Hi Ron. I know it's your duty (actually, I really, really like it...and I don't use 'really, really' very much) to moderate (read: corral) opinions here, and I know that wire has little to do with arms, but, if you will, let the reel reel out a bit more.
I wasn't quite there on Fulton Gold - knew about it, didn't bite - but I was pretty much in on the ensuing milieu thereafter. Some called it a war...
I vaguely remember that Positive Feedback (don't recall the reviewer) did a review of the first Essence PCs. There wasn't much else out there at the time. I was 28 and brash and newly hired at TAS and, so, grabbed the tiger by the tail. Reviewed the Essence to a wall of angry sounds...because if you said, back then, that a wire, a mere wire, could do anything at all...well, that was heresy.
But heresy against what?
The angry, recoiling wind, it came from here:
The scientific materialists seem attached to the concept that a tool (read: technology) has to necessarily have moving parts, or multiple parts, to be techno-logic; as if, parts complexity inherently endows some quality-in-the-subjective-hearing I'm not aware of. They say: a preamp - an arrangement of energy into matter, constructed by us - is somehow inherently, even without empiric observation, superior to a construction of metter into energy that is wire, with shielding, with connectors, all rearranged matter, etc.
Is that so? I know a bit about Cartesian method, but I didn't see anything about that along the philosophic way...
To me, a wire is a preamp is a speaker is the rock that Homo hablis just sharded and used as a weapon-tool in a potential future, a creative vision. Its all rearranged matter/energy to me. I know, it sounds horribly abstract, but its really the most simple way to see it. Wire may not have lots of parts, like a preamp, but it is still a human construct of matter...to carry another type of energy transference within it.
So, silver or copper?
I've said my peace in a prior post, and disclaimed limited recent experience, but I stand by the characterization, its application in a system. That said, I do see the attraction of silver; it's openness. I read somewhere here that someone did copper ICs with silver spkr wire, and I see what they are doing. I do much the same; I use harmonically complex copper ICs mated with open-sounding copper spkr wire. Kondo copper spkr wire is pretty predestrian to some, but it is quite open for copper. I have also used Omega Mikro Planar IIs in the past, same approach
So, dark and light, light and dark.
Putting a stereo system together is an art. I think that is what, in part, attracts us to it, and here. In service of the Music, of course....
This, of course, is what you get when you won't give me a photo of the SME copper tonearm wire I want!
