The all silver interconnects from AQ are superb. Detailed, smooth, great bass. You can go back to Niagara and get most of what Fire offers. Beyond Fire, you are only getting bigger air tubes for an exponential increase in price and I doubt you could tell the difference in sonics.
The AQ Fire is awesome as a standard interconnect. Love mine. I've got two pairs (RCA and XLR) I've used in various line-level slots in my speaker and headphone rigs. It's got a better fleshed out low-end and better soundstage vs. the Wind (which I also liked a lot); to my ears the Fire is a perfectly balanced/neutral cable. Doesn't have an iota of the leanness/brightness/harshness you sometimes hear associated with silver. Not too warm either. Notably better than Sky -- smoother and more detailed, though I've only had the old gen 1 Sky. Doesn't have that slight midbass warmth/hump of the old Sky either. And it's very very close to my gen 1 Wild Blue Yonder XLR; I'm not even sure the Wild's better. There's no comparison to the lower-line or older AQ cables like the Colorado or older Cheetah; Fire is way better.
The one place I didn't have luck with Fire was when I placed the 1m RCA between a my Bob's Devices 1131 SUT and phono stage. This is a special slot that really requires a 0.5m or less of cable, and preferably of a smaller gauge; high-gain SUT's (40x in this case) are VERY sensitive to capacitance following them. The Fire still sounded good there, but clearly had some minor ringing issues up top. The 1m Sky was even worse there, and its mids turned to mud too. I replaced this with a special 0.5m run of WEL LP, which was a huge improvement (probably had more to do with its low capacitance).
I might need another 1.25m XLR run for my monoblocks soon, and I'll likely go with another Fire to save some cost vs. the Wild Blue.
Hi Lee,
Did you ever get these Audioquest Fire cables?
I used Fire when modding my preamp and subs. I replaced the stock wire in the preamp connecting the XLR inputs and outputs with the PCB with great results. Same thing with my subs. Highly recommended!
I use Fire between my Ayre KX-R Twenty and MX-R Twenties and it sounds amazing; when I went higher up in the AQ line to WBY or WEL the silver sounded too bright for me, Fire seemed to be the sweet spot adding a little more resolution than Wind.
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