I received shortly before Christmas the new USB Sablon 2022, and was rather (very!) impressed by it, so here is a short review. I am by no means an experienced reviewer, so please excuse the enthusiasm, but I thought I might share the highlight of a great holiday after a gloomy 2021. Any feedback welcome, what amazing times for audio!
Sablon USB 2022 Review:
I have received slightly before the Christmas break the new Sablon USB cable, which
was a great way to finish a long and difficult year. Firstly, I should emphasise how much of a pleasure it is to deal
with Mark, who has been providing solid guidance throughout. A few words about my system,
I am using both a headphone (Woo Audio Wa33 with Abyss TC 1266),
and a speaker setup with Magico A1/Gryphon 120 depending on mood and work-from-home constraints.
Like many of us, I have gone through a long period of rabbit holes and explorations, before settling on the fantastic Taiko Extreme
and a Chord Dave, the latter now powered by a Sean Jacobs ARC-6. The system rests on a Norstone spider rack,
using a combination of Daiza platforms and Critical Mass Systems Center Stage 2 footers for both the Taiko and the DAC.
The system is connected to an Everest, all cabling is now Sablon. The fantastic Audiowise SRC-DX is used
as a bridge between the Dave and Taiko. I have gone through a long list of rabbit holes of dealing with network tweaks,
and settled on a dual Buffalo upgraded switch. Finally, the Dave is wrapped with a sheet of a
highly permeable alloy, for magnetic shielding, as my DAC sits inbetween my two amplifiers - that’s a
great suggestion from Audiowise that I highly recommend, although the aesthetic might bring in
interesting arguments with family and friends
. I should emphasise that all the tweaks above
have been introduced one at a time, over many months, and the impact/improvement was apparent and impressive at all of those
steps, opening the soundstate, increasing density and timbre, and most importantly (for me at least!) imaging and
dynamics. It also gave me time to get used to my system and set a baseline for future tweaks. I should say that
improving anything upon the work of Ed and Emile (Taiko Extreme, USB card, TAS) is a real achievement in itself,
our colleagues have set the bar very very high, so the baseline is the Atacama Plateau rather than our good old England
south downs.
I should say that I had used the 2020 USB Sablon as a reference cable for all these changes, and had somewhat
forgotten about it. I thought I was very much done on the side of USB, and to be honest how much a difference
could the USB make after all the care put in my system? To be completely honest, as I started experimenting
with the new USB cable, my excitement was very moderate at best and I
was giving it a go expecting the usual 10% improvement here and
there, possibly some compromises and tradeoffs.
Goodness me did I not expect what I was hearing. The density was hugely increased, dressing texture on
every single instruments, but also improving the smoothness in the highs, that are to die for.
In my limited experience, it’s very rare that an improvement is made in a part of the spectrum without
affecting something else, but I think that’s the tour-de-force that Mark has achieved here.
Voices became far more articulated, and another drop of ’noise’ could clearly be heard.
Electrical noise is a very subtle concept, as it’s not something that you really hear until electrical pollution is removed,
in the old sense of radio interferences that would crackle. It’s nothing like that, rather a sudden increase of
information captured by the listener. Practically, this translates in many improvements, in my case for instance I always
had a decent sound stage but with a clear loss of density at the edges, now the instruments sound even more alive
at the edges, which gives spooky moments where drums or violins seems to be playing next to you, a very holographic
experience!
We usually naively think of noise as 'white noise,
random gaussian distributed noise that fluctuates uniformly through time, frequencies or space, however my
take is that likely harmful electrical effects are sources of correlated noise, which can be introduced by any subtle
bias in electrical transmission, that’s actually a very complex field of research at the intersect of material science
and electrical engineering. I should say that my background
is in theoretical physics, and I am not unfamiliar with odd concepts such as quantum mechanics, but
the one thing I learned through time is that empirical evidence comes first, and here the evidence with Mark’s cable
is loud and clear, theory will hopefully follow one day and explain some of the effects at play!
So I was wrong, the USB cable matters even more now that my system has been carefully tuned, and it left me wonder
with what comes next, and how this can even get better? I have to say, at this stage, it’s all bonuses, I could
just left myself drift for hours into the music. In one sentence - Mark’s new USB cable comes highly recommended, and expect large and significant changes in your system. It’s actually somewhat unfair to name it or label it after the previous iteration, the improvement isn’t incremental, a totally different beast. Where does all of this stop ?
