Notes On Nirvana

Back on the home front, my own system greatly benefited from the Nirvana cable collection. I tried 'em all, the digital cable, the interconnect, and the speaker wire. Normally I'm scared of reviewing stuff in this price bracket (several hundreds of dollars each) but I have to admit, they're good value..

One thing I really dislike about cables (and reviewing them) is the audiophile-tone-control aspect of the things. The very best cables can be mighty touchy about interface issues, which is a diplomatic way of saying they can be really bright or dull-sounding depending on the source impedance of your pre-amp and weird things like that. So the usual drill is to try something that's ultra-deluxe (99.99% pure silver comes to mind here) and discover, oh yeah, man, all this transparency is really cool, but the tonal balance is way out of whack. so you mess with various pre-amps and such until you find a "good match."

Frankly, this is a drag.

If I wanted a tone control, I’d rather mess with various brands of 6SN7's and the speaker crossover, not cables. When it comes to wires, I take a Joe Friday "just the facts, ma 'am" attitude. This is where the Nirvana’s come in. Yes, by my cheapskate standard they're expensive. But they are very neutral, with no real coloration I can detect, and more importantly, they let the sonic character of the associated equipment shine through. When I switched to other cables, a good part of the magic of the Supermod M-33 or the LNPA-1 amps simply disappeared, replaced by the "sound" designed into this or that Tweak cable.

There is a definite synergistic effect when you use the Nirvana digital and interconnect cables together, with a major step forward in ease, naturalness, and "vitality" (thanks, John Pearsall.) that puts the Nirvana combo firmly in high-purity silver territory (but without the associated matching problems). When I tried the Nirvana speaker cable, the LNPA-1’s had long departed, replaced by a somewhat temperamental Class A transistor amplifier. This amp turned out to be very cable sensitive. The Nirvana speaker cable was the only one that could coax a subjectively flat spectrum from it. Normally, power amps aren’t all that picky about speaker cables, and I usually hear much bigger differences when I swap digital or analog interconnects. (Don't ask me why, except that signals at lower levels driven by millivolt amplifiers are more easily degraded.)

The Nirvana cable line, as far as I can tell, is deliberately not engineered to have a certain kind of sound. This greatly simplifies component matching problems, and lets you confect a system to your own tastes. Since the transparency is in the "very high" to "ultimate" category, what you'll hear will be the equipment you've got.

Back into the Twilight Zone

I feel a might odd recommending this, but the $500 Stan modified TEAC CD player combined with $500 of Nirvana interconnect would actually be an outstanding combination, even though the price ratios seem utterly skewed in favor of mere "wire."

If you've got an Audio Note Kit One, or another good triode amp with a built-in volume control, you'd be nuts not to try this combo. Your friends would laugh at the cheap looking CD player, the steam-punk industrial look of the Kit One, and the audiophile-delux appearance of the Nirvana...but the laughing would stop once the music came on.

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