Seeing red. After a brief listen to my usual setup for a fresh baseline, out came all the Kinki leashes, in went the Marohei. During this hands-on swap and to speak truth to cables, the Chinese contingent emerged the even slicker tidier builds. They looked and felt more industrial hi-tech than homebrew. The latter is no slight on the Croats. There's nothing amateurish about them. It's when machined anodized aluminium noise traps meet hand-sanded olive wood, impervious hi-tech translucent sheathing Maro's open weave that one knows. These products represent different production tiers. That the Sino loom is far more affordable rubs more salt into that fact. Yet scale of operation, country of origin, labour, materials costs and more all set these rules of engagement. When pricing is linear to multiply domestic build costs times the same profit margin, what EU brand can really compete with the People's Republic?

Qualio IQ loudspeakers, sound|kaos DSUB 15, Lifesaver Audio Gradient Box II set for a active analog 4th-order 100Hz hi and low pass.

At the ear meanwhile, this encounter rewrote my prior Kinki/Allnic gig. That had decisively assigned two divergent sonic profiles. The Korean klan from a SET designer was warmer, thicker, softer, heavier and darker. The Chinese crew from a high-bandwidth transistor engineer was quicker, more inside-out illuminated and articulate, more energetic in the treble, tauter in the bass and keener on general micro detail so deeper on ambient recovery. It was a cable clash that had something to say about vanilla vs chocolate. Not today. Both cable sets came from the same school. That shrank the offset to some seasoning. It was the many roads leading to Rome not just arriving in the same general vicinity but district block. My inner storyteller saw red. How to make this an entertaining read when I'd essentially already said it all in a prior review ending in an award?

When I visited with the late Bernard Salabert of PHY-HP motored around by his acolyte Samuel Furon of Ocellia who revived PHY driver production after Bernard's death, I learnt of IMD aka interface micro-discharge noise. It's a phenomenon discovered by Pierre Johannet, a researcher working for the French power grid company.  As explained to me, the practical upshot of Johannet's hypothesis for audio cables is that natural dielectrics like silk and cotton perform much better than hi-tech plastics which continuously discharge on a nano level. Hence Salabert cables and their descendants turned organic. Müsli and Birkenstocks? I didn't ask Maro Filicic whether he's read of IMD or came to parallel conclusions on his own but sense a connection. In any event, his is clearly a very silent cable with excellent layered depth and non-clipped reverb trails. The contrast between silence and sound is very high. I think of it as suchness. It's a slightly heightened state of keenness. It's not about artificial edge sharpening or pixilated limning. It's a relaxed obviousness from lack of obscuration. It's my idea of natural high resolution. It's not pushy but effortless and easy. Because recorded space illuminates when its planktonic cues can rise above the noise floor, there's more materialization of size. In that sense these cables sound big. They don't compact, choke or squeeze soundstage scale but allow it to unfurl.

Kinki Studio 250-watt class AB direct-coupled EX-B7 monos on the speakers, Gold Note PA-10 Evo bridged to mono on the sub.

Unlike a very expensive Matthew Bond loom had from his latest eponymous brand or a €10K power cord from Furutech, the Marohei set didn't bloat up bass with sheer conductive mass and minor resonance. Like the even skinnier Kinki wires, the low end was about pitch definition and exactitude to extend midrange lucidity downward without shifting textures or timing. The area of difference to my cable set was about relative shininess. To me the Croats felt slightly more chilled or energetically calm so texturally less glossy. Call it a bit more satin or soft without inserting minor darkness. Tonality thus leaned a bit more into earthiness than airiness. Musical motion had subtly less gush for more stateliness. These are all pointers at the same observation. Some listeners might key into the relaxation vs tension aspect, others into satin x gloss, others into the earthy/airy polarity. As I mean them, they're facets of the same distinction served up three ways.