Review: van den Hul The Orchid Interconnect

Category: Cables

Perhaps an oddball among audiophiles, I listen mainly to classical music--Renaissance choral, symphonic orchestral, and romantic opera to be specific. Yesterday, while listening to Le Chapelle Royale's 1986 Harmonia Mundi recording of Josquin Desprez's motets (dir. Phillippe Herreweghe), I dropped a 1m RCA Orchid into the system and, immediately, the clarity and separation of voices was remarkable in comparison with my reference IC, an Audience Au24, which I like very much. I use Audience cabling throughout the system (Cary SLI-80, Lector 0.6T CDP, Sonus Faber Grand Piano speakers, Audience Au24 speaker cables, Audience PC on the amp) and had been committed to consistency regarding cables, but the Orchid is turning my head. On Renaissance choral music, the Orchid is not only more refined in its separation and spacing of voices, but in finesse too--transients are more delicate, realistic, so the pulsing of voices feels more natural.

Last night, I stayed up a couple of extra hours just listening to what the Orchid can do in my main system, as my friends Dale and Chris Shepherd, owners of Eugene Hi-Fi, needed the cables back for a morning recording session. They've loaned me several pairs of interconnects to audition over the past few weeks and had been urging me to try the Orchid even though I'd thought my cabling "had arrived" already. And I must admit I had become somewhat smug about my success, until I dropped The Orchid into my system yesterday and heard how much more air and vocal separation it gave to yet another CD--"Utopia Triumphans," an anthology of choral pieces by various composers performed by the Huelgas-Ensemble.

With orchestral music, the Orchid was especially good with Beethoven's "Eroica" performed by the Cleveland Symphony, conducted by Dohnanyi. From the first timpani strikes and then throughout the first movement, the Orchid was wonderfully dynamic, speedy, and detailed. And the most pleasing thing of all was it handled string attack transients terrifically, bringout out the pulses of string phrasing as the violin sections quietly "strike" their own notes in response to the energy of the timpani. Only two other cables I've tried captured this exciting effect--the Atlas Titan from Scotland and the van den Hul the Second XLR. Other cables, as good as they are, don't quite reproduce the suddenness of the violin phrasing, those shuddering attack transients and correspondingly sudden silences between phrases. Beethoven's symphony is written as if the violin section was a regimental detachment of light cavalry--quick to strike and even quicker in getaway. The Orchid captures this.

The Orchid is also fabulous with operatic voices, particularly lyric sopranos like Renee Fleming and Anna Netrebko and dark, lyric tenors like Rolando Villazon. While a very few select cables can reproduce the general tessitura of a lyric aria (the Orchid easily among them), the big, fat virtuosic moments of rangey dynamic and treble peaks of dramatic arias can overwhelm the capabilities of most. Rare too is the cable that can render subtly complex pianissimo passages with fine, note to note nuance. The Orchid sailed through the entire scale of a variety of vocal performances without the treble hardness, upper register glass, or tenor blattiness other cables are prone to reproduce when called on by operatic majesty. And, with the ones that do succeed in representing a full operatic range, they mainly do so by softening attack transients and rolling off the top. In the Orchid, I could hear none of the lively transient sounds rounded off or the upper registers overly smoothed in order to better capture the bigger vocal dynamics--there is no sacrifice of vocal evanescence and pure presence. Again, as I said about the Orchid's performance with choral music, there's an unusual degree of robustness and brio combined with detail, finesse, and refinement here.

In my search for equipment to handle the range of music I listen to, it's been very difficult to find any one piece in any category that can handle energetic symphonies, the beautifully lyric and the powerfully virtuosic operatic arias, and Renaissance choral music full of complex treble harmonies, delicate tones and phrasing. This is the one cable I've auditioned that delivers most completely across the broad spectrum of my listening. In short, the Orchid is aptly named--bold and delicate both. It's now become my reference interconnect.

Associated gear
Cary SLI-80 integrated amplifier;
Cal Audio Labs CL-15 CDP;
Lector 0.6T CDP;
Shunyata Diamondback PC (CDP);
PS Audio Plus PC (amp);
Audience Au24 speaker cables (2.5m);
Sonus Faber Grand Piano speakers.

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