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Cable Asylum: REVIEW: Gabriel Gold Infusion Cable by budburma

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REVIEW: Gabriel Gold Infusion Cable

66.109.40.90


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Model: Infusion
Category: Cable
Suggested Retail Price: $2495
Description: Interconnect, 1m, single ended
Manufacturer URL: Not Available

Review by budburma on September 08, 2013 at 05:53:47
IP Address: 66.109.40.90
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for the Infusion


I swan! When I was a kid in the South, that’s what adults would exclaim or utter with a wide deliberate and worldly-wise grin while looking lightly toward the earth and knowingly shake their heads slowly from sided to side. Sometimes they would peek at you from under their open brow and smile with their eyes, too. They were avoiding the swear and expressing amazement, bemusement and understanding at the same time. Like they were in cahoots with you and shared your secrets while, at the same time, they still held both a deeper insight and broader, more detailed wisdom born of experience. But they put up with you, appreciating your insouciance and spirit with the unspoken expectation and hope that you would gain that same comfort and depth of understanding that only experience can bring.

The intricacy of that exchange is rife with detail. All made of gossamer and diaphanous impossible to define emotional connection and conversation. So arrived the Infusion cables from Gabriel Gold. All of that detail and communication was laying wait in my system? Only to be set free by the correct conduit? That seemed impossible, but it’s true! I swan! I ran into an audiophile friend this morning who was recalling with great joy how transformative the earlier GG cables, the Rapture R, were to his system. Man-o-man, you should hear what there is now!

The Infusions arrived Gabriel Gold in two forms, shielded and shielded. I started with the unshielded cable. The wire is packaged in gossamer white unassuming lightly weighted sleeves (with the expected quality GG construction and nice to handle tightening Rhodium coated Copper terminations). Out of this innocent enough appearing package leapt an astonishing soundscape. I was immediately astounded and almost bewildered by the amount of grainless inner detail that came bounding out of my system. I swan!

Not only were there new discoveries of content, but elaboration and delineation of old. The devil may be in the details, but this is a empyreal display of music with a capital M. All of the music is delivered in organic harmony with such a linear response and without specific emphasis, it’s hard to grasp why it seemed so immediate and exciting. There is such a musical presence and information conveyed through these cables it just IS that exciting. Plain and simple.

All of the deep listening space inhabited by a perfect sense of pace, macrodynamics, pitch perfect timbre, natural attacks and decays, and bible black background is festooned with preternatural amounts of detail, microdynamics and a soundstage that is nothing short of astounding. Lifelike widely spaced images are rendered on a stage that is wider than the wall of my room! Right through the open French doors into the dining room. And to be honest, while I have always been happy with deep stages in the past, I have never experienced one that extends both in front of my speakers as well as deep behind.

The bass is thunderously deep and effortlessly controlled, the midrange nothing but glory and the highs shimmering and clear without grain. Strings are clean and as engagingly expressive as originally played, string to string, pluck to pluck, caress to caress. It’s like you can feel the fingers on or bow drawn across the strings.

I love voices and refer to them, strings and horns in the same breath. Let’s just call them all vocals and the vocals through these Infusions are so sweet, balanced, and natural, I just melt with their nuanced substantive sonic certainty. The breath and the spittle, the minute timbre change at the end of a long held saxophone note, the trumpets staccato, the tremolo and strain. It’s all right there. Astounding…..I swan.

Then came the shielded version of the Infusions. A pure silver mesh of a shield, or so I am told. Rather than becoming larger, stiffer or ungainly, the package became smaller (!), almost diminutive. All the old aphorisms of the “don’t judge a book by its cover” and “big things come in small packages came” tumbling out of whatever box they are stored in all at once, fumbling over each other in a cacophony of chaos turned harmony to join me in my listening chair. I nearly leapt out of the chair, but was glued to the spot by pure musical delight and sheer astonishment. All the glorious characteristics of the unshielded version were further augmented. The slightest breath of softness around the solid images was magically made rounder and more three-dimensional, the already immense stage slightly expanded and the detail even further delineated. I could hear the individual beans inside a shaker. There were even more details within complex passages. The bass was even deeper and more controlled.

The defining characteristic of the Infusions for me is how well balanced they are musically. They are delicate yet assertive with the most organic presentation of extreme amounts of inner detail without being fatiguing at all. Balancing the preternatural with the natural. I am flummoxed by the fact that all that information was hiding in my system, just laying in wait. I always felt I had a detailed system, but had no idea just how much detail there was!

To say I love these cables belies the deep appreciation I have for the revelation they have caused for my listening experience. Maybe love is the right word….but it’s an inanimate object. Well, it breathed new life into my system and my listening. For me, that’s enough. I LOVE music and the power it has to transform. And, I am now closer to it. Infused with it! I am done. Stick a fork in me. I swan.

I listen to a very broad range of music except rap, techno, metal and just a little tech. I used various tunes for review that I am very familiar with and contain different passages for different purposes of critical listening mostly from Hayden, Wilco, Steve Earle, Dave Mathews, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ryan Adams, Iron and Wine, Sometimes Why, Bon Iver and The Be Good Tanyas. I love detail, depth, imaging, sound stage and musicality: an organic linear sound and response. A little warmth and bloom are ok, even desirable to some extent, but any sibilance or grain and my ears start to bleed.

I am buying two sets of the shielded versions and not looking back! They will to replace my GG Rapture R's and MG Audio Cu2's....


Product Weakness: none that i could discern
Product Strengths: see review.


Associated Equipment for this Review:

Amplifier: Plinius SA 201
Preamplifier (or None if Integrated): Klyne 7LX4.0
Sources (CDP/Turntable): AMR CD 77.1
Speakers: Dynaudio Confidence 3
Cables/Interconnects: see my system here
Music Used (Genre/Selections): see Review
Time Period/Length of Audition: 1 month
Other (Power Conditioner etc.): see my system here
Type of Audition/Review: Home Audition




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Topic - REVIEW: Gabriel Gold Infusion Cable - budburma 05:53:47 09/8/13 ( 6)