Dear People,
Maybe you thought I was a bit quiet lately, but in any event it has not been quiet in the listening room.
Today I present you
LUSH
As you can see I try to keep ahead of things. And as you can imagine, it gets more and more difficult to improve. But maybe I managed.
Now who is Lush. OK, here :
Lush Cosmetics Ltd.
When I myself think about "lush" as such, it is something which is soft. A breeze through something. No hard colours. But it is also about wealth in the sense of a wealth of things.
This is
the Lush.
If you look closely you see how The Lush operates. It is palpable. It whispers to you. You listen to it. It gives you wealth. It is nature. It is the real thing.
Some say the Clairixa is the best USB Cable ever. Well, it actually is; It is well possible that nothing was made better to USB spec than the Clairixa. It would anyway be very hard to accomplish.
But who actually tells that the USB specification with its - mind you - wide margin can't be improved for Audio ?
So that is exactly what I did ...
First it took two months or so of throughput before I found how specifications as such would influence the sound. Yes, you heard me right, I said
sound (as in : let's drop the "quality" part). Then the direction was determined of which way specifications were allowed to go (think a simple plus x or minus x here). Then the margin was determined as in "too soft now" or "nice but too strange".
Lastly a topology had to be determined which would make it feasible to ever construct the cable. This includes the sleeve which actually is part of the topology again (it is a dielectric).
Oh, I almost forgot : the last trajectory has been the listening for 4 weeks.
And here it is :
The Lush USB Audio Cable
Sound (1)Allow me to compare with the Clairixa;
Clairixa is the best 1:1 translation from digital.
Err ... from what ?
Right.
Clairixa is a most pinpointed razor blade sharp machine.
Lush is a pile of
musicality. If you hear it right out of the box there will be one thing jumping at you right away : the harmonisation of ... the harmonics. Ehm ...
Well, yes; Of course I am inclined to say that it is the harmonisation of the musicans etc., but while this would be completely the truth, it is about the technical thing underlying that. All "tones" swing.
Again it is so that all detail remains. Again it is so that the cable is as fresh as nowadays is required. But there's a "connecting droop" that turns digital into analog. And you know what ?
There hasn't been one single time in the 4 weeks I am listening to the Lush now, that I was disturbed by one or the other things which urged for improvement. And it is right here where the difference with Clairixa is : Clairixa
shows the lesser parts (from the source) or it just
is the lesser cable for some material or sounds. Actually, when listening to the Lush, what should come to mind is the analogy with analog :
Analog won't go wrong. It always works.
This is the Lush. But now with the advantage of the dynamics and "no noise" from digital. It really works, you know.
Sound (2)(this is the description I already made on June 1 - the description above I just created again, objectively)
All is relative and for me the sound is relative to Clairixa;
Clairixa, as her name tells, is clarity, crystal and clear water. Combine all these and you have a most clear sounding cable but which also can be bitchy. It can bite. This is no problem, unless you hold something against it which has the properties of "lush".
We now must be careful because "lush" in my own language does not exist as far as I know; working with the sound of the word only, there is softness in it. A sweet softness. On the other hand, when I look at the explanation in English, one of them is "green meadow". Now combine this with a nice breeze through that meadow and you get close to the sound.
If you watch closely at the descriptions I tend to give to such a vehicle as an audio cable is, you may notice that they are always technical. So, maybe you had another idea than technical with "green meadow", but my idea about it is really technical. It is "a means to" (create a specific sound). However, for the very first time I now dare to give a very normal audiophile description : this cable is musical.
If this cable is to be rated for its musicality, it will receive a 10 (out of 10).
All sings and dances together and you can hear the harmonics doing that. So actually the harmonics work togteher.
