Are you joking.

I think you are joking again.

I totaly agree whit the review of Hyperion very good review indeed. This cables are THE END.It makes you love the music more.I mean real music of real artists whit real emotions.I dont mean Madona,house or all the comercial stuf. It makes you love the music more! It makes you feel the music more! It makes you understand the music more! This cables Anvz and An-Spz need rely time to understand whit one thing i dont agree about this cables whit the other reviewers that they sound very well right out of the box.In my experience they sound to nothing out of the box just after 250 hours they start to shine.Than not erlier you start to have the feeling that this is something very special.And after that every hour you notice improvment. I use them since short whit Lamm L1 preamp and ML2 singelended mono blocks,wonderfull amps!The sound now after using them together the seventh day is unbelievabel.At the moment i am writing this review i am listening to it,i cant stop listening.I still cant believe how naturel,full of emotion,full bodied,wide,deep,very 3D,and relexed whit a peace and quetines the sound is that they create.At this moment i am not alone i listen to Chet Bakers CD Baby Breeze the song Born to be blue Chet is whit me now. Whit me in my room if Chet shoudt here this i am sure he woudt say: THIS IS GREAT MEN!

Similar Products Used:

Please stop joking.

Liquidity, exceptional HF extention, excellent details, excellent bass with slam and tightness.

None that I can think of.

I have used many makes of cable in my audio life. Some have boxes, most of them thick, sone thin, some with different windings, braidings, some with air dielectric and some solid core.....etc.

Finally when a good friend sugested I tried the Audio Note AN-Vz cables. I was at first reluctant because I had bad experience with "silver cables" (bright sound) in the past.

After some thought and tongue biting, I purchased 2 pairs of demo AN-Vz cables from NY.

From the package, these cables were incredible.

First pair: CD player to preamp.

Highs were silky smooth with lots of extention (no whiteness), and bass like I have never heard before. Midrange was so liquid and so REAL you could hear the vocalist's lips move! Soundstage was deep and wide. Detail was amazing. I could hear things that I've never heard from a piece of music before. Every CD I put in the CD player sounded so different. The difference was so apparent that not much ABing with the old cable was required.

After two days I put in the second pair:

No surprise. I heard the same results as described above.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the $$$ to get the AN-SPz speaker cables BUT settled for the AN-SPx Cables instead.

The AN-SPx cables were brand new and they required lots of break-in time (at least 200hrs) before you hear anything!

Right out of the package they sounded great in all aspects except fot the HF. HF sounded blunt with no extention. It got slightly better after 50hrs. Bass was awesome for a cable this thin (better than cables 10 times the thickness). Midrange was lush and LIQUID.

I highly recommend these cables who wants to listen to MUSIC and they are going to be the last pairs of cables in MY system. Sounds so real it's scarry.

Fantastic interconnect cables. Made HUGE dfference to my system (Pass Aleph 3 + Threshold T3 + Audio Note DAC3, Tannoy D-700 speakers). Previously I've been using Nordost Solar Wind cables. AN cabless so much better - clean highs, great transparency. Anybody can hear the difference, not only audiofiles.

Expensive.

Worth every penny.

Similar Products Used:

Nordost Solar Wind and Nordost Blue Heaven interconnect cables.

Audio Note AN-Vz & AN-SPz
The Audio Note AN-Vz is a 60 (or 30 depending on who you ask) strand individually insulated (litz) 0.2mm 4N silver conductor interconnect terminated with AN-P silver RCA (XLR version is also available) plugs. The AN-SPz is a 4 x 60 (or 30) litz 0.2mm 4N silver conductor speaker cable, usually not terminated with any connector (but custom connectors can be ordered and fitted). The conductors are supposed to be lab grade silver drawn into fine wire in Kondo san's custom-made diamond dies. They don't look like any silver conductor I've ever seen (both in jewelry or cable form), having a yellowish golden tinge. These are cables that won't pass as audio-jewelry and no one will buy em because of their looks. They don't even come in suitcases or fancy boxes - just either in plastic blister packages or good ole plastic bag depending on where you bought them. The thin unterminated speaker cable with brown jacket in particular seems to fly in the face of the "bigger, fatter is better" school of cable audiomania.

