MIT Vero cables

Anyone try any cables from this family? I pre-ordered some back in May at the Newport S.H.O.W. and after some manufacturing fumbles, I received a balanced full range headphone cable for my LCD 2.2's and a balanced "Bass Dongle" cable. According to MIT, these cables have little boxes with circuit boards that supposedly do some magic to get the cable to carry all the frequencies in an optimal way, I think it has something to do with different frequencies traveling differently and this will correct the timing errors that occur or something like that. Here's a link to their video. I'm sure many of you are familiar with it:



So anyway, I tried these out last night and here are a few observations (I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised because I pretty much thought this was bullshit):

First on my LCD 2.2, I normally use with a balanced DHC Nucleotide cable that Benjamin on HF made for me. This cable is a huge improvement over the stock cable. I recently got the Cavalli Carbon amp and they work well together. First I tried just adding the bass dongle to the DHC cable and have to say the bass dongle had almost no effect at all to my ear. Then I swapped out the DHC for the MIT Vero w/o bass dongle and the whole presentation was slightly more detailed, particularly in the highs. I heard more presence and better separation of the instruments. However, this was at the expense of body and weight. And the vocals sounded slightly artificial in comparison. Overall I found the DHC cable to be more involving and organic. It reminded me of rolling tubes, you always pay for an improvement in one area by sacrificing something in another area...

My other heaphone is the HD800 with the Anax Mod and I use a PCOCC balanced cable that Sonny over at Audiocircle made for me. This is a great cable, all my interconnects and speaker cables are made from this wire. Obviously, as I'm sure you guys know, the character of the HD800 is very different from the LCD 2.2. It's much more open, quicker, more detailed in the highs and thinner in the lows. It sounds especially anemic in the lows after listening to the LCD for a while. But the music also flows much faster and easy, like someone took the water restrictor off the faucet. In some ways that's nice, but in some ways the dampened quality of the LCD makes you notice more things.

But this isn't a post on comparing those two headphones... So I added the MIT Vero bass dongle to the HD800 and WOW! The low end came alive and got real weighty, without interfering with the mids or highs. The detail remained, in fact it increased in the low end but was weightier too. That was a very welcomed improvement. I also noticed in "Sing, Sing, Sing" from the Swing Kids soundtrack, there's a section where there's some incredible Tuba and Trombone action, but the acoustic bass is plucking along as well. I didn't hear this in the LCD's with either cable or the HD800 until I added the bass dongle, so that tells me the dongle really helped not just add body, but separation and detail.

So, maybe there is something to this multipole technology thing. It didn't have much effect on the LCD, but it did have a very favorable effect on the HD800. Anyone have any theories why?

More listening to come, particularly classical and rock next... as it stands, I will be using the bass dongle with the HD800's for now!

 

not sure if serious.

 

There is nothing comical about a 'magic' dongle...

 

Did the low end of HD800 became more similar to LCD-s with the dongle?

 

Couple of questions, how long have you had this cable? What is a bass dongle, a passive eq of some sort? I didnt see any info on the product on their website. Do you think what you are hearing could be attributed to some sort of expectation bias?

I am always weary of product that looks familiar (a cable) with a unexplained magic box that transforms sound with out decent explanation of the physics involved. The audio world seems to be filled with descriptive buzzwords and vague promises, and if the end user can not hear the difference they are not as trained as the other that can hear the difference.

 

apparently the "magic" dongles have a passive crossfeed in them... Kind of misleading marketing honestly.