Shunyata speaker cables

I owned Magenpans (3.6R) for about 10 years and found that Shunyata speaker cables were a very good match for them.  Back then it was the original Alpha and I was using a McCormack DNA500 amp.  The X series should be even better.  Contact the Cable Company and arrange for a borrow and try them!

@jwpstayman Thanks, did you by chance compare them to any other cables? Would you describe them as warm, bright, lean, neutral or…..?

I’m in Sweden so unfortunately I can’t use the Cable Company’s excellent lending library.

I listen to the Shunyata Theta a couple of months ago. I currently have Nordost Tyr 2, and Valhalla. The Shunyata has a tiny bit more fullness to its sound, but the Nordost is noticeably more transparent. And I’ve had both Nordost and Shunyata since 2003 and typically I upgrade as newer models come out.

When I see people saying there is no difference in cables, I now want to ask them two questions. 
1), what kind of music do you listen to?

2), Do you play any musical instruments?

My general experience is that the people who say that cables don’t make a difference, listen to a lot of highly engineered music (e g. Rock, pop, and a heck of a lot of other genres) and are not listening for tonal quality and don’t know what it sounds like when it’s correct. so if they heard a Yamaha flute with their preferred cabling, it wouldn’t sound any different to them than listening to Gemeinhardt flute. even some very exalted Audio equipment . over the past 30 years, but especially in the 1980s and 1990s, did not reproduce tonal quality correctly. And I’m talking about lines like Audio Research, Conrad Johnson and Goldmund, which were at the very top of the Audio pyramid. Conrad Johnson was the best of the three, but I haven’t owned any of their equipment since 2015. I had an Audio Research integrated app until three years ago, and it was a hybrid, and I always found it a little bleached tonally. 

So a subjective opinion, without an intimate acquaintanceship of non-amplified acoustic instruments, it’s less valuable than a musician who knows different brands of instruments and knows which recordings reproduce them correctly. 

So,  when people start making suggestions, you might wanna ask those questions. It’s not that opinions don’t matter, but I certainly would differentiate between somebody who’s just learning to ice skate and someone at the level of Alyssa Liu. It is not a matter of "completely wrong/completely right," as much as it is familiarity with the "absolute," which is acoustic instruments, which is what designers compare their products to. At least, the top ones did 30-50 years ago. Can’t speak to what people use to determine "accuracy" now. And "warmer" does not mean closer to reality; Shunyata had the CX line, which made everything sound pretty, but not accurate. Hence, the ZiTron line and then newer lines.

I listen to the Shunyata Theta a couple of months ago. I currently have Nordost Tyr 2, and Valhalla. The Shunyata has a tiny bit more fullness to its sound, but the Nordost is noticeably more transparent. And I’ve had both Nordost and Shunyata since 2003 and typically I upgrade as newer models come out.
 

@gbmcleod  Thanks, So the Tyr2 is leaner sounding than the Theta 🤔 I wonder how much better the Alpha X would be.
A couple of years ago I tried Alpha v2 XLR cables between my Esoteric and Diablo 300 but found them a bit lean and analytical sounding. Never tried Shunyata speaker cables but when I had Nordost Frey2 on loan I did not find them lean, thin or bright sounding. Tyr2 is twice the price of the Frey2, and my upper limit, but perhaps they are worth the money and who knows, even close to the Valhalla 🤗

btw, I wonder when Nordost will release Norse 3 🤔

@swede58 I have always found Shunyata’s Alpha line to sound leaner, no matter what generation. And I’ve also had the Sigma, as I’ve said in previous posts. The Sigma is noticeably more filled in in the upper bass/lower midrange than the Alpha lines. I found the lack of upper bass bothersome.

I might not have noticed the leanness in the Nordost had I not had MIT cables from the ’80s and ’90s, and then Transparent MM cables (from 2006). I find it easier to hear the ’leanness’ in cable by listening to cello recordings, which have a great deal of their sound in the upper bass/lower midrange frequencies. I couldn’t hear it easily on pop recordings, unless the singer’s voice was in those frequencies (Frank Sinatra comes to mind) and I would notice a loss of that by how articulate and full his ’throat tone’ came through. If one is not using the right type of recordings, it’s easy to miss. Obviously, a cello recording made by certain record companies (my go-to record company is Mercury Living Presence) will show up the loss in ’fullness’ quite immediately. I wouldn’t immediately have though Nordost’s Valhalla was ’lean’ but I did notice a lack of ’weight’ in the sound compared to the Shunyata Andromeda (final version) speaker cable of 2003, which had considerable ’body’ in that range. Double basses were powerful and dynamically more authentic in Shunyata. 

Also, peoples’ stereo systems count, too. If  I was playing my VPI Classic turntable (2014), I would notice the leanness in the bass, but if I was playing my Nottingham turntable - itself full in the bass regions - I wouldn’t notice it. So, any of our stereo system could be masking, or, better put - compensating - for a weakness somewhere else in our system. Hearing not-so-obvious differences takes a lot of concentrated work, otherwise reviewing components would be easy.

Now, I did clearly hear the difference between the Frey 1 and Frey 2 line when i bought it, and part of that difference was that the Frey 2 was ’fuller’ in sound, plus I still had the Frey 1 on hand for comparison. And, fortunately, I had Nordost, Shunyata and Goertz cables simultaneously, so it was easier to hear the differences in the cables.  Nordost was always the least "rich-sounding" of the three, although, the transparency was so stellar, I could (and did, for a while)  overlook what wasn’t there.