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Stealth
Does It Again
The “Indra” Amorphous Cable
A PRO’S POINT OF VIEW
- - Jim
Merod
First Things First
My headline should, more
accurately, read “Serguei Timachev
Hits Another Grand Slam”
. . . this being the moment professional baseball gets cranked up
in full.
Serguei lives within easy
reach of Camden Yards, where the Baltimore Orioles (once the
inglorious St. Louis Browns) play in cozy environmental elegance.
Such a designation – cozy elegance – might truthfully
nominate the final facts of Serguei’s new Stealth cable, The
Indra.
I wish I’d broken the
story of this special, vastly remarkable cable.
It is utterly distinct.
It has no discernible sound or sonic signature.
I’ve listened long and hard to its disappearance act.
It’s not an “act.”
The Indra is to the world of high-end audio cables as
Tantalus to Ovid’s narrative psychology.
I’ve thrown everything
at it I could imagine in search of some tell-tale index of its
eccentricity. None.
Nothing. The cable vanishes before your eager, suspicious
ears.
I’d have enjoyed
“breaking” the story of The Indra’s break through into such
astonishing “non-footprint sound” since I’ve waited so long
for such an event. In
truth, I thought I’d not be around when essentially non-interferring
cable would appear. The prospect of that unlikely day seemed
distant. My doubt, or pessimism, had everything to do with hearing
literally hundreds of good, average, very good, and (even) great
cables over the years. None
of them ever completely “got out of the way” of a master
signal feed put directly through it from a recorded source.
Because skeptical
awareness dies hard, I want to hold out pragmatic theoretical
caution here. Perhaps
I’ve been seduced by the far greater sonic “invisibility” of
The Indra in comparison to hundreds of wires that appeared before
it. Perhaps I’ve not
gotten wholly to the bottom of this cable’s seemingly infinite
subtlety.
Who knows?
I’ve tried my best to push and drive my two meter
balanced run of this new, potentially revolutionary wire to its
utter limit. I’ve
sought to find its spectral weakness, its dynamic flaws, its
uneven delivery of some small piece of the sonic signal coursing
its six-plus feet of effortless relaxation.
Nada. Zero.
Zip. No
weakness. No flaws.
Nothing uneven or exaggerated. Damn thing smiles and takes
signals in one side, out the other, as if only air or god’s
sweet fingers carried them innocently intact . . . in perfect
wholeness.
Alas, such feeble hope.
Alas, each sonic voyager.
Let’s get real. This
much too goo news completely irks me, if you know what I’m
getting at here . . . irksome because a cable’s not supposed to
be utterly NOT THERE. Understand
? That defies the laws
of ordinary physics. There
must be a “signature” in the output signal.
Somehow, some way, the musical signal going in one side of
The Indra cannot be exactly (perfectly) the signal oozing out the
other end.
Cannot be.
End of review. I’ll
stop now. I’m
stumped. Irks the hell
out of me. Lousy thing
for a nice man like Serguei Timachev to do to a hard working
recording/mastering bloke (me).
What’s this: some kind
of trick? An early
Halloween joke? I’m not big on trick or treat … in this case,
a big treat that just about bumfuzzles my attempts to get to the
bottom of its mystery. I’ve
listened. And listened
more. And swapped
cables. Driven hard
and soft, smoothly seductive and distortedly cacophonous signals
through The Indra.
It does not care.
It is not “there” . . .
The wire-related,
metallurgical facts are fairly obvious, reported by very good
audio writers, such as my old colleague at Enjoy The Music, Srajan
Ebaen. The “aginbite
of inwit” here, to pickpocket James Joyce a moment, is the lack
of molecular structure -- the absence of inner “borders” or
crystalline “boundaries” -- that define zero crystal silver
and “six nines” copper wires.
Apparently, in addition, Stealth employs a carbon-titanium
barrel at the point of termination. I have read some controversy
about the sonic efficacy of that termination.
For the purpose of this review, I’ll overlook it since I
have not had a chance to explore its merits.
Pushing Sonic (Cable)
Limits
You think most cables
withstand sonic torture with staid equanimity?
Not so. Take
your average or better audiophile grade balanced cable and pump
high decibel (undistorted) signals through them.
You’ll find the coherence of your input signal deformed
by dynamic stress. Try
sending an extremely low-level signal through, say, a fifteen
meter balanced cable. Take,
for instance, a quiet (low decibel level) bass signal put through
a very good (expensive, audiophile caliber) microphone cable.
Four out of five such
cables that I performed this renewed observation upon flunked the
“sonic integrity” test. What
went into
one end (the female) side
of the cable did not arrive as a pristine, perfectly-rendered
signal coming out the other (male terminated) end.
Note : these were not cheap mic cables.
