Brett Gideon: MIT Cable Demo

TONE Editor Gary steel and I spent some time recently with Alastair Uren, General Manager of new AV distributor Strom Distribution. We had a productive chat and listened to two Acoustic Energy floor standers – the Aelite Three (RRP $1,999) and the AE3 MKII Reference (RRP $16,999).

Before we could get down to serious listening, Alastair said he wanted to demo some MIT cables and he set a system up with basic but good quality stranded copper speaker cable and a standard mains lead to anArcam FMJ A32 integrated amp and Diva 73 CD player with the AE3 MKII Reference speakers.

After playing an excerpt from a track by Eddi Reader (ex Fairground Attraction), Al placed a little black box from MIT into the speaker cable loop.

The Speaker Network Module is an innocuous looking device designed for custom installation with simple spring terminals on either side and a RRP of around $300 per pair, I won’t speak for Gary but its effect on the music was immediate and substantial, quite possibly the most noticeable improvement in audio quality I’ve ever experienced from a speaker cable change – almost as if the volume had been pumped by 5% but the FMJ32 has a big digital volume display accurate to 0.5dB and that hadn’t changed. There was more air around vocals and instruments, the music seemed more alive and the transparency and detail had improved as well.

Before we could recover from this dramatic demo, he whipped out the mains lead from the amp and plugged in an MIT Z cord (RRP around $350). Again the effect was obvious and not at all subtle being more or less equivalent to the initial improvement brought about by the Speaker Network Modules.

Seriously, these weren’t little “oh if I listen closely I can hear it” differences, they were “bleeding obvious” .

Other changes included incrementally adding the following to the system:

A dedicated power isolation unit from MIT (a prototype 240 Volt unit)

A set of MIT Shotgun MA (Maximum Articulation) speaker cables and a Shotgun MA interconnect (high end gear with price tags to match)

The improvements were noticeable but much more subtle, almost as if the first two dramatic changes had made such a massive difference to the sound that each additional change only had a minor impact.

As soon as I can grab that Z-Cord mains lead and a set of Speaker Network Modules, they’re going into my system to see if I can replicate the improvements I heard. If so, Al doesn’t get to have them back.