Well, I’ve brought my “high-end cables” experiment to an end. The last two were the Wireworld Starlight Cat8 and the Sablon Panatela Reserva.
The Wireworld are a curious take on Ethernet cable design, using separately shielded cables in a ribbon design without any use of twisted pairs. This makes them quite light and easy to route compared to many of the high-end Ethernet cables which are quite stiff and chunky. The cables are fitted with Metz connectors which are a bit like the Telegartner ones, only shorter. They have a similar but softer black plastic latching mechanism which is a little spongy and difficult to release. Some of them will not latch properly. This is a known problem on the Roon Nucleus. I was using 2x1m cables and one of the latched, while the other didn’t.
Sonically, the Starlight presents a very broad and precise out-of-speaker soundstage with better depth than the vodkas and a similar mid/high upward frequency tilt that makes details stand out against a black background, but in a way that is not always coherent to the instruments and sometimes creates odd spatial effects. Grand piano, for example, tends to leak across the soundstage. Overall I had a similar impression to the Vodkas that there was a bass and treble roll-off that lowered the noise floor but also filtered out bass resonance and rumble as well as treble air. Leading edges are strong on the Wireworlds, however, giving a good sense of timing. Conversely tonal fidelity is its weakest point. There is more texture than the Vodkas but it is a little “dumbed down”. The body of classical instruments is lost, drum textures are dynamic but flat with little resonance and decay. Cymbals are monotonal and stringed instruments thin and somewhat screechy. The bass is, however, more textured than the Vodkas, while the upper registers are lighter and more airy, but also drier and less lush. The upward tilt meant that certain pieces lost their drive, from big symphonic works to Muse’s Hyper Music and Plug In Baby. Overall, I found these very slightly more involving than the Vodkas, but couldn’t get on with the lack of tonal fidelity.
The Wireworlds were sent out unsolicited by Futureshop when they found I wasn’t happy with the Vodkas. They give exemplary service and were very dedicated to trying to find a solution that would keep me happy on instrumental tone and textures. They were likewise very calm and professional when it became clear we couldn’t find anything that worked better for me than the Designacable Belden CatSnake Tactical cables.
The Sablons are in another class altogether. They are a big, fat and stiff cable that nevertheless obligingly stays put once you’ve routed it as you want it. The burn-in takes a long time and goes through lots of ups and downs. They need at least 5 days of constant ethernet traffic before starting to settle down, though the biggest changes are in the first couple of days. Like the Vodkas and Starlights, you get a big, solid soundstage against a very dark background and very low noise floor, albeit again at the expense of tonal accuracy, instrumental texture and venue ambience and air, though the trade-off is much less here. The Sablons have a more realistic and involving presentation, with a more convincing soundstage and instrumental positioning. Image depth is particularly strong: you can tell which way a grand piano is facing. Timing is also better despite no leading-edge emphasis.
Overall, the Sablons are by far the most musical of these three “high-end” cables with a big, smooth, fluid, lush and somewhat “dark” sound I can imagine Linn and valve aficionados loving. I found them beguiling on small-scale intimate albums like El Hadj N’Diaye’s Geej and Eleanor McEvoy’s very well recorded Portrait of a Songwriter. Bass extension is better than the Vodkas and worked well on Massive Attack’s Angel on Mezzanine, though there was a little texture, breath and clarity lacking in Elizabeth Fraser’s voice. Likewise, they gave a good, well-controlled rendition of Musette with Drums on Cocteau Twins’ Head over Heels, allowing Elisabeth Fraser’s voice to float over the pounding of the drum machine. They were also fabulous with progressive trance, beautifully capturing the bells and drums on Trancemaster 5 although bringing a brittle, monotonal edge to snares.
Where they ultimately just couldn’t satisfy me was on classical music. Piano was a particular challenge: slow pieces in the upper registers, like Chopin’s Nocturne 2 and Harp Study gain a nice albeit not entirely realistic shimmering and bell-like effect (the Sablons make bells sound fantastic!), but bass notes are shorn of their texture and precision, spoiling big percussive and rumbling dynamic works like his Revolutionary Study or the 1st movement of his 2nd piano sonata. At its most extreme, the individual bass notes are no longer discernible in a smearing of the left hand rumblings of the Revolutionary Study. Double bass and cello underpinnings and textures are also lost, although some of this bass roll-off also takes drive and ground away from completely different works, like Motorhead’s Overkill. On the Designacable Beldens, the bass here was both deeper and tighter, so that the drive and impact suffered less from the usual weird Motorhead mixing. Vocals also suffered, with certain throated inflections and fricatives missing. Like the Vodkas and Wireworlds, there was also a sense of dark congestion and missing air. Overall, there was a loss of ambience, dynamism, incisiveness and - for want of a better word, textural grit – compared to real life and the Designacable Belden cables in my system. There was finally, also a diminished sense of performers playing together or against each other – they related less well together, possibly because the various inflections of instrument and voice didn’t come across as well.
People on this forum with greater technical understanding and interest than I have stated that high-end cables “shape the noise” rather than altering the signal. I now tend to agree: it’s some of what I experienced with these cables. They do roll off both the top and bottom ends, removing noise but also texture and detail not only there but across the board, almost like a filter. The Wireworlds and to a slightly lesser extent the Vodkas also tilt the balance towards the mids and trebles, accentuating leading edges and creating an effect of greater detail despite the loss of microdetail and microdynamics. All share a widening of the soundstage which, with the accentuation of macro-detail, leads to an impression of more pinpointed positioning. Personally, I can’t live with the less precise timing, artificial soundstaging compared to a live performance, and above all the loss of instrumental/vocal tone and texture. But I can imagine others feeling differently, particularly about the Sablons.
I’m now satisfying my curiosity playing with high-quality “standard” ethernet cables, comparing the Designacable Belden Cat5e stranded cable with the Blue Jeans single wire Belden Cat5e and 6 (so no shielding on any of them and all 24 AWG). Just to see what, if any, sonic differences there may be between them.