CES 2019 • TABlog

by Marc Mickelson | January 25, 2019

nother CES brought another thoughtful and persuasive demo from AudioQuest, this time to unveil the thinking behind its new Mythical Creatures cable line. Garth Powell of AudioQuest began the presentation with a brief bit of cable theory and history. He focused on measurements, their use and misuse, in understanding the performance of cables. He wondered rhetorically, "Why measure in a way that shows no differences, especially when you know differences exist?" He finally settled on one area of inquiry, reproduction of low-level signals, that he not only considered central to cable performance but also measurable. "You have to look at minus 60, minus 80, minus 90 dBs, lowering the noise floor linearly," in order to see what distortion is concealing. "It's measurable," was his conclusion, in addition to being audible, of course.

He then moved on to a discussion of AudioQuest's new Mythical Creatures cables, citing the ways in which they preserve low-level signals by reducing the distortion that can mask them.

The final part of the presentation involved listening to music. Early on, when Powell discussed the history of audio cables, he cited the sort of thick, braided, all-copper conductors that some of the earliest, audibly effective audio cables used. He first played a musical passage with a set of these speaker cables in the system. Then the AudioQuest crew went to work, swapping out these speaker cables with AudioQuest's Wild, one of the upper-end cables ($18,400 per eight-foot pair when still available) from the company's recent past. The difference was easily and immediately heard, the music losing a layer of scrim that made everything sound fuzzy, distorted.

Wild was taken out and the new William Tell speaker cables ($2990 eight-foot per pair), from the Folk Hero series, which uses much of the same technology as the Mythical Creatures line, were inserted. The difference was even greater than the first swap, the entire musical picture sounding far more focused, solid, dynamic and colorful -- more like a change in amplifier than in speaker cables. After that, the William Tell speaker cables were exchanged for Thunderbird ($4500 per eight-foot pair) and finally Dragon ($27,500 per eight-foot pair), both from the Mythical Creatures series. With each of these changes, the musical picture became more vivid, with instrumental lines emerging from the background with greater suddenness and definition.

What this demonstration proved, other than that AudioQuest is on to something important with its Mythical Creatures technology, is just how profoundly cables -- and in this case, only speaker cables -- influence the sound of an audio system. The two greatest leaps in performance were the first two -- from the braided copper cables to AudioQuest Wild, and then from Wild to William Tell. Neither of these was slight or marginal; both sets of speaker cables seemed to rearrange the presentation, and they improved it in distinct ways. I doubt anyone reading The Audio Beat is a cable denier, but this presentation should make anyone with ears an even stronger cable advocate.