Anyone inclined to follow sound and its glorious frustration throughout the course of a lifetime's leisure ought to note, at some point, that the amount of time spent yanking cables in and out of various holes takes a considerable chunk from life's waking pleasure. Not that I'm complaining here, but that fact is (in truth) a genuine fact and a decently self-conscious person might notice such things because, after all, how you spend your time determines who you are.

Take my former neighbor, Doonbuggy Hogan, for example. He spent all of his youth chasing girls, most of his early adulthood playing golf and, now that he's old and somewhat rickety, he can't figure out why he's so bored with himself as he finds that self confined to a wheelchair. I doubt Doon was ever likely to be a scholar of the Civil War. Or a Beethoven or Bruckner connoisseur. But it's clear to me that such misapplied energy throughout the whole of his life leaves him somewhat high and dry now that he's got nothing but time on his hands.

And that's what leads me to mention this drag on our time that cable swapping portends. Perhaps for us audiophiles there's a lesson in Doonbuggy's dead wall stare, that vacant look in his eyes when you walk into his den and find him zoned out like a late-night test pattern. Maybe no audio guru I know will ever experience the massive annulment of spirit I find poor Doonbuggy up against. But this cable swapping tug on our leisure is a tweak in the old rump any way you calculate it. Especially if you add time squandered swapping gear in and out of shelves—out and in, now that I think about it, since you've got to get the piece of equipment that's already on the shelf removed ("out") before you can replace it with one that goes in.

Nonetheless, in or out being first in line, the fact is that audiophiles are both gluttons for self-inflicted punishment, because they endure a perpetually misplaced quest for the sound of a Holy Grail, as well as patience beyond the normal guy's ordinary temper. Come to think of it, maybe their quest is a Holy Grail search. Wait. Is it a quest for the Grail or a grail-like quest for sound that, itself, is the "holy grail"?

Hell, I don't know, but I think you get the point here. Audiophiles really go to extraordinary lengths to max out their sound reproduction adventures. And that takes considerable time at home, in your listening room, messing around with gear and cables. And then, away from the ranch, you've got all that schlepping from store to store. Or scouring through the web looking for bargains. You've got to locate your new gear. Often you have to go get it, new or used, either way. No matter how you add it all up, there's a lot of time whizzed right down the drain in the total pursuit of a totally great soundstage experience. Just so you can relax in style with whatever time is left over after all that.

We all do it. You're no more astute than the next guy, even if you may have better means to rationalize your misdirected zeal. Poor old Doon can't much rationalize anymore. His dead-stare reverie seems fixed more or less forever on straight ahead, directly in front, as if he were looking at a very small, eensie, teensie, tiny dot somewhere up ahead of him. He just can't seem to get it into focus.

 

Potential Solution

If you don't do as much swapping out and in, you'll get ahead of the game. You'll own more of your own time. You'll get your attention back in the saddle where you can ride it where you want.

We may be onto something here. How can we make such a radical alteration in our listening, tweaking, swapping, and maxing out habits? Is it really possible? "The world is all that is the case." Wittgenstein. Remember him?

I didn't think so. At any rate, you remember this. The sound of birds chirping on a bright spring morning, you jumping out of the hay with a special flair that holds your heightened mood within. And coffee, fresh brewed, wafting over you. Your new copy of Huck Finn calling to your attention. All of this, even as you listen, with perfect subtlety and grandeur, to Steely Dan or Lady Day or Yo-Yo Ma.

Ah, ha! You've found them. Robert Lee's new "Double Barrel" speaker cables. The sound of one hand clapping (I've been reading old issues of On Sound and Music).

If morning coffee smells better and the birds are chirping brighter, your spring more adolescent than geriatric, it's quite possible—audio dork that you are—you've stumbled onto the newest speaker cable creation from that wily ol' fox of a character, Roberto Gargantua Lee (RGL, to his friends)—a man who seems not to sleep very much.

We've reviewed Lee's concoctions before in these (cyber) pages and we've commented on his inclination toward secrecy and stealthy brilliance. His new cable design sustains such a reputation. It is, to these ears, by far the best speaker cable Lee has ever crafted. The "Double Barrel" cables are knocking on the door of the beyond-the-bend, all-carbon (way-expensive), top-of-the-line van den Hul speaker cables that, for me, represent the "holy" part of the tormented search for some kind of grail.

Let's mark down "Double Barrel" attributes. I've spent five months breaking these cables in, enduring their beauty from the get-go, listening to their enlarging, deepening sound stage, and wondering where the slow increase of tonal purity and dead-on harmonic coherence would stop. The damn things kept changing, always better, slightly better… improving already fantastic sound reproduction by the slightest increments that crept onward, me agape to observe their maturation.

Finally, wham! They appeared to lock in and stabilize and I began to settle in to take notes. First a footnote in advance. For all the joy of such activity—and it is joyful, despite the gripe above about painstaking swapping and time-consuming attention giving—there is a degree of honest work and steadfast effort that goes into sincere cable listening and comparison. Several times, as these cable inched their way cross their own journey toward an earthly nirvana, I wanted the maturation process to be done. Finished. Just let me sit back, sip a single malt quietly, and jot down notes that inch their own way back toward the truth of the sonic signals offered.