Before I go on about these notoriously expensive (unless you know where to buy it … Lukash, you've got to put your ears closer to the ground! :-)) and obscure cables. Let me point out first that this review is about the AN-Vz interconnect and AN-SPz speaker cable used together. I did not and will probably not bother to find out about their individual characteristics. In my experience, mixing cables of different make can result to a desired tonal balance, but it is a bad recipe for getting coherence and integrity.

However, I did introduce these AN cables to my system one at a time, at about 1.5 hour intervals (while playing the same sets of 20 songs over and over again in reversed order at each stage of insertion) just out of curiosity. I did not give these AN cables special treatment, no cleaning, no Progold, no break-in when they replaced newly demagnetized, newly cleaned and ProGold treated 4 year old WireWorld cables, in a newly demagnetized system that has been fully warmed up for 5 hours.

First to come in was one 1m AN-Vz replacing the 1m WireWorld Eclipse interconnect between the cd player and passive line stage attenuator. The effect was immediately heard on the first few bars of Peter, Paul & Mary's "500 Miles". The opening guitar sounded much more real than ever before, the plucking more natural and subtle, the decays longer and more melodic. When the vocals came out … what air, bloom and presence! Vocal nuances were highlighted in a most convincing manner. This clarity, sense of refinement and musicality extended to all the discs in the queue but some unmistakable "flavor" of the Wireworld cables like the full mids, the slightly mechanical treble, the rich weighty bass lingered on.

Then another AN-Vz replaced the other Eclipse interconnect between the passive line stage and the power amp. Again, more refinement, more subtlety, but even greater clarity and speed. The soundstage receded a few feet behind the speakers and shrunk a bit in size but music was paradoxically livelier and more vibrant. Stephan Grapelli sounded much more animated and seems to be having more fun in his duet with Rob Wasserman. Rickie Lee Jones's voice sounded even more playful and girlish. The awesome drums in Kitaro's "Matsuri" exploded with definition and tightness that I've only experienced with the Nordost Red Dawn before.

Then AN-SPz replaced the WireWorld Silver Eclipse speaker cables. The immediate result was the instant loss of bass power and weight but what the heck, the midrange and highs soared to even greater heights. They were now totally undescribable and beyond the scope of my limited audiophile vocabulary. The resolution was bumped up about 10X! - the breath intake of vocalists, the smacking of lips … all the inner detailing are easily heard w/o any trace of sterility and edge. By now, the tonal pallette also improved immensely, the golden quality of the c-j becoming more prominent because of the removal of the slightly "cool white ARC-ish" tonality of the Silver Eclipse. This is hardly needed in pop or jazz music but an absolute necessity for classical. On St. Saen's "Carnival of Animals" and "Danse Macabre" …. my ears revelled in the fertility of different timbres and tonality that make each instrument distinct and unique. The brain easily acknowledges this by ordering the body to get more classical discs into the mix and is rewarded immediately. Most of my classical cds are AAD and used to sound noisy, blurred and compressed, through any other cables I've used at home. Not anymore. Living Stereo Best of Tchaikovski for instance is a disc I have never listened completely in one sitting because I get bored at the slow and quiet passages - because I can hardly hear anything! But I surprised myself by finishing the whole disc! In retrospect, the pianissimo passages were actually even slower and quieter than before! The reason which I will only understand much much later is an unbelievable improvement in dynamic and temporal contrast.

Finally, the icing on the cake … AN-SPz biwire jumpers replaced the stock gold/rhodium plated brass Sonus faber jumpers. This resulted in more air, more top end extension and more coherence in the crossover region. Bass also got stronger and weightier but this is mostly due to the removal of the obstrusive stock jumper more than anything else. These 2" long jumpers get about 90% of the performance of AN-SPz in biwire configuration. I can live with that - the jumpers were after all sent to me for free! :-)

After a 6 hour stimulating and ear-openning listening session where the level of involvement is only paralleled by the initial switch to tube amplification, I have this stupid grin fixed on my face for quite a long time. Humming to myself, I put the WW cables back into their packaging. I know then and there that my ears are now too pampered to enjoy them again. They have been cruelly crushed and humbled. But they have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing could have withstood the Z onslaught.

