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But first, Franck gave us an eyes-only tour of his cable manufacturing process - no cameras allowed. The same discretion goes for the exact size and sequence of the ends. On his PC, Franck showed us the layout of the Liveline. Over the last several weeks, he had changed from a multitude of tiny ends of silver, gold and platinum to a smaller number of slightly longer ends. This not only made the cable 'easier' to produce -- Franck still calls it a royal pain -- but sonically superior. And as though anything ASI did was normal, the silver return now is cut near the middle where a few additional slices of dissimilar metals are inserted. So there is a total of 5 areas per individual Liveline cable where 'acoustic resonator metal sequences' are spliced in - and all those five sequences are dissimilar.


Over in the workshop -- atelier is the better term -- Franck was back at the jeweler's desk to show us the various parts that form the cable. A bunch of silver and copper wire was ready to be treated. First Franck takes a fixed length of copper, i.e. a plain yellow good-quality solid-core conductor, and fits it into an extruder fixed to a work bench. With a pair of pliers, Franck then pulls the wire in one smooth, very quick sweep through the extruder. The result is a springy length of copper wire about 1mm in diameter. According to Franck, this final extrusion (at a much slower pace than the copper supplier used) gently aligns the copper crystals. A similar process faces the silver wire while at another work bench, an acetylene torch awaits action. In several boxes, meticulously pre-cut silver, gold and platinum ends get picked by tweezers to then be butt-soldered with silver to the main conductor. The torch is hot enough to create a neat weld without destroying the metal's crystalline structure. Working as a jeweler for many years has taught Franck how to go about this. A similar procedure completes the silver wire, albeit with the addition of the center joints.
After the tedious job of attaching the tiny bits of wire to the ends of the longer wire and affixing the middle splices, the finished conductors slide into their own loose Teflon tubes to be mostly
surrounded by air before the Teflon tubing is inserted into an expandable, very loose Techflex braid sleeve. Termination with a Neutrik RCA connector is next. From all the connectors Franck tested personally and then with a listener panel, the ultra-cheap Neutriks sounded best. Only, he still saw the need for three decompression holes to the connector's body. As a final step, the cable gets a black and red shrink tube cover. Red indicates load or 'to', black source or 'from'. There is no left/right indication.

With the design and manufacturing process now firmly in our minds, we segued back into the listening room whose system was fitted with a balanced pair of Livelines. Built the same as the RCA version, the only difference is the plugs even though the XLR connectors too undergo a small acoustic treatment first. The first CD to be fed into the dCS player was Eva Cassidy's Imagine, not exactly our fondest flame but now she sounded so different, so - um, alive (no pun intended). She had body, height and was on the breath as she sang. Silences between notes were not nothings but indicators of room size, and a room with something in it. The blackness was filled with a (silent) body. The next CD was the Carlton-Ford Live in Tokyo collaboration again which inspired Franck to pick up his self-made guitar and play along with his former teacher Ford. It was hard to hear sonic differences when they played in unison.


With the guitar back on its wall-mounted stand, Hadouk Trio's Utopies was loaded. This is great music yet sadly, the synthesized bass smears out and the bass drum becomes a monotonous boom box. At home, we had put this disc aside on a growing pile of "not bad enough to toss out completely" (a growing stack since more and more CDs suffer ridiculous compression.)


Franck had the same feelings about this disc and not played it for a long time until he rediscovered it while developing the new cable. Now he played Utopies with very good results. Somehow all the negative aspects that made us put the disc away were transformed. Bass extension was phenomenal without a trace of smearing. The bass drum kicks were dynamic and alive; a real skin was excited with real attack and decay.
Back-to-back resonators behind the oval 'port' of the Tango D

Over to vinyl and the big Kuzma Stabi XL with Lyra cart (never use the clamp – it will kill the music says Franck). Stevie Ray Vaughan was called to stage and he answered. Played at a nice live volume, this sounded really really good. It was hard to even think about cables or soundstaging or any other beta-brain concerns. We just listened to Stevie who was there in the room with us. While Stevie was playing, Franck picked up one of his store-bought interconnects, a certainly much respected, good and very expensive pair and re-cued Eva Cassidy. This was not nice. Eva no longer sang but sorta sang-talked. Where in the previous round she'd had body or a gestalt as it were, now she was flat. With all due respect, Eva sounded like she'd gone horizontal, pale and lifeless. The height information was far supressed though a definitive soundstage of depth and width remained. Yet compared to the Liveline session, there was no real music.