Curious Cables Configiurations Connections and Conversations (about)...

[kennyb123]

My Curious Link finally arrived. USPS made some very odd routing choices to get it to me.

 

Even cold out of the box it's an improvement over the solid adapter that ships with the REGEN.

[kennyb123]

My CCRL has opened up really nicely after a few days of music flowing through it. Clarity has improved somewhat significantly. There's also something special now about how the music flows.

 

In fairness, it's hard to know how much credit is due to the CCRL. It's obvious that the solid adapter that shipped with the REGEN had been doing harm and possibly keeping me from hearing all that my Audience Au24 SE USB could deliver. Both seem to work together exceptionally well. For the price though, the CCRL is a no-brainier. I still think the CCRL might have delivered a more significant improvement than the REGEN.

[kennyb123]

I think I was actually the first person to purchase a Curious Regen Link as Rob created it a while back based upon email discussions between the two of us- Rob was the only usb cable maker willing to make a short usb cable for my Regens and I think he added the Regen Link to his website shortly after our discussions.

 

Thank you for doing this. I greatly benefited.

[kennyb123]

The CCRL, though being immediately better than the REGEN solid adapter, still seemed a little off the first night. Giving it 24 hours helped, and 48 helped a bit more. It seemed to get completely out of the way by the third night.

[kennyb123]

Another couple of points, the Curious does considerably boost mid-bass 100-130hz, it's just below 80hz it is lacking.

 

I didn't hear this at all with the CCRL. Not even close.

 

A boost has to be relative to something else. You don't say what.

 

Also, seeing your system listed would help to put your observations in proper context. I was going to mention this last week after reading some of your earlier posts in this thread.

[kennyb123]

Thinking outloud considering true possibilities, my supposition: I wonder if the integrity of the member's cable that rendered a substandard SQ was in fact compromised by a faulty fabrication, flaw, despite the cable is new. I don't recall this possibility was even considered. Or not.

 

A claim was made that the Curious Cable bloated the bass. The challenge with such a statement is that it's relative. As such it very well could have been that other USB cables he's tried were lacking in bass. And then what if he made up for the lack of bass by selecting signal cables that bloated the bass just to even out the frequency response? This would make it seem like a USB cable which gets the bass right (like the Curious) is wrongly to blame for the bloat.

 

I usually take a look at the system of those sharing observations that differ greatly from mine to figure out what's going on. Unfortunately we can't do that in this specific case.

 

The best USB cables I've tried do seem to allow more bass energy to pass. I can see why that might be considered bloat in some systems.

[kennyb123]

That is a real testament to Rob standing behind his refund policy and being extremely reasonable about it. Most sellers will not make a refund until they receive the return, and the fact that he did so immediately after receiving notice of your return being mailed says a lot about his integrity.

 

Kudos to Doak too for giving it a fair shot.

[kennyb123]

HumanMedia system:

 

Nice system.

 

 

What about cables and power cords?

[kennyb123]

As soon as I changed the adapter for the Curious REGEN link I heard the music playing differently from my speakers. Voices seemed to be more backward. The tonality stayed the same. Dimensionality... DIMENSIONALITY... wow! The stage dimensions in left - right didn't change that much, but it gained a lot behind and IN FRONT OF the speakers. The voices that seemed to lean backward were at the 'regular' position, but the stage extended now also in front of the speakers. It's quite an experience. After about 100 hours burn-in the transparancy improved (sound is open, you can 'see through' the stage). I'm really enjoying the music: it gives me shivers and a big smile and foot tapping!

 

The Curious REGEN link is wholeheartedly recommended!

 

This almost exactly mirrors what I experienced as well. Nicely written!

[kennyb123]

I'd get a refund. Even if you believe in directionality, how does a manufacturer (or probably a one man shop in this case) let that happen? How many others got "bad directional" cables and how would they know? Do you REALLY believe all this as a viable excuse?

 

A friend also had a cable from this batch. Rob took proactive steps to rectify the situation with my friend not even knowing there was an issue. He even got a phone call from Rob out of the blue.

 

An honest mistake was made. It's not right from me to offer details.

 

I actually make mistakes in my job so it's easy for me to cut Rob some slack. It's even easier to do give Rob's efforts to make things right. Such manufacturers should be applauded.

[kennyb123]

Watch out the thread "curator" doesn't banish you with a thousand words!

 

That's not fair. No doubt Richard was verbose, but his heart was in the right place. He was just trying to keep a few threads on topic. All he asked was that people stay on topic.

 

There are so many folks here who seem interested only in mocking the way some of us choose to get more enjoyment out of this wonderful hobby. And yet it's Richard who's getting all this ridicule?

 

Could Richard have tried to say things with fewer words? Sure but why? No one was getting hurt by his words.

 

Could he have used better tactics to keep things on track? Yes I think so. So maybe the answer would have been to spin up another thread to discuss thread thread curation?

 

Given the way some threads go to heck, I think maybe we should welcome the fact that some members want to step up and moderate a few threads here and there.

 

Of course now I'm way off topic. Sorry to all you for that.

[kennyb123]

19 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

When I got my T+A DAC 8 DSD, I already had the original Lush USB cable which I used with my previous DAC. I bought the Curious USB cable and found it to provide far better resolution than the Lush, without sacrificing musicality. The Lush tended to "smear" the sound by comparison. Thus far, the Curious Evolved appears to improve on the standard Curious USB in all respects in my system. All my listening is done upsampling all music files to DSD512 with HQPlayer.

 

I heard smearing from the Lush as well.  It didn't last long in my system.  Later I got to try the Lush^2.  There was no apparent smearing that I could hear.  The Lush^2 is a cable I could have lived with.  I could not say the same thing about the original Lush.