In the third day - when I was still basking in indulgence, playing exclusively classical cds since these seems to have the greatest benefits of having the AN cables. I played St Saens' "Oratorio de Noel" and was startled when the organ came rumbling out of nowhere … what is this?! It cant be??! This is deeper bass than I/ve ever heard in my room - and from a skinny cable! I quickly lined up a few discs with deep bass from the likes of Enigma, Bela Fleck to Bach, Beethoven to rap galore like Lauryn Hill, Run DMC and Lighter Shade of Brown, and some electronic dance tunes. No its not like I just added a REL subwoofer. But yep, no doubt about it. Mr. BASS was back! And even better than ever.

Two months later …

The first adjective that comes to mind after such a long time of listening to an all AN Z series cabled system is of unparalleled refinement . I have never heard a more refined sounding set of cables. Period. The lack of artifical edge and etch, lack of brittleness, lack of mechanical sound. Absolutely natural sounding. As Dick Olsher wrote in his review of the AN-SPx (essentially AN-SPz divided by four …) , the cables conjure mental images of pure velvet and silk. Pure, pristine, immaculate, virginal - take your pick! And this refinement does not come at the expense of transparency, transient response, timing, vigor, dynamics and other equally important components of music.

Let's talk about transparency. These AN Z cables uncover an unbelievable amount of details. To illustrate the astounding resolution of these cables, I found out that my $200 Pioneer laser disc player (w/c normally have but a fraction of the resolution of my main cd player) wired with these AN cables suddenly surges ahead by a mile in the details dept compared to my mainstay cd player wired with the Wireworld stuff. (w/c are no slouch in the details dept. when compared to other cables) And that's not all, despite the copious amount of details that is almost enough to overload the ears, the cables never sound analytical or obstrusive. Far from it, in fact the cables sound wonderfully musical - to the point that I now enjoy music from the $200 LD player! I can still hear all the flaws in the recordings or electronics - bright and grainy cds still sound that way, the LD player still sounds lean and flat but it seems uncannily so easy to get pass all these and get into the core of the music. There was something so right about these cables …

The highs might be a bit rolled off in absolute terms - although I cannot really say if this is the real case since most of my components, from the cd player to the speakers are slightly rolled off from 16kHz up. (or I may not be able to hear anything higher than 16 kHz) But the highs are absolutely gorgeous. It is airy (but not as much as Alpha Core Goertz silver & Transparent Reference), grainless, sweet, and they have the longest harmonic decay of any cable I've heard - this achieved w/o smearing the transient attack whatsoever. The singing edge of violins was retained for instance. The vibraphones in Jazz at the Pawnshop XRCD sounded as metallic as they really are, when most cables make them sound soft and woody like marimbas. Snare drum - a very difficult instrument to recreate in a realistical manner due to the complex reverberation of the snares in the drum is no problem at all. Rimshots crackle with blinding speed but without the edge and hardness of some well known speedy ribbon cable.

The midrange is still impossibly hard to describe because it is not thin, not full, not cold, not warm but sounds perfectly real and convincing. The best way to describe it is that it made the cj Premier 11a sound more like a directly heated triode amp. Gone was the natural sounding but slightly soft creamy midband, replaced by an even more palpable crystalline grainless midrange with tremendous presence that seems out of place in a push-pull amp with 6550 tubes. Midrange was also accorded exemplary power and dynamic authority. Sopranos like Sylvia McNair sings with more strength and energy, her voice punctuating the depth of silence in Carmina Burana. There's no doubt about it, if you are a midrange nut - these cables are probably the next best thing to owning a 300B SET amplifier and a paper driver speaker.

