…continued from part 1
Now almost all major electric guitar manufacturers have recognized this trend and jumped on board to recapture their historic “vintage tone” with “vintage cables,” “vintage capacitors,” and “vintage woods.”
This “vintage tone” trend went largely unnoticed in audiophile circles until recently, when in a parallel audio universe, the discerning Shirokazu Yazaki, engineer at SPEC Corporation, recognized the lost art of tone that tinned copper conductors provide so naturally when applied to HiFi audio use.
Shirokazu Yazaki likes to refer to the tonal qualities characterized by these tinned copper conductors as “real sound,” and I agree that their musicality and sound are much more similar to what we hear and perceive from live music than bare copper or silver wire.
Unfortunately, however, when we talk about “vintage tone” cables to an audiophile, most people mistakenly conjure up the mental image of a warm cable, focused on mid frequencies, with modest resolution and a pleasant musicality, which is not really suitable as a high-performance “audiophile” cable.
When we say “vintage tone” to an electric guitarist, however, they think of a cable that provides extremely vivid tonal color, superb dynamic response, with a sudden attack and release during melodic improvisation, allowing the notes to decay beautifully, and possessing an irrepressible musical expressiveness and tonal beauty that is not easy to quantify but easy to perceive, because there is simply something special about the way you can play music with it.
This, in conclusion, is why, unlike most other manufacturers, we have chosen to use tinned copper conductors for our cables, referring to what vintage electric guitarists appreciate about tinned copper wire, with its vivid tonal color, superb dynamic response, melodic refinement, harmonic complexity, musical expressiveness, and level of emotional engagement.
But there are other relevant aspects of “vintage tone” performance in terms of audio, such as spectral image presence, natural resolution similar to live sound, generous representation of the soundstage and sound space, and presentation of timbral complexity similar to live sound.
