[Puma Cat]

I rented some Shunyata Venom and Delta RCA interconnects about a month or so ago, back when I first posted about my experiences with the new Shunyata Alpha USB cable.

I wanted to try the Shunyata Venom and Delta ever since I bought a Venom SPDIF cable to use with my Schiit Eitr, back in 2017, and I was quite impressed with it.

So, I wanted to see how the interconnects would fare.

My current cables are a mix of Audioquest Columbia and Colorado. I currently have Columbia on the Bob's Devices SUT to the phono stage and between the EAR 324 phono stage and the CJ CT-5 pre-amp.

AQ Colorado is currently between my Schiit Gungnir Multibit Gen5 USB DAC and pre and between the pre and CJ LP70S power amp.

For this test, though, I ran each pair of cables under test using the two RCA outputs of Gumby; these are identical outputs, and I just ran them into the Tuner and CD inputs of the CT-5, respectively. This allowed me to make identical and effectively instantaneous comparisons between the cables under review at push of a button the remote.

Music was a range of content, from Melody Gardot's The Absence, Antonio Forcione's Touch Wood, Grant Green's Idle Moments, Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue, Rodrigo Y Garbriela's eponymous Rodrigo Y Garbriela, Ella Fitzgerald's Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie, Sarah Vaughan's eponymous Sarah Vaughan (with Clifford Brown), Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Ella and Louis, Vol.1, and The Academy of St-Martin-In-The-Fields seminal recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons on Argo with the astonishing Alan Loveday on violin.

Overall, lest I run the risk of ruffling anyone's feathers with respect to brand loyalty, let me say right off the bat that these are all very fine and lovely-sounding interconnects. I've been running the AQ Columbia and Colorado ICs in my system since 2014 or thereabouts and have been very happy with them, and I am presently still using them. They were a major step up over the Zu Mission ICs I was originally using.

The Audioquest Columbia and Colorado are now both discontinued models, having been replaced with Audioquest Water and Earth, respectively, as far as I can determine. While they were in production, Columbia sold at an MSRP of $500 and Colorado sold for ~$900 or so for a 1 M pair of RCAs.

The Shunyata Venom I tested sells for ~$350, and the Delta sells for ~$1000 for a 1M pair of RCAs.

When listening, I compared the Columbia to Venom, Venom to Colorado, Venom to Delta and Colorado to Delta.

Overall, these are very high-quality, all copper interconnects are very close in sound quality to one another. For any "audiophile" sonic quality or attribute you'd care to list, they are all very, very similar in character to each other. They all sound musical, sweet, open, clean, spacious, and a quiet with a very slight warm-ish quality to them that makes listening to music very enjoyable. They are also all so close in these qualities, that picking out differences between them is not easy, and these differences are small, overall.

Where I heard differences, was not really "in the music" but between the music: the Shunyata Venom 3 was slightly quieter and "blacker" between notes and lyrics; the noise floor appeared to be just ever so slightly lower. AQ Colorado was then slightly quieter and "blacker" than the Shunyata Venom 3, and Shunyata Delta was slightly quieter and "blacker" than AQ Colorado.

I would say the differences between them, from AQ Columbia to Shunyata Delta are, at most, 10%, but on the whole and for the majority of the content, even less than 10%. When the these small differences were at their greatest, it was on only certain portions of certain musical content, which is why I used such a broad range of musical content for evaluation.

On the whole, though, I was quite hard-pressed to tell a difference between these cables. On some content, you literally could not hear any difference whatsoever, period. For content where you could hear a very slight difference between cables, I attribute this to those recordings having either superior miking, recording, and, most importantly, mastering, where the intrinsic noise floor of the recording was lower so that it allowed for some discernment on differences.

Soncially speaking, I would say that Shunyata Venom gave maybe 2-3% more "quietness" and "blackness" than AQ Columbia, Colorado gave maybe 2% more than Shunyata Venom and Shunyata Delta provided maybe 2-3% over AQ Colorado. And that's it.

I would think that the Shunyata cables were ever so slightly quieter than the AQ cable counterparts because they represent a newer product design and likely a more advanced design embodiment with respect to control over noise and concomitant maximizing of the recording signal. But, again, we're talkin' differences of a few percent, here.

As far as value for money here, given the "law of diminishing returns" corollary in high-end audio, the big value proposition here is Shunayata Venom. At $350/1M RCA, Venom is 30% lower in price than the discontinued AQ Columbia when it was in production, and very slightly quieter & blacker with respect to the noise floor. Its also 42% less than the current Audioquest Water (which, with its 6-layer noise dissipation system, might be a skosh quieter than Columbia; I have no idea how it compares to Venom, so please don't ask).

AQ Colorado and Shunyata Delta are both fine cables, and a subtle but real step up from Columbia and Venom. If price were not a consideration, I would get the Shunayta Delta, which is the cable I kept switching back to when it was in the system and I was just listening to music, and not doing "evaluations". As with all Shunyata products, as you move up the product line, you just get more and more Shunyata "goodness".

As for which cable I prefer between AQ Columbia and Shunyata Venom, I'd have to say that their respective audio qualities are so close, there is very little to choose between them, sonically. However: the Venom, for my components (YMMV), has superior RCA connectors, and grip the CJ RCA jacks more firmly than the Columbia/Colorado RCA plugs. Also, the Venom is more flexible than Columbia or Colorado, and does not have the DBS "bricks" on them, so they are also quite a bit easier to route and dress behind the audio rack. And, as I mentioned, with respect to for value for money for new cables, Venom wins hands-down, in my book.

For $350 you can have an IC that can compare very favorably with an interconnect selling originally for almost $1000.

Wrapping up: I did this performance evaluation to see, based on my experiences with Shunyata's interconnects, if I should "upgrade" to from AQ to Shunyata. The answer, like most things, is context-dependent. I don't see any reason, at this point in time, to switch out my entire IC loom. That being said, I've ordered a Venom RCA IC to run from my Bob's Devices SUT to my preamp as routing it will be simpler and much easier than dealing with the DBS bricks. With time, I may switch over to Shunyata Venom, piecemeal. If I can get find or get good deals on Shunyata Delta RCAs over time, I may snag a couple of those as my discretionary audio budget allows, but, after this experiment, replacing my ICs is not as high a priority as determining which Ethernet cables I want to settle on, or perhaps getting a Zen Innuous Mk3 Mini music streamer.

If I were putting together a system from scratch however, I'd be getting all Shunyata Venom RCA ICs, as these represent a superb value for money.

Cheers, gang.