The bass is deep and very articulate but this is probably where they won't impress most listeners. Even after two months, the sheer weight and fullness of the WireWorld cables is not there (but I don't miss it at all). They are still not as tight nor slam-happy as the Nordost Red Dawn too. But they did have better extension. It got another ace here too, the resolution from the mids and highs also extend down to the bass: it is superb in bass timbre, tonal shades and textures. Transparent Reference seems to dig up even more shades and textures but I have trouble liking the extremely deliberate and reserved approach to music making. The worse cables will not be able to differentiate electric bass, acoustic bass, piano's lower registers and the drum kit, the good cables will but they have limits. The AN Z cables have no trouble distinguishing different acoustic double basses in one song! Even synthesized bass don't sound alike and has distinct tonality and texture after all.

Another special quality of these AN Z cables is the ultra wide tonal pallete. These are the among the very few cables that are chameleon like in terms of intrinsic tonal colors. (others cables that I have heard w/c excel in this regard are van den Hul carbon, OCOS and Alpha Core Goertz silver) It can go sunny warm, to dark and cool, golden, grey whatever depending on what musical instrument is being recreated. No wonder classical music sounds so much colorful and enjoyable. One would argue that a good cable should not have any distinctive tonal color at all but most cables do. Some networked copper cables are for instance notorious for "golden/light shaded" pianos and basses - something I have yet to hear in live music. OTOH, some silver cables are equally notorious for absurdly metallic and cool sounding cellos.

An even more unique quality is the kick ass microdynamic and temporal contrast. (and note: the more important components of music (for me) - rhythm, timing, energy and presence are all directly related to microdynamics.) The emotional content of music are mostly expressed in terms of microdynamic and temporal nuances. For me, this is the killer characteristic that make the AN cables very special. The feeble human ears and brain might have trouble sensing freq response, pitch and tones in a hurry but we have no problem hearing contrasts of any kind. The AN Z cables cruelly reveal that most cables act like dynamic and temporal compressors. I guess this is the reason why the ears immediately warm up to these cables, the speed, liveliness and vibrancy without aggression, sterility and any mechanical quality easily registers as being strangely similar to acoustic live music. The immediate effect of this excellence in microdynamics is that it led me to listen a lot less louder than before - a good thing because this directly leads to less room related distortions. I guess the human propensity to turn the volume pot up is nothing but a petty attempt to recreate satisfactory microdynamics more than anything else after all.

In conclusion, I find it very helpful to use an analogy to what these AN cables are all about … they sound exactly like a good SET amp made into cable. They sound wonderful not because of relatively trivial improvements/changes in resolution, tonality, speed, soundstaging, dynamics etc - it's because they take a serious stab at diverting one's attention into the elusive emotional fabric of music, and they succeed with flying colors at that.

Considering the spectacular results with an ultralinear 6550 based amplifier like the Premier 11a, a passive line stage attenuator that will probably make Kondo san blanch, and a modest entry level cd player (but at least it got a midband that will put to shame most $$$ cd players) … I can only imagine how these cables would perform in even more revealing analog sourced SET based systems which they are designed to partner! I promise I will find out soon enough! :-)

Caveats

But these are not perfect cables for everyone …

If you are a soundstaging freak, you can forget about these cables. The AN-Vz / SPz combo do not put up godzilla sized infinite depth soundstages all the time like some network terminated cables I know. They also don't conjure the ridiculous kind of neat cookie-cutter pin-point imaging where no instrument seem to overlap one another (an outright impossibility) as sought by imaging freaks. (lest you get the wrong idea however, these cables are excellent in terms of layering and dimensionality - images are slightly diffuse so they overlap one another but they are nicely distinct and layered, just like live music) Scale freaks who think that the physical size of an instrument relates to the size and scale of its sound will also be unmoved. No doubt they will be put off by flutes that fill a big chunk of the sonic canvass. But then they obviously havent heard a real flute in action - especially one played by a creative flutist. Focus freaks whose idea of focus is a statuesque vocalist that remains the same "size" fixed in the center of the two speakers through the length of a song will balk at the ever changing focus/size as presented by these AN cables, nevermind the fact that all human vocalists have to move their head and body and alter the distance of the microphone while singing. Slam fans will miss their favorite Mr. Robo-drummer - real drummers after all cannot use sledgehammers to whack room-sized drums to create the inundating wall of bass presented by other cables. Accuracy fans who believe that accuracy is synonymous to monochromatic, hard edged, freeze-dried, cooled to absolute zero, and zero harmonic content will laugh off the sweetness and harmonic beauty of these cables as euphony.

