July 25, 2012

  • XLO Reference Type 5, Part 7

    Ah, summer of '92.  My old friends were back in San Francisco.  That made it easier for us to get together at, among other playgrounds, Rossi.  We'd mostly play softball.  For the most part, the weather was mild that summer.  The fog may have rolled in during the evening, but there wasn't much wind.

    One time, a few of us did go to the indoor pool.  Yuck.  Male or female, my friends and I had bad bodies.  Yuck.  But we did talk a lot about sports.  Get this.  The S.F. Giants' pitchers included Rod Beck, Bud Black, Jeff Brantley, Dave Burba, John Burkett, Kelly Downs, Gil Heredia, Mike Jackson, Pat Rapp, Dave Righetti, Bill Swift, and Trevor Wilson.  What did all that pitching get them?  A 72-90 record.  Yuck.  The A's weren't very good, but would somehow win the AL West.  The 49ers actually did NOT have a quarterback controversy.  You see, Joe Montana was out, so by default, Steve Young, when healthy, would be the starter.  The Raiders?  Their quarterbacks were Jay Schroeder and Todd Marinovich.  Yuck.  The Sharks had recently concluded their awful inaugural season, with home games at the Cow Palace.  Yuck.

    I don't know whose house we were at, but my friends Ken and Julian were grooving to the new Megadeth song, "Symphony Of Destruction."  It came from the album, Countdown To Extinction, which would peak at #2 [#1 was Billy Ray Cyrus.  Yuck].  It proved that, even in the midst of the grunge revolution, there was a thirst for kick-ass thrash. 

    My friends and I talked politics.  Ross Perot was right; give in to the corporations, and they'll export our jobs to foreign countries.  Bill Clinton won the Democratic nod over Jerry "We The People" Brown.  Clinton then tapped Al Gore as his running mate.  Who was Al Gore's wife?  Why, none other than Tipper Gore!  It was odd that Megadeth's Dave Mustaine, who had feuded with Tipper in the past, now had to throw his support behind her.

    At home, I was using AudioQuest cables.  But what was the hot interconnect of the time?  XLO's original Reference Types 1 and 2.  XLO also made a speaker cable, the Reference Type 5, at $980 for an 8-foot pair.  Yuck.  Look.  My Sony TAE-1000ESD cost $1000.  My Muse Model One Hundred cost $1200.  There was no way I could then spend $980 on the speaker cable!  But just as I lusted after thrash, girls, and sports, I lusted after that XLO Reference Type 5.

    I would hear from users that the Reference Type 5's sonics "skewed all over the place."  Did that mean it was self-effacingly neutral, thus revealing all the differences in everyone's systems?  Or did it really perform wildly and inconsistently?

    Megadeth's Coundown To Extinction would eventually be reissued on MFSL gold CD.  Does its sound skew all over the place?  No.  Each track is smooth and liquid, thus appealing to audiophiles.

    But we now have the audiodharma Cable Cooker, and can treat these up to 20-year-old samples of XLO Reference Type 5.  Guess what?  All these years, no one has heard what the Reference Type 5 can and is supposed to do.  We now know that the un-treated samples have a small midrange, with an overall hardness.  After being Cooked, the Reference Type 5 loses a lot of the built-in hardness.  The images then become more solid.  Top to bottom, the tonal balance becomes more even and balanced.  The soundstage's dimensions are no longer relegated to some small spot between the speakers.