No Radio Shack bargains
or
Guitar
Center
standard brand jobs. There
were no Belden or Canare (universally-used) “professional
grade” cables. Better
than that. Much better
. . . proprietary, state of the art cables far too
expensive for most recording applications.
Second iteration.
Drop down to two meter balanced lengths and run the same
tests. Very high and,
also, modestly low decibel signals.
Better results all around
this time. Working
with an even playing field in this scaled-down version (shorter
cable lengths), similar results.
The Indra smoked every cable I ran against it :
Acoustic Zen Silver Reference II (a great cable) ; Magnan
Silver-Bronze (an awe-inspiring cable) ; van den Hul carbon
(extremely neutral cables) ; Analysis Plus (a workhorse cable with
a big heart) ; Audience Au24 (a contender for ultimate neutrality)
; Nordost Valhalla (a gorgeous sounding cable with a huge
soundstage) …. my livery of undeniable monster cables.
I love them all, each
different, each fantastic in distinct ways.
Great cables, every one !
The Indra has something
going for it not related to any conventional (or previous)
“sonic flavor.” It
is a cable without an attitude.
No sonic “attitude.”
Its inaudible presence is virtually miraculous.
Did I mention I adore it . . . even as it irks me to the
max?
Concluding Forays With
Nothing
The Indra irks me because
it puts my listening and discernment up against a wall. A reviewer
is tempted by embarrassment as soon
as he -- or she (RIP
Valerie K. / Anna Logg) – announces the most recent reappearance
of Elvis Presley. Where
would Moses be without Charlton Heston?
Jesus without Jimmy Swaggert?
Reviewing is a
time-consuming, under-compensated occupation, inevitably
subjective. Some
reviewers are better than others at the intricacies involved; some
have no clue at all. There
are one or two in this laudable, much maligned profession
deserving permanent vacation.
I loathe those whose “stake” in the audio game is
fraudulent as the bent ace of spades your ornery cousin,
Claude-the- card-shark, slips into the late night deck. Spades are
never innocent with such slippage.
Do you remember Red Skelton’s anti-hero, Klem Kadiddle-hopper?
Think about it.
Audio reviewing demands
two fundamental requisites at the least : good hearing with the
unlikely capacity to consistently recognize near-difference sonic
discriminations; intelligence enough to share the nuanced
complexity of the audio art with taste, professional courtesy, and
tactful (in fact, dialectical) critical clarity.
I can name several who
approach that set of standards, one or two who flunk all tests
involved. I’ve cited
Srajan above because he’s proved to be an unusually discerning
reviewer of audio gear. One
thinks (perhaps most all) of Robert Harley. I’ve learned a great
deal over many years from Robert Harley.
For me, one irrefutable
thing emerges from the morass of sometimes indecipherable
(unpalatable) subjectivity. The
integrity of any reviewer is hedged by human frailty and personal
taste, on one hand, and by the uncertain conditions of equipment
and system interactions, on another.
Other limiting conditions obtain, as well,
but my point is like
Samuel Johnson’s (the great 18th century literary
critic) who thought of intellectual effort as a wager made against
the impending disaster of one’s mortality and the bastards one
disputes.
Not even Johnson’s hero,
Shakespeare, escaped such
midnight
oil.
Let my conclusion’s
momentary diversion suggest the humility needed to exclaim as I
have here. I am not at all sure, with apodictic certainty, that my
reading of the Indra cable is correct to an absolute degree. I am
sure I’ve sought to torment its capacity for accuracy, clarity,
beauty and, most of all, transparency. The Indra has not (yet)
failed my irksome measures. Reciprocity.
You dig?
Here, concluding
“unscientific postscripts,” once again, I’ll suggest to any
who cares, as I do, this : approaching
ever-receding degrees of sonic and musical truth (that uncongenial
partner to our love of sound and lyric eros), Serguei Timachev’s
brilliant good luck and hard-earned genius, I feel, deserve
adoring scrutiny and sincere investigation.
One final note. I’m not
aware how much material resource STEALTH has to producing Indra
cables. My information suggests that the amorphous wire at the
core of these incredible cables may be severely limited … not
false scarcity. Genuine short supply.
In truth, that may be the limiting condition of this
cable’s otherwise glorious future.
Thus spake Zarathustra : Coelitus
mihi veres.
We Are All In It Together
Whatever the fate of that
potential, I’ll say something here I’ve never (knowingly)
asserted in speech or print about any audio product.
At any price the market bears, for those who want knowledge
of the upper limits of their sound system (warts and all),
Stealth’s INDRA is a component to be pursued, cherished,
protected, used mercilessly, and heard into the inmost recess of
attention’s soulful, conscious space.
Caveat emptor !
Listener, beware !
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