Likewise, if you own these cables … I am warning you before hand that it inhibits cable mania, inhibits audiophilia nervousa, increases length of listening sessions exponentially! (now you know what's keeping me from spending more time in the net hehehe) but sadly induces arrogance and superiority complex, and you will have a hard time keeping your mouth shut and sooner or later you will write an obscene review like this, and on top of that, accidentally say that your friends' $$$ cables suck - with cataclysmic results!

SO! … are these the best cables in the world? Without hearing some fabled snakes like Magnan Reference, Nirvana, Nordost SPM, Alpha Core Goertz M3AG, Transparent XL, PAD Dominus, NBS Statement, Yamamura Millenium 6000, Siltech G3 etc, and w/o a topnotch analog/SET full bandwidth, wide dynamic range system - I cannot truly say but they are the most musical and emotionally communicative I have heard so far, and by a long shot too.

Who am I?

I am a Sonus faber zealot, tubehead, and tweakoid - ardent believer and practitioner of resonance tuning. I listen to all kinds of music. I do not believe in "The Absolute Sound" - not the hifi mag, but the idea that there is only one correct and accurate way of presenting music. Being a midrange, rhythm and coherence nut dictates my priorities. Sounstaging and imaging are not important to me but I love disappearing/unobstrusive speakers. I prefer silver to copper conductors. I prefer listening in nearfield to farfield.

My System:

Musical Fidelity CDT w/ Sylvania JAN 6922 Class A SET output w/ sand-damped copper shielded clock
FT Audio LW-1 passive line stage attenuator
conrad-johnson Premier 11a (Svetlana 6550c output tubes)
Sonus faber Electa Amator II / Sonus faber Stand Iron adjustable

Misc./Accessories:
Chang Lightspeed CLS6400 20AH power line conditioner
Shun Mook Valve Resonators on all minitubes
Shun Mook Mpingos on cd player
Audioprism Isobearings under passive preamp
Audioprism Blacklight cd mat
Audioprism Stoplight
Harmonix TU1000 under cd player
Harmonix TU210 under tube amp
Mike Vans Evers tuning woodblocks
Ferrite ring on cd player power cord
Caig Progold / XLO TPC contact enhancer
XLO/Sheffield, XLO/RR, Sheffield MDMS demagnetizing discs
Sponges to isolate/suspend cables
All components except tube amp under DIY sandboxes / air suspension
Dedicated 30A audio mains
DIY corner absorbers, DIY abfussors/diffusors (assorted diameter cardboard and foam cylinders)

Music used in review:

Too many to mention.

I have not listened to (or even seen) the Audio Note SPz speaker cables, so this "review" only describes what I have discovered about the pricing of these pure silver Japanese wires. After reading Hyperion's excellent review at this site, I decided to check with my favorite audio dealer in Tokyo (Audio Union in Ochanomizu) about ordering a set of SPz cables directly from Audio Note to biwire my speakers (5 feet [1.5 meters] times 4 runs). I have seen these cables advertised at $1500 per mono foot at the Audio Note NYC website. The quote that I have received (and subsequently confirmed) from Audio Union is 50,000 Yen (less than $450) for a 1.5-meter pair. I do not understand how speaker cables that cost less than $900/20' in Japan can cost $30,000/20' in the US. A 300% markup I could rationalize, but a 3000% markup seems rather obscene, even in high-end audio. If you are seriously considering purchasing these cables, I would suggest that you save yourself $28,000 (assuming $1000 for round-trip airfare to Tokyo) by picking them up in Japan.
Since I have not heard these cables, I will defer to Hyperion's judgment and also give them 5 stars.

