Upstairs a long 6m Zu Event silver cable connects the right sidewall stack to the frontal stack. Then an Exact Express Earth loom follows on. It includes RCA cables between active crossover splitting the feed to the speakers and sub at 70Hz 4th-order hi/lo-pass; and the non-balanced Kinki Studio stereo amp which drives sealed 6-inch Accuton 2-way monitors with dipole Mundorf AMT in ribbed acrylic enclosures. My first Vermillion swap was the XLR along the right sidewall. That compared Zu silver to Mundorf silver/gold. The second and third swaps were Vermillion speaker leads between Kinki amp and the stand-mount crossovers. The Chinese speaker wires in Teflon dielectric use OFC copper plated with silver "2.5 thicker than standard". There's obviously more to cables than metallurgy. These details are just data points. They don't imply explanations for audible shifts. On which, Zu's long XLR was drier, more focused down, locked, compact and taut. Vermillion had more gush, bloom and expansiveness. This wasn't about tonal balance. The primary mechanism seemed to be more or less inner tension. That caused a textural/temporal change. The Zu Event felt more strict, grippy and damped, more punctual. The Virtual felt more relaxed, loose, flowing and temporally casual. Related impressions were that within the same soundstage, Zu's imaging action felt more compact and sorted whilst Vermillion surrendered into something more billowy and outgoing. Once again the tenor of this offset had a PCM/DSD echo. PCM feels more precise, crisply enunciated and controlled (Zu), DSD softer, more elastic, redolent and spatially unfurled (Vermillion). Unlike in the office where Vermillion replaced a darker denser thicker Furutech, the upstairs swap didn't move the needle between dense and fast. Vermillion didn't act more quick or lithe than Event. This change concentrated on control vs bloom; archetypical masculine vs feminine traits if you will. The next swap compared Exact Express Earth speaker cable to Vermillion Fire so Greg's copper/silver-gold hybrid. For these changes the Vermillion XLR remained in play.

This very noticeably piled on the DSD effect. Images bigged up to overlap more. Things got more crowded. Ambient reverberance increased as though decays lengthened. The core gestalt was fluffier and more voluptuous. Think narrow-focus spot mics suddenly broadening their capture ratio. The reading felt even more relaxed and generous though simultaneously less separated, sorted and contrasty. Belts had loosened, collars unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up. Everything was more unfastened and expansive whilst seeming a bit sloppier so less organized and adroit. I flashed on the weaker grip of zero-feedback triodes. It creates bloom and a bit of flab'n'fluff. For ears and systems where this Vermillion combo overshoots, would swapping in the pure Duelund-copper Spark lower the effect? Affirmative. It reduced the degree of humidity. Image outlines reined in their micro blur. Shapes firmed up with less of an aura. Control reasserted a bit though not to a full reset of my domestic loom. I was fascinated by how these cable swaps impacted my experience: more Italian la dolce vita than Teutonic Arbeit macht frei. I could clearly hear Grzegorz's fondness for the Sicilian Tektron valve amps, for DSD512 resampling into his T+A DAC, for a big bold exuberant juicy sonic flair. His choice of conductors and connectors reflects and enables it. Tacked onto the XLR, the two speaker cables act like a seasoning agent and are named correctly. Flame's further push in that undulating subtly puffy direction is stronger than Spark's. Combine to taste. Considering how non-intimidating these leashes are on weight, diameter and bendiness, their potency aka difference making is surprising.

