Jim Merod
Kubala-Sosna Realization Series of Cables
For fifteen years or so I've considered Kubala-Sosna's Emotion to be the de facto "go to" audio reference cables for both sheer musical delight as well as recording and mastering work. Their tonal clarity—transparent without being dry; rich yet avoiding coloration—was a revelation. Never, in the many years I'd used various cables in my recording work, had I discovered any so vivid and simultaneously relaxed. They delivered audio signals, from microphone feeds to tape and digital capture, with sonic precision and ambient truthfulness. The Emotion wire was that startling companion every recording person seeks, especially in classical and jazz domains: "real" sound recovered in the actual holographic spatial environment in which it took place.
I still consider those cables uniquely musically rewarding and truly delightful. Although, by definition, no one can imagine or fully grasp sonic enhancements before they occur, I remember thinking on several occasions that the likelihood of significant enhancement to those cables was slim to diminishing.
Of course the paucity of my imagination left me stranded in the desert of my inadequate foresight... nine years ago I was given an extended opportunity to use several sets of the new K-S top-of-the-line cables, Elation. My anticipation was unusually acute. I literally did not what to expect. How could cables as seemingly transcendent as the Elations be outdone?
I have no technical insight to frame the sonic enhancement that the Elations brought to bear, but I have been at once amazed and deeply appreciative that the understated promise their introduction to the audio world implied was not merely fulfilled, but accomplished with incarnate proof that the old (nearly mystical) adage, "less is more," is a profound fact. As if demonstrating that "good" can be "better," that "the best" is vulnerable to "much better," Elation cables presented audio signals with greater nakedness. Music recorded with them—and played back afterward—was more immediately alive, detailed, self-evidently lyric in all the ways that "live music" reveals: rhythmic force, pace and pulse given greater presence; the whole of the sonic spectrum more convincingly revealed with far greater relaxed haptic allure.
I believe most audiophiles who do not erode their love of musical reproduction with fuzzy generalities recognize that music is very difficult to talk and write about. The great guitarist, Kenny Burrell, many years ago mentioned (almost in passing) to me that any attempt to "define" the inmost essence of, say, a Beethoven late quartet or Bach chorale is futile. No less, any attempt to fully grasp in words the numinous, fleeting presence of sound is equally stymied.
Was it Corbusier who once asserted that writing about sound and music is akin to dancing about architecture?
My reminder that the elementary provenance of music and its seductive sonic appeal resides in a vastly non-verbal territory that our best attempts to overcome fall far short, often sadly failing altogether. The best we can do as lovers of music, gratefully indulging the magic of sonic delight, is to say what we can... to say, to the best of our abilities, what can be said with credible discernment.
And so it is that my twice amazed ears (and heart and mind), surprised with delight and appreciation by, first, Emotion and, then, Elation cables now find themselves crossing a familiar yet not wholly explicable Rubicon. For six months or so I've auditioned the newest top-of-the-heap Kubala-Sosna cables, Realization. On one hand, I must admit the re-appearance of audio surprise, pleasantly, profoundly invading my musical wakefulness. On another paw, I now no longer feel competent to fully engage either how that ephemeral gambit—less is more—once again stands tall, as if to admonish my humble reach toward explication, at the same time putting un-indelibly before me a new audio and musical universe.
While I attempt to find appropriately accurate terms to indicate what, to me, is essentially an artistic miracle, I'll indicate only this bare and brutally adorable (in fact, erotic) sonic revelation: I have heard one hell of lot of live music over the past sixty-plus years. At my moment did I believe that great audio gear would ever, with any sort of instrumentation, recorded and/or reproduced, bring my alert witness to a soundstage anywhere that virtually delivers the full reality of live sound, live music, the immediacy of its actual performative ambience. That has now occurred with multiple sets of REALIZATION cables delivering those mind-boggling values.
It is without any degree of hesitation or uncertainty that put these cables forward as my Audio Product of an otherwise somewhat dreary year. My recommendation here comes with a caveat. Once these cables are installed in a superior sound system, the one who does just that may regret the inability to stand up, to tear away from sound and music so utterly real and seductive. Such a fate is a blessing. One is, under such duress, lifted to a transformative place of emotional, perversely beautiful, musical engagement that Dante, alone, offers at the end of his journey through hell, purgatory and paradise:
OF DANTE'S WITNESS
The brilliant pilgrim came back
from wordless height to speak
what he saw, say what defied
his ears' astonished bliss.
Unlike him traversing
Florence to imagine God's
unending light, I hold my earth-
bound mind's safe keeping
secure wondering what I hear
as he, too, pondered radiance
unknown, music tempting
God to flee its glory.
