USB DONE RIGHT: Two magic boxes that let computer audio ...

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30 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
number of sonic delights available. They
then realize they need to work for better
quality.
I call this the “Vienna effect.” Once
you have been to Vienna, and you have
attended concerts there for a week,
forget it! But of course it need not be
specifically Vienna. There are other
cities with great concert halls, but when
I spend a week in Vienna — as I regularly
do, with all kinds of concerts, all kinds of
rehearsals, all kinds of training, opera,
classical music, it opens your ears in a
way that makes you hungry to retrieve
that sound again. The basis for many
designs I’ve made in my life is to make
the sound better, and more “Viennalike,”
if I may call it that.
UHF: Do you have any new ideas you hope
to have the opportunity to develop?
AJV: Yes, I’ve just finished a project
called 3T, a new set of cables.
UHF: Can you disccuss it?
AJV: Yes, certainly. Most people who
have looked into cables — if they
understand anything of it at all — have
concentrated on electron transmission.
But it’s not just electrons that move in
a cable, it’s electromagnetic fields. By
concentrating only on the first part,
electron transmission, the second part
is completely forgotten, or not even
recognized. If you make a conductor,
focusing on both, you may not have a
perfect conductor, and there might be
some resistance, but you have a much
better technology than if you focused
on just one property.
Let me propose an example. If you
are looking for a lady to marry, imagine
that you had decided only one thing, that
she must be precisely 1m85 tall. You’ve
focused on just one property, but that
doesn’t mean you will have a happy marriage.
It is the balance of properties that
can make the best match. Does she have
the same style as you have, does she like
the same food? The more you have in
common, the better the story will work
out.
UHF: Why have some aspects of design,
then, been ignored for so many years?
AJV: Because some people don’t care,
or because they find the subject too
complicated, or because they simply
don’t have the necessary knowledge, or
perhaps because they couldn’t find the
right materials to use. Being aware of
the problem is one thing, finding the
solution is another.
UHF: And you’ve been working toward
the solution.
AJV: Yes. It’s cost me two years of thinking
— not making anything, just thinking.
Then I said to my manufacturer, if
you do this, it will work. I’ve given the
resulting cables to friends, and to some
very critical people, and the results were
optimistic. They said, “Please continue,
because this is what we want.” After
they had listened, if they reconnected
the cables they had before, they were
just rubbish.
UHF: This sounds like great news.
AJV: I think so. It’s good news not only
for replay, but also for recording, because
if the recording is better, then the replay
will be better too.
UHF: Certainly we’re dependent on the
quality of the recording we’re listening to.
AJV: Yes. I’ll give you some of the properties
of the product.
First, there’s no oxydation. It does
not suffer from metal fatigue. There is
a very god strain relief, so you can pull
on it and it won’t break. The structure
is amorphous. This is better than a
crystal structure, because crystals have
boundaries. It is stable at high temperature,
and it can handle much higher
temperatures than regular cable. there is
no electroplating. There is no chemical
or mechanical aging. It’s very flexible,
but it doesn’t age when you flex it. There
is an extremely low number of internal
barriers or boundaries. That means the
cable has an extremely long lifespan with
no change in sound quality. It has a very
short run-in time, a minimum of two
hours, up to six hours. It produces an
extremely high resolution without any
harshness, which means sharp “esses”
completely disappear. You might think
there is frequency range missing, but it
is crystal barriers that produce the sharp
“s” sound.
The most amazing thing is that
sonically — not by measurement but
by listening — you can hear very clear
information. If you listen to strings,
for example, they are very lifelike, just
because of the range between 2 kHz and
10 kHz.
It is really amazing.