Executive Summary: Cole Porter could have written this review. With three words.
Background: Until two weeks ago, our desktop-computer-equipped home-office system was the only rig capable of playing CD rips and downloaded high-resolution files. Some weeks earlier, I’d won a pair of eBay-auctioned, customer-returned Paradigm Studio 20 v.5s (which I promptly upgraded with a set of Wireworld Eclipse 7 jumpers—cue an appreciative they’re-well-worth-it nod to Ivan). They took up residence in the office, replacing a pair of Paradigm SE-1s that I shunted off to the bedroom. The only problem was that, in listening terms, the office is a cramped, furniture-stuffed sardine can, and the Studio 20s had no real room to breathe.
Although the bedroom presents its own acoustics challenges owing to furniture placement, foot traffic patterns, and an abundance of reflective-framed wall prints, it has more “breathable” space. So I moved the 20s there onto DIY’d sand-filled stands and returned the SE-1s to the office.
At that point, the bedroom system’s sole program source was an FM tuner dialed most often to a listener-supported 24/7 classical music station. To add more programming variety, I decided to add computer audio to the source mix, using my Windows 10 laptop as the launch platform. Which meant having to win another eBay auction, this time for another TEAC UD-501 DSD/DXD-capable DAC. The DAC arrived with a stock USB cable.
Listening to rips and hi-rez downloads via the stock cable hinted that I’d made the right move in relocating the Studio 20s. But an unyielding wooliness overlaying the sonic presentation caused Peggy Lee to jump inside my head and nag incessantly, “Is That All There Is?”
Based on my positive experience with a Wireworld Starlight USB cable in the home-office system, I ordered a Silver Starlight 7 from Ivan. I installed it as soon as it arrived early Monday afternoon and gave it time to settle with an assortment of rips and downloads for about five hours before I camped on the bed for a serious listen. But even before I got to “serious” I noticed a dramatic drop in the noise floor. Good things to come, I thought. I couldn’t imagine just how good.
Listening Test: I threw a wide variety of classical, jazz, vocal, choral, and film-score program ranging in format from 16/44 rips to DSD128 and DXD downloads at the rig. Even with the host of speaker-boundary interference and reflective impediments evident in the bedroom, the Silver Starlight ate the stock USB cable’s lunch—and then gulped down its dinner.
Michael Tilson Thomas’ DSD64 reading of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony with the San Francisco Symphony is a case in point. As with much of Mahler’s symphonic output, the Third offers a rich palette of tonal color, dynamic contrasts that range from mass-destruction explosiveness to delicate filigree, and a healthy dose of complex inner-voice writing that with the wrong miking or mediocre playback equipment can easily get lost in the mix. With even the stock cable in place, I got the sense that the SFSO production-and-engineering crew got the miking and mixing right. But substituting the Silver Starlight shed a woolly overlay that had muted dynamics and the “pow” factor, obliterated subtle instrumental and spatial detail, and rendered instrumental and vocal color an “almost” that didn’t quite count in horseshoes. With the Silver, the Third came you-are-there alive and the performing space expansive and reach-into tactile.
My outing with the Mahler Third illustrates my experience with a variety of program that I’ve auditioned since with the Silver Starlight in place. And I’d make the point that the cable’s ability to “free up” detail previously masked does not render the sonic presentation—be it Mahler or Nat Cole or the Johan Dielemanns Trio--“clinical.” Far from it. There’s far more organic feel and flow evident with the Silver connected.
As Cole Porter would put it, it’s “night and day.”