Hey, I gave them 5 stars! What gives?

It has been a very long time indeed since I posted here. I guess I finally have a system that takes me so far away everytime I hear it that I lost interest in audiophilia. Of course it was after years of searching and spending lots of money of various components that this happened. There was no shortcut, at least for me, but I wanted to thank the many people in this forum for all their insights and help. Especially Joe Sanders who turned me on to LAMM, and Hyperion to AudioNote Anz cables, for these components are the true keepers in my current system (though the other components are all fine).
My review of the LAMM m1.1 monoblocks is in the amplifier section, so anyone curious can go there. They are magnificent.

Later, though I was sceptical that the LAMM L1 preamp could offer any large improvement worth the money over my Pass aleph P, I tried one anyway. I have always thought that poweramps play a much larger role than pres, so when the Lamm m1.1 trounced the (still wonderful im my opinion) Pass Aleph 2's, I was not so surprised. But surely the pricey Lamm L1 pre would not offer such an improvement?

Wrong pretty much. The odd thing was that unlike the m1.1's, it is much harder to put your finger on what is so good about the L1. In a way then, it is even a superior component to the m1.1's because where the monoblocks thrill and caress you, the L1 just seems to dissapear. As I thought the Pass Aleph P did! But there are many depths to that word "dissapear" and the Lamm dissapears much more, chiefly in the department of texture. It sounds much more again like live music--compared to many components the Pass Aleph P sounds stunningly present and real, but plug the Lamm L1 in and another layer of "electronic distraction" is removed. So much that in fact you forget about the equipment. The Lamm L1 (until I hear better anyway) is the most unindulgent piece of audio equipment I know of. And though it does not *zing* you at first, it has the amazing effect of making you forget about it. It makes the whole experience of listening quite different. I do not exaggerate--please try if for yourself. Whether or not it will have this effect partnered to non-Lamm amps I do not know. And it is expensive too, but since I have had it I've had no desire to listen to new equipment anymore.

Well, there is one more catch till my satisfaction came, that was the Audio Note An cables which Hyperion kept ranting on about and wrote a long review of in the cables section. Since he lauded their aplomb with classical music, and I am primarily a classic and ancient music fan, I tried some out. The suprising thing is, is that Hyperion's gushing review is true! He gushes, but his observations are very accurate and spot on. This is the casmere of cables--music is clothed in such beauty and sweetness, yet with tremendous transparency and effacing neutrality. "Lord this sounds so right!" these cables make you shout. Best of all, when I first put them in I was working around the apartment and kept being drawn back into the listening room. These cables make you want to listen--they capture some level of ambience (Hyperion calls it harmonic decay) that sounds like real live music. The overprecise (and initially impressive) soundstaging that most fine cables offer is gone here, replaced with something only describable as organic. And when you go to the concert hall you affirm, yes that organicness is how it sounds. These cables have that quality in spades, and though the lack of giant bass offered by such cables as transparent reference, Nordost, or on a subtler scale my previous Nirvana's may seem a fault at first, you soon realize that the huge and impressive bass is coming at the cost of obscuring depth and solidity. You feel like you are listening down to the center of the earth with the audio note cables (at least with LAMM amps which are champs in the depth category). Hyperion is also right that they do sound slightly soft up top, possibly rolled off, but the overall effect is nothing less than pure enchantment.

So combined with the L1 and my previous system Lamm m1.1, Wilson Benesch Act One speakers, Denon D1 transport and Mccormakc dna DAC, and a nice Magnan ref power cable/conditioner (highly recommended) I have forgot all about audio, audio discussion forums, magazines, shows etc. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it certainly is saving me lots of money. As Hyperion said of the An cables, though it applies to my system as a whole now, "it inhibits audiophile Nervosa and exponentially increases listening sessions"

So thanks again to all who helped me on my search, and of course I recommend you try out some of the products in my system, especially the Lamm and Audionote cables. Although the other components are fine they still are on "this side of the river" Somehow the Lamm and Audionote have crossed over to the lonely other side.