Interlude

Over the next few days - five days in all, actually - I've got to ask my visitors to bear with me as I catch up on listening to a few records in my collection. It's been a long while since I cleaned my dirty old records because I've been busy listening a lot to those albums that I had cleaned previously, and also to the compact discs. You see, I've finally come to accept that it is not enough to have a good stereo hardware system. It is also important to be equipped with decent speaker cables or otherwise, the sound will still suck.

I took up my friend Eric's suggestion to buy a length of QED Micro High Technology speaker cables quite a while back but it wasn't until he loaned me the Belden Indoor/Outdoor Oxygen Free Low Cap Brilliance speaker cables that my system began to sing. Then another friend Long Kin lent me his Audioquest FLX/X-16/2 Long Grain copper speaker cables recently and the mist lifted from my eyes. I had been trying various permutations of the three speaker cables and can verify that I heard subtle differences with all four combinations.

So, after having enjoyed listening to my CD and cleaned-up record collections, it's back to cleaning those dirty old ones to put on the turntable. Bear with me for the next few days, okay?