Not very bendy. Melodika's photo makes the point. Brown Sugar's turning radius is that of a fixed lorry. This puts added torque on a spade connection without slot channel like this Bryston amp. Now we want extra torque on our binding-post nut to avoid coming loose and causing a potential short. Again, a monkey diet of bananas sidesteps these concerns to become my default recommendation for today. Having already sampled Brown Sugar's benefits to a standmount speaker of darker self voicing, my final stop were Martin Gateley's sound|kaos Vox3 monitors driven by Kinki Studio's 2.5MHz direct-coupled class A/B high-power stereo amp. Their small widebanders allied to upfiring Raal ribbons have more presence/treble resolution than Zu's monitors to likely make for an even better match.

Here is that setup. Before you begin to speculate on why this layout, let me toot my own horn. If for resolution, tonal balance, textural continuity and bass linearity we arrive from Immanis/Susvara-type headfi, the smartest solution for speakerfi is the nearfield. Its classic take is the desktop. But who wants to come home from work to do after-hour tunes in front of a computer? An alternate approach is to turn a small area of a decent-size room into a compact listening zone. Sit against the wall, place the speakers wide but toed-in face on within ~1-1½m. The goal is cubits of open space behind and next to them so that room involvement can exit the picture. Do you remember being a kid, nose pressed against a bakery's window? That's the kind of soundstage this casts. You're not exactly in it just as you weren't in the bakery then. But you do feel pressed right up against the sonic bubble. That creates far more immersion than a standard 'free-field' orientation. It's quasi headfi on most counts, just liberated from our skull cave so far bigger. The cosmetic challenge is exposing the back of our hifi to the room. My basic solution is…

… the below small screen. If I bought Brown Sugar for this system, I'd obviously get far shorter lengths for a cleaner look and some saved coin. Sonics naturally syndicated the prior showing. Given different transducers, they simply dovetailed slightly different. Even twinned and ported, sidefiring 5¼" carbon-fibre woofers can only do so much. Hence my 2 x 9½" sealed Dynaudio sub to the left of the left monitor. But under massive copper attack sans sub, Brown Sugar's bottom-up skills did a bit more. Because of the more resolved presence/treble bands compliments of a custom 4" Envieé widebander from Germany's Armin Gauß holding hands with an upfiring true ribbon from Serbia's Aleksander Radisavljevic, the usual overcast from any bassy tuning minimized. Compared to the Virtual Hifi Vermillion Spark speaker cables using Duelund tinned copper usually in play here, the Melodika simply curtailed the ends of HF fades and their highest sparkling/fizzy aspects. Cymbals and triangles had less fire but more weight, the domain of recorded ambiance diminished in presence whilst the physicality of objects within it magnified. Established hifi lingo calls that difference "they're here" vs "I'm there". The former transplants images into our room, the latter transports us into the recording venue. Getting physical is more basic than going StarTrek spacious. That said, much spec-driven digital and class D in the affordable sector tends toward leanness and paler tone colours. Here Brown Sugar becomes an effective antidote. It sends such crews to the meatpacking district then triage for a blood infusion.

To wrap, Melodika's top Brown Sugar speaker cable is a gentle giant. It not only looks and feels beefy. It sounds it, too. Besides the very friendly tonal benefits implied in any bass-first tuning plus some innate softening, special beneficiaries will be current-hungry loads where low-Ω woofers and reactive crossovers make demands and react with better grip and dynamic exuberance when obeyed. Whether you have a small speaker whose gonads haven't yet fully dropped; or big-woofer Klipsch/JBL whose leash you want tightened whilst horn-loaded tweeters could stand some taming—this Polish bi-colour twisted pair in its fat translucent tube strikes me as tailormade. Again, specify bananas and thank me later. Regardless of your present cable needs, do visit Melodika's site for a look-see. In this hobby it's always good to know of fair-priced no-nonsense resources when a neighbour or friend asks for recommendations and none of the usual audiophile suspects really suit. Melodika's mission statement of being the missing link between generic big-box appliance stores and high-street specialists seems very real to me. So pencil their name into your little black book of hifi connections and look like an absolute ace when you get to pull their card!