A game flame changer? Each cable or pair came in one of these gold-branded white cartons then inside a black bag with magnetized flap made out of thick felt. Think baby's Harley-Davidson saddle bag.
Inside each bag then came a vacuum-packed cable with moisture-absorbing pellet packs, velcro zips and a branded protective velour cover with drawstrings over each sculpted noise trap. The plugs of the AC cables even came with extra plastic covers. A Flame loom definitely arrives pampered. Unpacking should make buyers feel giddy with glee over their shopping savvy. As the opening photo showed, this lot combines lean flexible diameters with impeccable workmanship and a good helping of very functional bling. The EMI copper traps certainly wouldn't need to be this extravagantly styled or gilded to work. But it sure looks fab. Likewise for the subtle branding of all plug barrels. So far so flameboyant. Of course the initial visual hit must soon give way for the collected calm of proper distance in the listening chair. Then all visual wow is obscured by rack/s and speakers. Now what do the ears have to say?
First a final closeup of…
… the flaming show. As far as these things go, it's undeniably posh but a far cry from the gauche, gargantuan or other 'geez' reactions typical high-end excess will rightly prompt. These cables route and dress like a dream. Back to hard-hitting reality it was when I replaced my upstairs loom with these Mongol invaders. To be clear, this wasn't yet Genghis x Kublai so Flame versus Earth. The opposition was a mix of Crystal Cable and Furutech.
My inner cynic was unprepared. The Flame game proved demonstrably more dynamic. Peaks rose more violently, micro inflections rippled harder. The top end had superior micro detail, the overall presentation a quickening or deslagging as though Drano had declogged the pipes of electrical signal transmission for more unobstructed passage.
That effect tracked a parallel review's replacement of excellent but classic 2-way Acelec Model One monitors with 1½-way Lindemann Move. The German monitor puts up to ~15kHz on a single Mark Audio Alpair 5 widebander. That makes for the bigger version of the isobaric Alpair 4 in our MonAcoustic minis below. In the air region the Move adds a small AMT on a 1st-order high pass. The aluminium Acelec combines a 5¼" ScanSpeak Revelator mid/woofer with a Mundorf AMT with compound 1st-order filters. For all their excellence, my Dutch homies were outclassed on immediacy. That's a tacit more 'hardwired' connection with music's kinetic energies. In the temporal domain it's classic pace, rhythm and timing aka PRaT. It manifests as an apparent removal of reluctance or drag. Returning to the prior status quo reinserts it quite like a leash restrains a pulling canine. Removing an electrical filter and energy-absorbing classic spider, the Move monitor took the tunes off the leash. To overstate for effect, music's energy status turned from tame to temperamental. If a system had lungs, now they were bigger. If it had toxins in its bloodstream, those had burned off to improve circulation. However you phrase it, the result was easy to hear and felt like an accelerant. It even manifested in certain percussive events carrying the type of sudden crack to which our body/mind reacts entirely involuntarily as though a real branch had just snapped in our room. Call that startle or jump factor like accidentally shattering a glass. It only needs the right recorded trigger to pop for that adrenaline twitch. In different lingo, it's a well-executed widebander's domain of special expertise; or a true ribbon headphone's unfair advantage over a planarmagnetic even as sterling as Camerton's 2024 Binom-ER.
All of it echoes my award caption for the Earth loom: "Built for speed and energy transmission". I simply hadn't expected it to assert itself to this degree in my smaller rig. How big of a gap would I hear in a direct A/B against the downstairs Earth cables? I began to suspect that whilst any reading of the Flame specs suggests a rather minor lead, direct contrast could prove otherwise. In which case, the correct takeaway could be that little things can add up to something meaningful indeed?
