Let us not beat about the bush. These beautifully-fin- ished but, at £342 a metre, expensive DSS-4.1 speaker cables from Furutech are big. Really big. With an outer diameter of no less than 19mm, we’re talking bigness of towing-boats pro- portions. And they’re heavy.
Furutech has taken the humble outlet and run it through a gauntlet of refinement far beyond what most of us can imagine.
Performance-wise there’s no doubt that the Furutech removed a layer of low-level grunge from the Sonic window, reducing
noise across the soundstage. Like a Sonic dust cloth, images were more tangible and retrieved with greater clarity. While the
Furutech GTX is not cheap, its uncompromising quality and high performance make it seem like a small price to pay.
Cables have it rough. Last in thought, least in budget, forever to be put to work quickly, and then quickly overshadowed by flashier audio gear. When gushing about an audio system, who starts with the cables? Nobody ever, that’s who. Such neglect is a crying shame. Cables bear the precious audio signal like a yeoman’s cart dispatched by his ladyship. They’re the pack mules in the trip down the Grand Canyon; the Pontoon boat floating down the Mekon river. Without cables, your audio system deluxe is just odd-looking furniture. Cables deserve accolades, no matter how much contrary nonsense is spouted off by cynics. I deny the cable deniers!
It’s no secret that I like to tweak. In fact, I made a name for myself and built a huge following in my early writing career writing about such minutiae. My third paid audio writing gig (after folding the audio analyst© that I had founded in 1988), saw me at full throttle on that mission in the mid 1990s. In my three years at that online journal, aside from writing twenty-three hardware reviews, ten media reviews (music and film), and three musings on different subjects from the virtues of vinyl to demystifying the underlying technology and resultant sonic characteristics of different loudspeaker cable constructions, I also wrote thirty-five tweaking articles that appeared in a monthly column.
Marc Phillips has been doing music reviews for Positive Feedback for quite a while now. In the interest of full disclosure, he is also a distributor (Colleen Cardas Imports), and has a separate life selling fine audio gear. You’ll want to keep this in mind as you read his comments…but his evaluation dovetails exactly with my own take on the Furutech NCF Boosters. They are remarkable devices.
Furutech adds a third edition to the range – ideal for HDMI and USB cables
Not only do the NCF Boosters lift audio cables off the floor and enable optimum alignment between connectors and sockets, they also provide damping for both cables and connectors.
Japan… land of the rising HiFi. When
one thinks of Japanese cultural sym-
bols, thoughts of drift cars, pachinko
machines, portable music players, and
Shinkansen bullet trains readily… ehm…
drift through the mind. Japan is a detail-
oriented country. No other society on
earth can so happily obsess on making
minor improvements to small items to
invoke signifi cant increases in overall
performance — especially with cars and
electronics.
AS THE CHEAPER of two new
power cables from this respected
Japanese specialist, the Roxy is an
expensive-looking product with a
mains plug that is beautifully built
and finished – something that won’t
come as a complete surprise to fans
of the brand. It hasn’t scrimped on
the cable either; this has a 37-strand
silver-plated OFC conductor for live,
neutral and earth, and each has a
five-layer dielectric. The conductors
are enclosed by a polyethylene
dielectric, and all three are wrapped
in a cotton inner filler, with a paper
barrier layer, an outer sheath in
lead-free PVC and finally a tough,
nylon yarn braid outer sleeve.
Sometimes, you can’t help but get giddy about a product that most everyone is going to gripe that, “It can’t
possibly work!” But the fact is the highly debatable yet finely engineered Furutech NCF Booster-Signal I’ve been
lucky enough to be closely reviewing these past few months clearly improves the clarity, focus, resolution, and
musical enjoyment of just about any otherwise free hanging or gently lying-about cable you may be using in your
high-end audio playback system.
Promising to remove static from your hi-fi, Paul Rigby reviews Furutech’s portable Destat III
