz. That's a collection of Gipsy and Klezmer dance music in a Romanian salon setting of saucy strings, rumbling cembalom, piano and slinky clarinet. Pay day! Now I had a most telling difference of gestalt considering how easily massed strings reveal things. The Telos cable had them far wirier, metallic and edgy. The Curious was rather better at capturing their tone-wood aspects, a redolent quality often ascribed to vinyl or triodes. On space matters, it indeed unfurled more depth by opening up the decay envelope. The crisper drier Telos behaved more damped and dimensionally shorter. Its sorting and layout of spatial relations was less specific, more flat and compact. Joshua had it right. But not only he.


I sensed a rare instance of truthy advertising. Had Rob already said all there was to say? Was my job to be a mindless press parrot, republishing prefab product statements? From a creativity angle, I can tell you categorically that writers find such outcomes rather less satisfactory than minor or major disagreements which allow one to work out a carefully considered counter position backed by contrary findings. "As he said" is rather less fulfulling. But when it happens, the job demands to say so, boring as it might be. Shuffling through more material merely confirmed it. Rob had already said all there was to say. Damn. Looking for some unique things to add, I had two ideas. One, see whether headfi enjoyed these differences to the same extent (having the HifiMan HE1000 on hand would rather drill down on soundstaging); two, determine whether the 3-metre length suffered anywhere by comparison. For starters and plenty rope to hang themselves with overcooked steeliness, I fed the two cables a heavy dose of Latchès, a fiery Jazz Manouche album with blistering show-off guitar duels between Yorgui Loeffler and Steeve Lafont. No doubt, the Telos strangulated itself by focusing too hard on the steel and not enough on the wooden bodies behind them. This acted like an injection of white sizzle, of needly hail on tin roofs, of nasty nails on chalk board. The Curious not only repaired that transient emphasis, it showed more decay haloes around the instruments to illuminate spatial connections. These aspects factored despite headphonia's strange exclusion of natural crossfeed where each ear only hears the channel assigned to it.


Replacing the 1-metre with the 3-metre leash in a setup which didn't need the extra length wasted not only money. It also threw away a degree or two of articulation, of incisive focus capture. The overall signature remained unchanged but the longer cable did give up a bit of definition. With the Curious—and perhaps true also for many if not all of its competitors but I haven't tried it on those—wherever you can accommodate the unmanly maxim of shorter is better, your pleasure goes up. When it comes to listening distance as in, nearfield versus midfield or desktop versus living room rig, the latter enlarged the already not subtle difference of this peculiar Oz wire. It was a virtual rerun, albeit on a newer tellie with better picture quality and deeper black values. That curious signature —more decay retrieval, fuller tone, deeper space—once more asserted itself unchallenged over the double-header LightHarmonic LightSpeed and a standard Black Cat Cable redlevel Lupo. It even did with the basic 24/96 USB 1.0 DAC of the Aura Vita. By focusing his max shielding efforts on a separate coaxially configured power leg and not on the actual signal conductors, Rob Woodland seems to have lifted the competition's damper pedal on tone and space. The impact of this action does not rely on a jeweler's loupe to see. It's easy to hear and very obvious. If the sonic contributions John Darko and Joshua Jacobson and Rob Woodland and now I described also describe what your current setup is short on, "get ye real Curious" would seem to be the antidote. Consider me very pleasantly surprised. And my apologies to late-coming reviewer colleagues. Like me, they'll be stuck with having to say "like those other guys already said". The Curious cable simply is what it is. It would seem to translate from system to system, from ears to ears. Hence if that's the sound you're after, you're pretty much guaranteed to get it. Few cable choices are that unambiguous. Now that is curious!
Postscript: Upon reading that his 3-metre length didn't sound quite as good as the 1-metre, Rob asked again whether I could look into the Regen. He'd supply his own very short USB patch cord to replace Uptone's USB/USB adaptor. With Darko leading this particular parade once more, DAR by then already had a report on that very combination. John had to use Uptone's stock SMPS as supplied. For the maker, a switcher rather than linear supply seems a disingenuous choice when computer-based switching power supplies are viewed as satan's spawn by inference. Not to rain on their parade but Regen really is German for rain. Had Uptone spelled their device ReGen, the Germanskis amongst us would more easily latch onto their intended meaning of Regenerator. That's fancy verbiage for what really is an active USB repeater such as I used in prior digs to bridge more than five USB metres between computer and printer. The Regen box is meant to huddle as close as possible to the DAC in question. They don't want to reintroduce issues based on cable length. As we remember from CD player error-correction mechanisms—the less they were invoked, the better the sound or so theory claimed—the core idea with the Regen is to reduce the work load placed on the USB receiver's physical layer. The less 'error correction' it has to perform on the incoming USB packets, the better for the sound. PCfi already is familiar with a parallel rational for specialty player programs. Their most extreme settings strategically defeat background threads to reduce CPU work load. They may in fact disable a PC's regular multi-paralleled functionality to focus on just the bare essentials necessary to output music. Humans recognize good advice in not labouring hard on a full stomach. Computer audio seems to work better in the same way. Lower work loads from reduced multi-tasking equal superior results. Stay tuned...

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