On the championship C words of cosmetics and Crystal Cable, handling my loaner loom was definite déjà vu. Packed in modest cardboard outers, I found a branded black very thick felt pouch with push buttons inside each. Those could pass as stylish saddle bags for a toddler's first Vespa; or roomy holder for paint brushes or a picnic's cutlery. Plastic webbing protected the connectors inside. Faux satin cylinders with draw strings sleeved the triangle traps to avoid scratches in transit. Connector quality with hollow pins felt unexpectedly high. So did overall fit 'n' finish. On the sex appeal of mundane appliances, hoovers and cooling fans enjoy the Dyson touch. Today's Earthies seem to ask that if toasters and electrical toothbrushes can doll up, why not hifi leashes? Should you think that out of order, Kinki's friendly pricing simply includes it. They don't charge us extra to look good. Whilst unlike XLR and power cords most RCA and speaker cables aren't functionally directional, intended direction was still crystal. That's because the triangular traps mount significantly closer to one end. The functionally directional cables put theirs close to the receive not send end. That's how the RCA and speaker links are meant to be used, too. The RF/EMI traps—duh!—go at the end of a cable not beginning. No need for directionality markers.
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Wikipedia on truthiness: "… the belief/assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition/perceptions of an individual or individuals without evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts." Meanwhile truthfulness is simply "the fact of being true". It took less than a music track to progress from one to two. "Chasing issues of sonic distortion and quality problems like HF fuzziness and slow bass" is precisely what the white Earth speaker cables did compared to my resident black Allnic ZL8000. By contrast the far thicker far heavier leashes felt bloated and blurry in the mid bass and lower midrange where the 9.5" Satori woofers labor before handing off to Audio Technology 15-inchers inside the cardioid sound/kaos sub. That this merely compounded when the Qualio IQ speakers ran full-range was a remote click's proof away to bypass the Gradient Box smart crossover beneath the left Kinki EX-B7. The skinny Earth cable shone clearly more light into the bassment. That tightened up, showed more textural differentiation and banished subliminal blur. Allnic's leash exposed extra fat and weight which in this context had the side effect of more ponderous portliness. To a lesser extent the treble also stepped into the light to gain small clarity points. In short, 6 meters of cable—three per channel—did exactly what the Earth design brief promised. It's immaterial which other cable might do the same; or for how much. Relevant here is built-in synergy with Kinki electronics. Now synergy isn't mysterious or happenstance. It simply continues Kinki's sonic aesthetic established by their electronics to reveal more of it with cables that don't change course or actively oppose it. I thought that most sensible assurance. How heavy or light would the contributions of my sample interconnects be when added to the speaker cables?
I had serious not déjà vu but AI. Don't think of any worrying artificial intelligence bent on taking over the planet. Think acceleration & illumination. Where the speaker cables had cleaned house down low, 15 meters of interconnects—6m/pr XLR from DAC to smart xover, 1.5m/pr RCA from xover to amps—worked most noticeably on the midrange and particularly treble. If you favor a Living Voice sound with SJS or Kondo valve gear, this truth won't be for you. My prior Allnic loom was obviously darker, warmer and heavier if also not nearly as revealed or laid bare. The interconnects created a powerful sense of inside-out lucidity which emphasized ambient recovery for extra depth, separation and that nearfield gloss of unfettered upper harmonics which don't survive distance losses into the far rows. To really hear the overtones of orchestral violins wants a front-row seat. Even better is a string quartet off the main stage in a more intimate setting to put the audience closer still. With the Earth loom triangle pings and bell strikes rose steeper and lasted longer. Premature expiration is a thing not just in bed. In hifi it has to do with overdamping; or resonant overlay which obscures micro detail.
The Kinkis also added more background silence over the Allnics. The telltale consequence were heightened contrasts. It was a familiar effect from Furutech's NCF² and LessLoss noise-attenuation tech. Yet their house sounds differ. Furutech follow more in Allnic's footsteps, LessLoss a DSD/SACD gestalt. Playing deliberately hard bright tracks showed that my fully Earth'd signal path could nearly but for my tastes still not cross the line of 'too direct'. Someone else could wish to reinsert one Allnic cable to slow things down a tad. It's why performance audio becomes the never-ending story. As a classically trained clarinet player with orchestral and chamber-music experience, I grew up sitting on stage inside a very big or quite small ensemble. It's why I fancy that close-up frisson of energetic quickening. It's not the posh front-row balcony seat hogged by a classical subscriber to support the local symphony. It's the directness of the nearfield. Did I now exploit more of the EX-B7s' 2.5MHz bandwidth? It's not there because we hear past 20kHz. It's for phase-shift avoidance and steeper rise times. Again, this before/after delta of swapping out two pairs of analog low-level cables any stranger pulled in off the street would have noticed. It wasn't subtle so a lovely break from typical hair-splitting cable gigs. A superb example for related resolution gains was the elegiac "Elif'e Ninni" from Erkan Ogur's Dokunmak album.
Listen for the shimmering surrounding Derya Türkan's con-arco kemanche or spiked fiddle. As resolution increases, this aspect—of how the instrument's vibrations play the surrounding air—steps out of the shadows. The same held for the shining which embeds around well-recorded instruments with plenty of harmonic content. I'm thinking of the piano/cello interplay on the Vassilis Tsabropolous album Melos and the track "Promenade". It's a very light-filled ECM recording of tacit spaciousness and gloriously unveiled string tone. Contrary perhaps to their 'Earth' moniker and any implications of dark, these Kinki cables really dug into that. Add our dipole Mundorf AMT into the mix and who needs super tweeters?
