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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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Most of my friends graduated from college in 1995. After the grad parties, friends came over to my house. I had gear from API, CAL (no relation to UC Berkeley, above), Classe', Parasound, and Theta. Among the mess of cables was a loom of XLO Reference, including the Type 10 powercord.
Thanks to Disney's Pocahontas, everybody wanted to paint with all the colors of the wind. Instead of heading east to Virginia, my friends and I decided to meet in Hawaii.
Once everyone checked into her hotel, no one wanted to cook. She wanted Hawaii's wide variety of poke. Even after the XLO Reference Type 10 has been properly treated on an audiodharma Cable Cooker, it does not allow your high-rez sources to display their full palette of colors. So it's like going back to Mainland, and having bland ahi tuna.
You took a nice side trip to the Big Island. Akaka Falls crystallized what California did not have: water. The XLO Reference Type 10 is neither dry nor lush. Still, the sound of the waterfall is not as crisp as it should be. There's some slurring. Drums lose some focus, snap, and power. Guitars are a bit bloated. And with a smaller soundstage, it's as if you cannot see the pool of water at the base of the falls.
Due to the 13,000' elevation, thin air, and low temps, Mauna Kea is pretty barren. But occasionally, it gets some snow. Since Mauna Kea is above the clouds, you often have a panoramic view. The XLO Reference Type 10 does a better job at preserving soundstage width, than depth. Mauna Kea is dormant, but it still has seismic activity. Interestingly, the Type 10 is excellent, in preserving bass as a physical entity and force, with grip, shape, and direction.
Back in Honolulu, you rode The Bus. This photo encapsulates what the XLO Reference Type 10 does, in an overall sense. The depth and imaging aren't right. You can't be sure, if your friends were (a) kissing the pole, (b) sharing the rope, as if it were spaghetti, and (c) doing these while the bus was in motion. A better/more resolving powercord would allow your gear to show that your friends were pretending to blow kisses at each other -- while the bus was stopped.
Because the XLO Reference Type 10 does not fully retain the soundstage's depth and layering, as well as the image specificity within such a stage, it is not a good match, for example, for the dCS Puccini. A little bit clumsy, it is a so-so match for the Classe' CP-500 and CA-2200.
Not that anyone with this caliber of gear would be using budget powercords, but the XLO Reference Type 10 is a better match (versus the dCS Puccini) for the more evenly-balanced Simaudio 750D/820S. At the same time, this digital deck reveals the powercord's shortcomings. But you what? You may not be able to paint with all the colors of the wind. But mated to my old CAL and Theta gear, the Type 10 still inspires you to draw and color with Crayola's 24 pack. For comparative purposes, recall that the API PL-313 was like a "dull, fat, wooden lead pencil."
Back in the mid-90s, we thought that the XLO Reference Type 10 "was okay." After being Cooked, the Type 10 is "still okay." It would have been an ideal product to hold us, until we could find, at much greater cost, the all-star superlative powercords.
-Lummy The Loch Monster
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Topic - XLO Reference Type 10, Part 5 - Luminator 21:40:13 12/04/21 (0)
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