Nope. Not gonna happen on cue. I found resolve and patience and walked away, notepad unscribbled-on atop my chair's side table. When the evening showed up, when it seemed more-or-less true that the "Double Barrel" had arrived in spades, I was not in the mood to dig in. Another bummer. Phones. Tasks. A less-than-optimum mood to boot.

Soon after, I had the moment within reach and took the bloody phone off its cradle. These cables wanted to brag on themselves. I was willing to listen to these bi-wireable twin hoses that are neither inconsiderable in their girth nor inconsiderate to your listening pleasure.

 
A Ten-Round Victory

I've listen closely to previous iterations of Robert Lee's speaker cable designs. There's not been a bad apple in the lot, the "Double Barrel" no exception. But a curious quality dogs the path of Lee's speaker cables, creating a "sonic signature," as it were—wholly useful, in no way detractive, "additive," intrusive, or in any other way defiling or disrupting of the essential accuracy that his cable design philosophy seeks. This signature quality is the remarkable mid-range accuracy that Acoustic Zen cables, by and large, always achieve. There are degrees of such. One or two other cable designers have a deep understanding of this region, none more that Robert Lee. One might quibble and squabble at length about instances of a slight degree "more" of this (say, a specifically authoritative capture of a grand piano's middle C region) or "less" of that (a lack of glare in the usual places where a less-noble cable stumbles into trouble, say around 6.5 kHz). But none of those dicings and slicings will get at a yet more important sonic quality, without which a speaker or interconnect cable is reduced to just one more near-miss.

Roberto Gargantua Lee—the "Gargantua" middle part being a nickname only his nearest friends and one family member utter—has an enormous grasp of the essential coherence of the entire sonic spectrum... a breadth of tonal differentiation that defies the ability of most speakers to reproduce it fully, accurately, and wholly integrated. That understanding of sonic coherence, of course, rests upon a genuine insight into the various ways that "middle C" exerts itself and is not always the "same" middle C.

Let me amplify. You cannot record or reproduce the heart of music, which always resides within the broad sonic mid-region (from roughly 200 Hz through 2.5 kHz, and possibly higher), unless you know what the different timbres of various instruments "do" to each section of the sonic mid-bandwidth. In sum, a Yamaha grand piano is tuned altogether different than a Steinway grand piano. Pianists (good ones) know this with their waking consciousness, know it from the bottom of their feet all the way to their scalps. It's not that the ear does not recognize middle C to be, in fact, middle C on each of those two pianos. It does. Or should. But the way in which each piano is set up: its sound board—the foundation for any piano's fundamental tones and sonic "voice"—determines the way in which it articulates the timbral complexity of middle C and each sonic region of its whole reproductive force.

Robert Lee seems both to hear and to know all this. He seems able to identify as well as intuit overlapping timbral shades that create middle C in a variety of ways. That sonic insight leads Lee to a remarkable ability to "tune" his cables so that they own (or achieve) sonic coherence in each region of the audible sonic spectrum.

None of this is obvious. When you listen to a good many quite-fine cables, you hear that, for certain, this knack for timbral accuracy is not at all obvious to a good many other designers who work hard and accomplish quite a lot. In Lee's previous speaker cable designs, including the splendid "Hologram" series, his speaker cables had the slight tendency to allow the 6.5 kHz to 12 kHz region to exert itself a touch more affirmatively than the utmost degree of accuracy would warrant. The "Double Barrel" has not only overcome that wee degree of emphasis; it has reached down to integrate the lower mid sonic region with the upper bottom octaves—that difficult-to-bond sonic region that occurs right at or near 200 Hz.

Thus, the "Double Barrel" speaker cable extends the range of sonic and musical coherence in the already superior (at times magical) Acoustic Zen line of cables. Thus, for someone urgent to reclaim more of his too-easily squandered time, choosing the "Double Barrel" cable might be part of a set of choices to find excellent gear, put it in harness, listen attentively but always with deep pleasure... and then let that sound system alone to do its seductive duty.

One ought to (somehow) find the strategic means to scope out and then nail great gear, at whatever price point one's budget allows, so that one's system can be trusted to drive itself—leaving you, hands free, uncluttered by mindless swappings out and in, to sit back enjoyably. Delightedly.

Of the two or three speaker cables I've heard, at any price in any system, that I've found myself both enchanted and instructed by (simultaneously), Acoustic Zen's "Double Barrel" is one of such scarce company. I am not saying that Roberto G. Lee is done with his search for the holy grail he seems dedicated to pursuing. I'm not saying that this is the very best of the very best. I'm not sure I can assert such a champion. But I am saying that, until Lee accomplishes yet another mini-miracle—or Dave Magnan, or the folks at Nordost, or Serguei Timachev, or the gang at van den Hul, take the speaker cable art to a new level once again—the "Double Barrel" sits before your hungry ears and weary self as a finalist for permanent attention. It's good. It's very good and better than that.

Unlike Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy, fifty years ago, collapsed from the world of prize fighting into drudge work on the waterfront, the "Double Barrel" is a genuine contender... for your aching heart and potentially less-taxed soul.
 

Specifications:

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