Synergistic Research cables. bit of a test

Synergistic Research.

If you are firmly in the 'cables sufficient enough to conduct are all the same camp' read no further there is nothing that will brighten your day in this post, reading any further won't make you happy. However if you like to read about people putting gear to test in reasonably sensible conditions then read on.

As far as cables go I'm in the 'I have experienced that cables CAN make a difference' camp. That's not to say that in my experience all cables sound different, far from it, a lot of them sound exactly the same, auditioned sighted and auditioned blind. My experience of ABX testing has proven to me that 5 minutes of swapping bits of gear about and expecting to hear a definite change seldom happens. I much favour living with a piece of gear for a few days and then swapping back to see if I can live without it.

As far as my cables go I employ an all silver loom, powercords, IC's and speaker cables. Though I have found that with my current gear my powercords make absolutely no difference whatsoever, which is curious because when I used to run an Audiolab S integrated, swapping to my current silver powercords from stock IEC's made a very significant difference. I don't have any answers as to why, I'm no scientist.

So, on to the cable jewellery.

A box full of Synergistic Research's best cables landed on my door step last week. Ta very much. A 1m Tricon Magnetic and a 1.5m Precision reference with active shielding. Both of them are very matter of fact in build, reasonably flexible, no dragging of components off the back of the shelf here. They come in pretty basic cardboard boxes, no flashy wooden pucks or injection moulded casings filled with bits of metal and given high tech bullshit names. All very workmanlike to be honest, well apart from the gold Mylar shielding they use under the black flexy braid outers, but we can forgive them that, they are an American company after all.

The plugs are pretty hefty with a thick outer body, standard none locking construction, but the center pin and the negative contacts do look to be very thickly silver plated, maybe even Rhodium over the top, can't tell and couldn't be arsed to check the manufacturers specs.

So I decided to plug them in between cd player and pre-amp, a lightly modded Cambridge Audio 840c with added internal regulation, damping and new output stages, and a TAG Mclaren PA20r. My 840 has WBT silver Nextgens on the back, they have never sat particularly well with the thin metal case work of the 840c, they sit even more uncomfortably these days as one of them now has a completely snapped off screw ring, due to the impossibly tight plugs on these interconnects.

From the first 10 seconds of Easy Money by Rickie Lee Jones it was apparent that the Tricon Magnetic was obviously different in presentation to my current IC's. For comparison my current IC's are two runs of 4n silver in cotton for the live and a 4mm 4n silver foil for the return, no shielding, pretty hair-shirt. The Tricon proved itself to be both smoother and more detailed immediately. After an hour or two of listening to my current 'heavy rotation' cd selection, Tom Waits, RLJ, Lou Reed, Housemartins, Scott Mathews and various classical I had come to the conclusion that not only were they different, they were better. Score one for Synergistic Research.

With CD laid to rest I plugged them into my phonostage and set about various albums from Radiohead, Tom Waits, Feist, Lou Reed, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and once again Rickie Lee Jones. And it was more of the same, not just the same of the same but more of the same, more detail, shimmer to cymbals, more separation between the wires on the underside of snare drums, just greater subtlety all around in the presentation.

Now maybe you could put that down to them being shielded, as opposed to my pretty exposed wires, but when rigged up to my oscilloscope and phonostage instead of phonostage and pre-amp there was absolutely bugger all difference in the noise floor with the needle resting in the groove. So I genuinely don't think it was down to simple differences in EMF rejection. I put the differences I observed firmly in the 'unknown magic' camp. 'Unknown magic' is any mechanism for which we do not yet have an accurate understanding, there's more to life than LCR of that I'm a firm believer.

Next up was the big daddy, twice as thick, Precision Reference, not only twice as thick, but it also has blue LED's on it, ooooooh. The 'active' for the active shielding is provided by a 24v wallwart, in this case an American two pin plug wallwart. The swift application of a pair of needle nose pliers into the earth pin of my 6-way block soon saw that rammed home with reckless abandon for EEC directives on mains gear.

To my ears without the shielding turned on the more expensive cable sounded identical to the cheaper cable. I have to say I was somewhat disappointed at this, I was expecting fireworks after my introduction to the cheaper cable. After a good thirty minutes of DSOTM 30th Anniversary edition on vinyl I was beginning to question my initial judgement. There was something in the soundstage that was different to the single wired cheaper cable, a quick AB didn't help me home in on what this was but I was left feeling that they were not presenting the music in an identical fashion.

So inevitably I plugged in the wallwart and gave them the active shielding they so richly deserved. Lo and Behold they now sounded very different, not a little bit different, but completely different. And that difference was....... the loudest 50 hz hum I've ever heard from a wallwart supply in my life, maybe the pliers hadn't been such a good choice. Slapping the transformer box about made no difference so the 6-way was shoved under a large floor cushion and the noise was reduced to nothing, hi-tech solutions are always the best.

With the active shielding in place the Precision Reference proceeded to add an air of stability to the soundstage. It wasn't that the soundstage had been temporal and transient previously, just that it now had a much more obviously delineated shape, it filled out towards the edges of my listening room and now appeared to fill the extents of the far wall from my seated position, right out into the corners as opposed to more rounded corners presentation that I have grown accustomed to with my hi-fi. A quick flick of the switch and this solidity disappeared along with the loss of some very low level discrimination, a loss of subtle low level cues that add an extra layer of being there to the listening experience.

