As noted earlier, my listening sessions with the Equinox 6 IC's linking my Oppo digital source to the C-J line stage and the line stage to the C-J amp prompted me to pop for two more pairs so I could "Wireworld" the Graham Slee Era Gold V MM phono stage and McIntosh MR77 FM tuner to the line stage. When those cables arrived, I subjected them to FM interstation noise and sweep tones with some occasional real FM and CD listening during about 100 hours of primarily bedroom-system burn-in.
All critical listening was done with them wired up in the main system as shown below. In the foreground at photo center are the line stage phono, tuner, and CD input WW cables. The green interloper is the Comcast Motorola cable box Tara IC feed. (Note that the tonearm-to-phono stage link is the original Mogami IC supplied with the Profile/Jelco arm.) Speaker cable (the white and black wires emerging from a gray jacket below the input IC's) is Blue Jeans-sourced Belden 5T00UP 10-gauge with ultrasonic-welded banana plug terminations.
In one respect it was easy to hear (and, yes, see) a difference between the Kimber Silver Streak silver-copper hybrid originally feeding the MR77's output and the Equinox 6 that replaced it. The Kimber was at least 3db more efficient--the digital-readout C-J Premier 17LS's fixed-resistor ladder volume control increments and decrements in approximately 0.7db steps, so by viewing the readout I could see the approximate difference in line stage output to achieve an equivalent listening level with the two cables. I attribute the perceived efficiency difference to the silver in the Kimber hybrid.
Determining the sonic quality difference with FM is trickier because the source material is not a repeatable datum like home-based CD/SACD or vinyl playback. But leave it to my wife: "It's clearer, more distinct, and I can hear more of what they're playing in the background." She was referring to the MR77's output with the Equinoxes connected. And what she picked up on was...the quiet, a lower noise floor akin to what I'd heard during earlier outings with the Oppo through MF2500 WW linkage. (I should note that she doesn't say things like that to please me. When I DIY'd some speakers in the early '80's, she'd let me know with unalloyed directness when she thought I'd gotten the crossover wrong--and she was invariably right. Nothing's changed in the 30 years since.)
Moral: When someone insists that conductivity is the sole determinant of sonic quality when it comes to cables, do your best to be polite.
With vinyl playback the sonic difference was apparent right off the bat. Prior to the WW's, I'd used, in succession, Kimber Silver Streak, Tara, and Vampire-terminated JSC IC's from the Graham Slee to the 17LS. I'll keep it simple: None of those has made me appreciate anywhere near as much the musical sensibilities of the producers and engineers of the French and British EMI's, British Deccas, RCA Living Stereos, Mercuries, Vanguards, Lyritas, early Everests, certain Reprises, and, yes, even some Columbias as the Equinox 6's do. These cables allow more of what was captured by the mikes and emerged from the mixing consoles to flow to my Paradigms. All of the detailed comments I made in my earlier review about tonal, rhythmic, and dynamics characteristics discernible in the digital-source-to-amp stream with the WW's in place apply here as well. (Of course now I have to wonder about what adding an Equinox 6 tonearm cable to the mix would achieve.)
Formidable. And I'm not even taking price into consideration.