August 4, 2012

  • XLO Reference Type 5, Part 12

    "Firehouse?!" I gawked 20 years ago.  "They're still around?"

    One of my friends had the then-new Firehouse album, Hold Your Fire.  In this time of grunge, anything heavy metal came as a surprise.  A couple years earlier, at the tail end of heavy metal's reign, Firehouse had come out with the killer power ballad, "Love Of A Lifetime."  Hold Your Fire's "When I Look Into Your Eyes," while good, proved that nothing comes close to being as good as "Love Of A Lifetime."

    One day, KJ actually accompanied me on my Hokubei Mainichi paper route.  We stopped by at Rory's Twisted Scoop, then located on Fillmore, between Pine and California.  Rory's flavors were kind of bland, but still acceptable.  Sadly, after the dotcom boom of Y2K, Rory's closed.

    Because my parents and brother were in Hawaii, I had the house all to myself.  Thus, KJ spent many a night there with me.  We'd get dinner, watch TV, play games, and listen to music, including Firehouse's Hold Your Fire.  That album also includes "Reach For The Sky" and "Sleeping With You."  We ended one night with the latter, which led us to sleep together.

    So what was my main system then?  NAD 5000, Sony TAE-1000ESD, Muse Model One Hundred, Paradigm 5SE.  Cables were entirely AudioQuest: Lapis between CD player and preamp; Quartz between preamp and power amp; Type 4 between amp and speakers.

    Okay, so I lusted after KJ even more than I did the original XLO Reference series.  The audiophiles want to know, "Does the Type 5 speaker work best with XLO's own Reference series interconnects?"

    Kind of.  The interconnects and speaker cables use the same types and qualities of materials.  Ultralink (who now own XLO) supposedly manufactured the products in the same facilities with the same equipment and outside vendors. Both had the goal of having "no coloration."  XLO knew that, in the line-level interconnect, you have relatively high voltage, to relatively low current.  And in the speaker cable, you have relatively low voltage to relatively high current.

    So when used together, the Reference series can do a decent job of letting you know what the system's and recording's tonal balance, speed, control, and image focus are like.  On one hand, I can see how the Reference series can sound like it's "skewing out of control."  But that same self-effacing honesty can also make it seem like the cable loom is "speaking with one voice."

    Within the Reference series, the Type 5 speaker cable is indeed the most expensive product.  While the original Reference series interconnects do work well with the Type 5 speaker cable, that Type 5 is the one with higher potential.  We know this, because we can swap out interconnects, and the Type 5 will show what the interconnects are doing, and in some cases, exceed what it does when fed with the Reference series interconnects.  Hold your fire.  In XLO's case, I actually prefer the current-production Signature 3 series over the original Reference series.  And yes, the Ref Type 5 accurately portrays the Signature 3 series interconnects' superiority.