Nordost Valhalla vs. Acoustic Zen


Has anyone had a chance to compare the Nordost Valhalla line to Acoustic Zen? I replaced Quattro Fil/SPM with Silver Ref/Satori and found that in my system it betters the Nordost cables, or any other cable I have tried.
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Showing 1 response by bwhite

Hi Keith and Ryan,

Ryan, I tried AZ Silver after your recommendation and I purchased my set from Keith. I think that overall, the Quattro Fil is a far superior to the AZ Silver cable in all respects. Given that Valhalla is better than Quattro Fil, you know where I am going with this.

However, my friends system which had a significant degree of harshness & sharp edges with ALL other cables he tried was miraculously fixed by using the Silver Reference cables.

Additionally we tried the new Hologram speaker cables on both systems. On his, the Hologram improved everything. On mine, the Hologram sounded congested - veiled and quite frankly, horrible.

I tried the Matrix reference cables on my system and they were among the harshest and most difficult to listen to cables I've ever owned. I asked the manufacturer about this & after telling me that AZ cables break in quickly, they retracted their statement and said that on "some" systems Matrix can take more than 300 hours to break in. That is just ridiculous!

In summary, I think that if a system has a problem with harshness, the Silver Reference is the way to go. If a system lacks inner detail and is too "soft sounding" - one should use Matrix reference.

If a system already has a good tonal balance, the Hologram will strip away much of the sound and harmonically shroud the music with the "Zen Sound" - whereas if a system has sharp edges the Hologram will smooth it out. Needless to say, on both systems the Hologram and Silver seemed to hold the equipment back and prevent it from reaching its full dynamic potential.

I am not familiar with the lower end Satori cables and presume or hope they are more neutral than any of the other cables produced by AZ.