Buoyed by my own experiments with the IC's I decided to invite my nearest audio partner-in-crime round for a listen. Mark duly arrived, stole my listening seat and settled down to some Johnny Cash on CD, (he's a dedicated vinyl guy). We listened to Hurt via my cables a few times to get a base level and then swapped over to the Magnetic Tricon. A wry smile gently wrapped itself around his face, then he turns to me opens his eyes and says, hmmmmmmm. That's the best I've heard cd sound, and it sounds better than your cables. 'Bugger'...

And that pretty much sums it up. There's an additional tale of how we went round to his and did back to back with both cables and his stock Les-wire in his Naim set-up, and how we did some ABX blind between Les-wire and Magnetic Trcion.

But that's a tale for later in the week.

Suffice to say they sound much better than my stock wire, I find the lower cost cable offers a more compelling solution, but that is based on my distinctly mid-fi set up of solid state Tag and Cambridge Audio gear and hot-rodded ES-14's and Sub. If you are looking for a relatively foo-free cable solution and have the inclination to do some testing before you part with the hard earned I can whole heartedly recommend them. I listened to some uber-shite cables in the past at top dollar prices and these couldn't be any further from those in sound quality or value for money.

 

v interesting. Do you know the list price on the active precision ref ?.

 

Excellent , can't wait for Part 2 (can you get Johny Depp to play me in it?).

I think the Active Precision Ref. cable is firmly in the 'shit loads of money' camp (it is for me anyway - certainly for an interconect); the Magnetic Tricon is just in the 'raised eyebrows, that's a fair old chunk of dosh' camp.

 

the Tricon was about 500 sheets and the reference firmly in the eye watering 2.3k bracket, i'm sure the .5m is more sensible money as opposed to the 1.5m i tested.

 

To be honest I thought there would be more interest in sq225917's findings - I mean I've never heard any realy 'big bucks' interconects before (not in my system before).

 

nicely written .....

always wondered about active shielding ....is it doing more than just pumping dc or ac through the shield ?

 

Synergistic Research has a very good website.

http://www.synergisticresearch.com

 

I also had the pleasure of auditioning the Precision Ref IC but found them to be dull and lifeless in my system. Just like someone had choked the air out of someone.

I'm told by the designer that I shouldn't use them from source directly to power amps and that they're also act as a tuning aid..." The Tesla Apex is what I need".

My opinion to that is, a good sounding cable should sound good regardless where it is placed in the system.

Cheers.

 

Wow that's chalk and cheese, i couldn't have called them dull, ever. That does smack of a cable that definately does soemthing then.

 

The problem is as I was told by Ted ( designer ) the Precision Ref. should not be used to connect to the amps as they were not designed for that purpose. You will also need the whole system to wire with Synergistic cables to get the real benefits. I did a A/B direct comparision with the Precision Ref. and the Missing link cryo ref.

The best way to go is Precision Ref. from source to pre amp then Apex to amps and finish off with either Precision or Apex speaker cables. In my case, Im told to use Apex direct to the amps because I don't use a pre. and either Precision or Apex speaker cables.

Please don't shoot the messenger...

 

Just playing around with the Synergistic Cables It all depends on your system. You have a very good and revealing system Class A so your system requires Apex anyway. dosn't it? You know you want to

 

IMHO, I can say that the Tesla Apex speaker cables are very musical, dynamic without being harsh, massive soundstage, have a lovely midband bloom but not the most detailed, the rest of your system have to be upto scratch as it takes no prisoners. If you want to start using the S.R. cables, I suggest trying a Tesla range one from the source and progress further down the chain as I'm sure you will hear the benefits of the "active shielding". They are also very well made and comes with if I'm correct a life time warranty to the original owner.

SORRY sq225917 for hijacking your thread.

Hi-Fi Addict: Hmmmm, we'll talk.

 

Did you have the whole system wired with S/R cables when you tried them?

I presume the cryo ref was not as good, was there a big difference?

Also Class A what is your system?

Thanks,
jaspal

 

Jaspal,

1: I had the Precision Ref IC and the Apex speaker cables at the time of auditioning.

2: You assumed WRONG....The Missing Link Cryo Ref. is IMHO much better than the Precision Ref. in everyway but Pls read why the Precision did'nt work in my system.

3: A humble system...

Please note that I have no connecting business interests with any companies mentioned here.

 

t's all about synergy

 

Yes to most of the time but ultimately like I said earlier in the thread.. a good sounding cable should sound good regardless where it is placed in the system. I'm talking about night and day difference to my ears between the two evaluated cables in the same system.

 

i think a benign cable should be benign wherever you put it.

A cable that really makes a diffefrence, well i wouldn't expect that to fit everywhere.

 

I was talking to S/R over the phone about their various cables and they pointed out that one has to plug in the active shielding a certain way otherwise you don't hear the benefits. Did know this?

jaspal.

PS. Re-reading the whole thread, yeah you do refer the Missing link cryo ref as being better in your system. My mistake for not reading all the thread carefully.

 

You hit the mark with your 1st comment but the 2nd is very contradicting. Im puzzled now

IMO, the best cable is NO cable but since we have to have them then the best sounding ones should be the most transparent without colouring and getting in the way how the equipment should sound. I could be very wrong here. There are those that say their cables act as tunning aids....if thats the case then, you should change the hardware to get the sound that you want in the 1st place although I'm a strong believer that cables do sound different.

Cheers