Given girth and stiff tails, attaching Brown Sugar spades to amps or speakers obviously wants sufficient clearance below binding posts. Otherwise we need to connect from above which could be more unsightly. Bananas eliminate bend-radius concerns so might be preferable depending on our hardware on hand. I thought I'd asked for bananas. What delivered were spades and a copy of my original email showed that, oops, I had specified spades. It meant a bit of forearm exercise whilst twisting and bending these pigtails into place. Again, even without thick translucent skin, Melodika's conductive innards were about thrice the size of my entire domestic slinkies. That had an immediate sonic impact. Think triple dose of B vitamin for big, bold 'n' bassy. As someone who owns three 15" subs—one with twin face-to-face woofers, two with single front-firing units—I know big-woofer'd sealed/dipole bass from small-woofer ported types. I also know big-woofer ported variants. The latter's impact on the entirety of a presentation was the Brown Sugar signature. Not only did things seem louder without touching the master volume. They'd gotten demonstrably warmer and fatter. They were looser and somewhat ballooned or expanded but for it also less articulate/adroit and separated. If the sonic gestalt had a human body, it now was chunkier, had thicker ankles, thunderous thighs and less overall muscle definition. The latter's sonic translation was greater softness and from it, minor fuzz. I thought of a US-voiced 12" 3-way ported paper-cone vintage über 'monitor' on a stocky frame stand. The effect and its disappearance upon swapping back to my Exact Express was undeniable. With it pegged, I now looked for a system in which it'd play to maximum benefit. In the below context, personal preference diverged. My 2.1 video system runs Zu Method monitors plus Method sub. Here the two-way standmounts don't high-pass. They run wide open. The sub simply tacks on with Zu's target filter for these monitors. Should Brown Sugar get too portly, I'd turn the sub down; or off entirely. My thinking was that these monitors could well respond most favourably to Melodika's signature when the bipolar GoldNote integrated driving them lives on the cooler bluer side of the tonality fence. So let's leave this system…

… and play the cards I was dealt here for happy extra chunk without adding my own personality funk.

Et voilà, for music not movies I now could do without sub. Don't misread that to mean an extra octave of cable-added reach. Not. What it did mean was an injection of extra mid-bass weight and black in the general colour palette. That enhanced tonal saturation over what the far skinnier silver Zu Event cable had done. Shifting from acoustic music like Haris Alexiou to character-driven BBC episodes in an older TV series showed the same benefits. Now my focus was the dialogue of four familiar older leads I'd accompanied through already eight seasons over the past few months. In a prior review I'd called that a more Sherlockian insight than using even favourite music. Our hearing mechanism has genetically evolved extra acuity for the human speaking voice. We instantly clock changes that might elude us or take longer to identify with instruments we don't play. In that former review, the change had been a p/p amp with single pair of 500-watt Mosfets sans degeneration resistors per side. Now it was a switch from skinny silver to capacious copper cable. Yet the general shift of sonic milieu tracked; including more boisterous macrodynamics with explosions and machine guns in a Nordic Noir series.

Cables make no difference; or at best a small one. That's routinely true. To experience otherwise whilst keeping both kidneys might just want a Brown Sugar moment whose maker not conscripted to usual high-end machinations throws considerably more conductive gauge at us than we'd usually get in this price range. Mind you, I'm not advocating thick heavy cables for their own sake. My bed is comfortably made in the slinky lightweight easily dressed camp. I'm simply suggesting that Melodika's range topper makes a fine case for what happens under a massive copper attack. It generates a focus on the macro polarity hence prioritizes voltage swings, scale, sizing, weight and warmth. That naturally turns away from the micro polarity of small-signal resolution; aspects like apartheid during complex passages; everything related to top-down illumination, air and gloss; and tone modulations based on fully elucidated upper harmonics.