My inner Feng Shui critic dispensed a few drops of blessed water. That chap was chill. How about the caustic audiophile compadre? In truth, those two are not fully separate. They'd love to pretend otherwise but one influences the other. Otherwise there'd be SPS; split personality syndrome. I'm framing this light-hearted. Still, what's in the frame matters. Looks and how we feel about something are part of the overall package. If that's supposed to perform as in, do a job, looks are plainly an aspect of performance. Informing how we feel about it are workmanship, nobility of materials, execution of details. On it all Exact Express aced my score card. Thin yet tough. White so the closest thing to invisible against white-ish walls. Quality materials without plasticky shrink wrap. Excellent connectors with twin torque screws. Easy to route. Set 'n' forget.

But let's not forget Capt'n Caustic, the curmudgeonly critic of musical noises. Rather than sprinkle holy water, that fella got on his high horse about consistent cable looms. It's a gospel he's preached for ages. Here was more proof for it. Clearly the earlier jumpers had inserted themselves with a different tuning. They had exemplified the copperish concept of softer warmth and heaviness. By contrast, the white jumpers had the silvery signature of greater HF energy, more overtone tracking and a quicker more fleet-footed demeanour.

I'm not talking of actual copper and silver by the way, just general preconceptions whose ubiquity makes for a convenient descriptive. If you didn't think that 80cm wire behind 3m wire can make a difference if the two are dissimilar, think again. Sure, one could combine two which just so happen to follow the same sonic ideas even though they're from brands X and Y and look wildly different. Far more likely, one will combine two which disagree on where true north is, exactly. My first jumper set had touched the steering wheel, changed course and thereby diluted what the preceding loom aimed at.

Combining not merely like with like but identical with identical established an obvious course correction. This endeth my brief tale of claim jumpers and jumper claims. While beyond Taylor Sheridan and his Four Sixes ranch the Wild West is mostly gone, claims of jumpers are very real. Just because they tend to be short so seemingly insignificant, they can turn out to be anything but. I had already practiced the one-loom faith with as much religion as my wallet could muster. Correcting this deviation from the straight 'n' arrow reconfirmed its real-world merit. Lesson. Relearnt. It reminds me of another lesson first taught by Franck Tchang, l'enfant terrible of acoustic resonator fame. His solid-core LiveLine cable had splice-welded 1cm sections of precious metals like gold, silver and platinum to their ends which changed the sound of the predominant copper in-between. In the wake of Serguei Timachev's Indra cable made with a roll of amorphous metal apparently found discarded in a Russian warehouse—the details of its location are shrouded in mystery—measurement-driven Siltech subsequently experimented with amorphous wire. They confirmed Franck's insight that dissimilar short splices attached to lengths of normal conductor made the full cable behave as though it were, in this case, amorphous. If I remember the story correct, the costs of obtaining such raw conductor from an Israeli military contractor at the time proved prohibitive. Hence that Siltech experiment ended. But the upshot remains. Terminate a long loom of consistent wiring with even a short stretch of alienware and you will alter your tuning. You might enjoy the effect. You might not.

I much prefer the Exact Express jumpers to what they replaced. And it's far from being about just looking better. After all, that Feng Shui guy and audiophile critic are one and the same person.ality.