Alas—and in accord with the previous page—I harboured strong suspicions. This just had to be the result of an unusually fortuitous speaker match. It had to be that which created a perfectly gapless super-strong dovetail joint, no glue required. I expected that on our Mythology 1 speakers from EnigmAcoustics or the Albedo Audio Aptica, the very same qualities would telegraph as too much of a good thing. And so it was. I conducted that M1 comparison for Samuel the very next morning. He agreed immediately. Whilst the general box-less presence transitioned intact if less so, the lit-up factor across the bandwidth now caused too much treble energy and a generally lean hollow tonality. Things had tipped up and become too forward, whitish and zippy; all speed, no curves. To me, the inherent root cause seemed plain. Samuel's Canadian control system uses PHY paper-based widebanders. Even with their optional piezo tweeters, those cannot match the treble effulgence or micro resolution of the dual-tweeter Mythology monitors as one of my reference speakers for modern sound. Even the Raal ribbons in our Swiss ovals can't. By inescapable consequence, being extremely optimized and calibrated for his own speakers—and by extension, others similar to them—meant that his latest cables caused lesser or at least imbalanced results with majority-voiced boxes of today. That's the implication of specialization.


From this came questions. One, could the desirable qualities be retained and the undesirable ones toned down or eliminated by using a partial loom? If so, would the power cords or signal cables dominate? Two, could similar results be pursued by using solid-core copper not silver inside Samuel's trademark recipe? That uses crushed quartz fill of two particle sizes. This crystalline sand gets encapsulated in a natural Indian rubber tube (kautschuk) for which he specifies the precise mineral content. Or might a silver/copper mix, like one metal for the hot and the other for the return leg, be the best general-purpose ticket when speaker choice conspired against his pure silver cables?


Samuel was just as curious. Having signed dealer agreements for two French speaker brands to sell through his small Canadian atelier would soon give him permanent in-house references beyond his own speakers. Once back in Canada after his summer break during which he worked exclusively on drivers and speakers, he finished up the XLR interconnects to complete my front-to-back OCC loom. Throughout 2016, he plans to experiment with pure copper or copper/silver options; and also craft a headphone cable. Could the very specialized hence app-limited results of my first encounter broaden to suit more mates? If the delta of performance I'd witnessed on our resident widebanders could migrate to more traditional speakers, Samuel Furon would have a potent system improvement on his hands. Incidentally, crushed crystal fill isn't as esoteric as it may appear. Shunyata, Gutwire, AudioMagic and Waveform Fidelity cables exploit their own blends of ferro, piezo or pyroelectric crystalline materials. With it, some go back well more than a decade. Stein Music use such compounds even in room treatments. In short, the use of crystalline materials for RFI/EMI reduction has numerous precedents. So does the embrace of MDI or micro discharge interface distortion theories of one Dr. Pierre Johannet. For example, they are referenced in this PDF by Swiss Cables. These theories too are the basis of Samuel's cable efforts. Hence he shuns synthetic materials like the plague.
To increase conductor gauge and current for a short wall-to-power-conditioner stretch, Samuel braids his 15A power cord where the 8A uses a single sleeve. Connectors are Furutech.
By October, a 1m and 6m pair of OCC XLR arrived to complete my loom. On our usual gear, this definitely overshot. Even the Sounddeco Sigma 2 speakers with their benign silk and paper Satori range SB Acoustics drivers exhibited the now familiar whitishness. This was accompanied by a hollow midband that sounded a bit like a minor smiley-face response where the extremes are lifted and the middle is depressed. I'd have to divide to conquer, mix just some Ocellia cable with our usual (or unusual) suspects.
Samuel Furon at TAVES 2015.