Given my downstairs Exact Express Flame loom—their next level above Earth—I felt pre-booked for a syndication. This included the mono versions of the upstairs amp. Even the speakers use the same open-backed AMT tweeters. Still, how would what is different shape the rerun? As it turned out, my Chinese speaker cables must be quieter. On Tanja Tzarovska's absolutely brilliant No Record of Wrong from BandCamp, the endlessly stacked multi-tracked "Juliet 08" showed more super-faint recorded ambiance behind and around her opening vocals with my resident leashes. Whilst the Vermillion once again strutted bloom and what I now firmly saw as gold's viscosity and virtual atomizer—a device which produces a fine spray from a liquid like a perfume dispenser—the Chinese dug down deeper into the noise floor. This retrieved more recorded spatial micro data. Technically we'd call that even higher resolution. The same held for the 6m XLR. My Sino Flame captured super-fine ambient cues below what Vermillion did. Meanwhile the carmine cable again showed off its earlier gushiness. Having this signature assert itself across three systems promised being intrinsic. It should translate regardless of associated hardware; a sure thing. For my desktop I'd pick the combination of Vermillion XLR + Spark speaker cables. Ditto for my upstairs. Blame my diehard inner German for stopping shy of going full-on Italian so Vermillion XLR + Flame.

In this downstairs system, everything has assembled carefully over years. It meant that for my tastes, the resident loom already bedded in ideally. At heart I'm more of a PCM than DSD guy. I'm also more into advanced transistors than tubes. If you lean the other way and want to go deeper; or a decent dose without actual tubes and DSD resampling – Virtual's Vermillion cables celebrate a similar aesthetic. They're utterly non-fussy, finely made and very high value considering their top-quality ingredients. If you've counted to keep track, yes, Greg has now hit three out of three for Virtual. The man is on a roll. And there's still Cobra. Meanwhile Dublin hosts an Indian restaurant named Vermilion. This colour is certainly suggestive of lush intensity and well chosen for today's small cable range. In conclusion, it's popular to poo-poo cables particularly when they ask half a kidney. When we're still in kindergarten, lamp cord does just fine. Once we graduate from hifi high school, horizons expand, listening skills refine, tastes clarify. To now insinuate that cables can't change the feel or personality of a system sends adults back to kindergarten. It's regressive. Of course if a system still sings with multiple voices, we must first unify it. Once it sings with a single voice where all parts pull in the same direction rather than fight each other, a consistent cable loom can easily shift its mood or expression. Even if it was by just a degree, we'd notice. The question is merely whether that's how we want to move our sound. My review hopefully gave you a solid notion how Vermillion steers by design and by quite a few degrees. Here is Grzegorz on his speakers: "The biggest challenge with both Viper and Cobra will be how to properly manage customer expectations about size versus performance. There's a lot of work to be done to convey just how unexpectedly powerful and capable they are given their compact dimensions. I will still prepare Fusion 360 renders of Viper and Cobra relative to their combined cone surface to visualize the difference and what to expect. That's also why I want all my accessories like the opamps, footers and cables to be amazing value to become gateway drugs for the bigger things."

From this shake out two terse takeaways. One, value. To recognize it just necessitates knowing what we're looking at. To assist, Virtual Hifi's site itemizes all ingredients and costs. Two, unexpected potency. These cables create a definite effect. It might not be your rainbow but there's no denying that the choices made to build them create an undeniable audible action. It's not the myth of the straight wire with zero gain. Given just how frank Grzegorz Rulka is about the kind of sound he pursues, that should be a surprise only if you believed that cables can't express their own personalities and values. These crimson conductors most certainly can and do. With a review of the Cube Monet widebanders booked which I'll test with Enleum's AMP-23R not direct-heated triodes, these Vermillion samples will make another 'curated' appearance to exploit this very effect. How does the old proverb put it? It ain't bragging if true…

Greg responds: "Thank you very much for the next great review. You caught the spirit of the cables very well. Indeed I like big bold dynamic sound extra present in the room but with a bit of softness and musicality so that the harshness is on the edge of being but not really there. That's also how I'm voicing Cobra. I've been listening to that speaker for the last 3-4 weeks and every day I make a small change to the crossover. After a few hours I always return to the default so now think that I cannot do any better. The official Cobra premiere will be at the Warsaw Audio Video Show 2025 starting October 24th but I'll ship your demo pair next week."