“Is this the triumph of music over hi-fi?” (Roy Gregory)

 

 

Listening is the Key…

Listening to music: it’s about more than simply hearing the notes. It’s about understanding their shape, the spaces between them and feeling the message that binds them into a single, meaningful whole. Hearing and feeling. We hear sound, we feel music.

Listening to audio systems, all too often what we hear is sound – not music. It was that realisation – coming home from the emotional intensity of classical concerts to the pale and insubstantial facsimile presented by my hi-fi system – that first made me question, then drove my fascination with, the shortcomings of the audio experience.

I experimented with different equipment and then I experimented with different cables. It soon became obvious that I could change and improve the musical capabilities of my system by building my own cables. More than that, it became obvious that my system, my equipment, could be far more musical if the cables would let it. That was the start of a journey, a path that led through years of testing literally hundreds of different material combinations and configurations, learning hard lessons the hard way.

But hard lessons stick.

I learnt that there are no miracle materials or short-cuts to musical perfection.

I learnt that everything matters – from what you use to exactly how you use it.

I learnt that ‘better sound’ in the short term often means less music in the long term.

I learnt to question conventional, high-tech cable wisdom and instead search out alternative, natural and organic solutions.

I learnt that less is often more.

The results of all that effort and accumulated experience are incorporated into my Brandt Audio cables: cables that could only have been arrived at in this way; cables whose difference is as obvious to the eye as it is to the ear.

 

Charles Brandt