I have been to Synergistic and have known one of their golden ears, Elliot, since I spent my entire early separation check from the service on a pair of Maggie 3.0s. 20 plus years ago, come to think of it. So perhaps I can shed a little light on their operation, and indeed smaller boutigue businesses in general, as many boutique businesses are my customers. Because of the small quantity sold, there are generally only a couple of people totally knowledgeable about the product and everything it does, generally the owner and a righthand man. The other people are hired to do things the owner can't or won't.. ie accounting, reception, shipping, repair, mfr, qa etc. There is no room in the profit margin for a battery of customer service specialists that can speak to lifelong audiophiles coherently, with experience behind them. Call many of the high end mfrs, and you get the president, who is the one with the vision afterall, and in high end hifi, generally the lead designer, Conrad Johnson, Hales, Ayre, etc. They good thing about this is that you get right to the source if they are available, something that would never happen with say, Sony. You will never talk to anybody that had anything remotely to do with the design and theory at a large company The bad news is if there is a trade show, a web to design, checks to sign, or any other president duty to do, then you cannot talk to the driving force. And although the price is high for these and other cables, we are talking handmade, burnt-in, tweaked and re-tweaked and listening and re=listening. Synergistic has, for the size of the operation a very respectable listening room, with all kinds of components to substitute. Nobody but Elliot and Ted probably know everything about the cables, which is at least one more person than many small companies have. There may be more, but those are both savvy, golden eared audio guys. I have found email often works best at smaller companies, the presidents will almost always get back with you.
Now let me tell you what most impressed me. I borrowed a pair of speaker wires, for free, from them. No credit card required, no check, nothing. Because of some type of impedence mismatch or oscillation problem with the amps, my amps blew up.... $75,000 amps. When I called the dealer, he immediately freaked, "what did you do, did you move the wires with the amps on?, did you short the wires, etc. " trying to pass blame from minute one. When I called Elliot at Synergistic, he just said that he would help where he could, didn't know why those wires would do that, but of course, if there was a problem caused by Synergistic, they would take care of it. Now as it turned out, it was just internal fuses, and amps going into oscillation, depending on the design of the cable, can happen. But how many people who let you BORROW a cable tell you they will do what's right with a 75000 dollar pair of anything? In my experience, only Synergistic. Did I ultimately buy the cables? No, in my system and how I used them, I found a different set a better match. After a long trial, and some waffling I might add. Maybe if I had them set it up completely with Synergistic, it would have been the better choice. That is the recommended configuration from them. I have used Synergistic for many apps over the years, and their balanced Relspec cable is da bomb. But because of that response, anytime I want a new cable, I know who I am calling first. Every time. The guy who says "we'll make it right".
Cheers
Chris