Comparing with Clairixa we can say (or at least I do myself) that this is a piece of machinery that adds nothing and passes on what it is given. If you listen to the Lush for a week and put back in Clairixa, you will say "oh my, what a d*mn good cable is that ! - how is it actually possible ?". However, for you as the yet unknowledged, I can tell you that it will be this what you hear from the Clairixa when you listened to the Lush for real :
When you again listen to the Clairixa, you start to notice that not every day everything sounds as good as you liked it to be. It doesn't really bother because you are used to that anyway and all you hear is the "goodness" of it all.
On a side note : During the path to the launch to the NOS1a/G3 upgrade (Clairixa in the chain) I have said this several times lately : you can hear that things are not perfect but you are not bothered by it because it is as it is and you can not see possible improvement (and now it does not annoy either).
Not so with the Lush ...
For a 100 times I have thought "okayyyy NOW I achieved 100% pure analog". It just can't go wrong.
And that's how it is. It can't go wrong ...
Yesterday too, I explicitly watched for any wrongness or disturbance or annoyance etc., but in 4 hours of time I could not find anything. Instead I thought "OMG what have I done this time".
Sound (3)Under "Sound (2)" you read that the original description was made on June 1, and I can tell that "Sound (1)" was made on June 13. Today it is June 21 and I have this addition :
This cable will change audio (or something of that order);
Because I obviously was able to play more in three weeks than in two weeks, it becomes clear more and more how something like this cable is able to dig out super profound say "melodies" which weren't there at all before. Think like being used to e.g. Talking Heads - "Once in a lifetime" for the major part of your life, and suddenly there is a synthesizer in there playing the main melody for a larger part. This really makes you think like "huh ?!?".
What's also new is that the Lush is able to let MQA sound more or less right, which the recognition that the properties of the sound heard, seem to spring from Hires in general. Say that there's a "hardness" in metal with a little sauce of roughness, which is almost the opposite of what you normally experience from Hires (at least I think it can sound too silky up to dull). So this realism in metal is almost the main characteristic and if you watch (listen) closely, you can see that it is this property which makes things infinitely more real.
Assumed that one day you will own this cable, you should start out with playing Tanita Tikaram - "Twist in my Sobriety" and drop dead from what you perceive from the larger hits on a larger drum while explicitly trying to think that she and the band is
not with you in the room. Well, I perceived it as the most realistical representation of music in the room, that somehow still coming from a pair of loudspeakers. Btw, this counts for the whole of the Ancient Heart album.
The last revelation only springs from last night, but for this I must first go back so something else I recently found : the famous toilet test fails - at least when being outside of the house, door open, you being around the corner somewhere.
Toilet test : When being in the toilet, a couple of doors closed between you and the listening room, all frequencies should sound still even for level. No boom-boom, no hissing, just even and only lower in level. "Should" ... ?
Today this test for its "being outside" version fails because it seems that insufficient highs are available. No boom boom, but a kind of stuffed ears feeling when you try to listen to nice music, thus being in the garden etc., you speakers around a few corners.
And now this revelation :
Yesterday, for the very first time I was able to play music while eating outside in the garden, without being distracted by music. So, I am quite sure both just described phenomena go together : a bit of less pronounced highs which allow the music to be better background music.
The fun is too that when you go inside, you are overwhelmed with the exact opposite : spades of highs but which somehow don't like to travel around corners. It can also be that it works out like this for me personally, because I am relieved that it works so well, while being outside makes me doubt whether all is as good as I wanted it to be. Well, it just is and in double-fashion.
PriceThe time required to make one of 100cm (~3ft) is a little bit longer than for Clairixa. Still I like to keep the price the same at 200 euros.
Otherwise we now work with standard lengths which is more economical with production so the price can be kept "low" :
070cm : 200 euros.
100cm : 200 euros.
150cm : 225 euros.
200cm : 275 euros.
300cm : 400 euros.
Edit : This is without shipping and is also without VAT; for those liable to VAT 21% must be added.
You can
order your Lush here.
You can see that the price progressively rises with the longer cable, which is because of the difficulty of the topology and the sleeve which becomes harder and harder to slide on (think like cm for cm to push through and at 300cm it taking an hour).
Clairixa was sold at up to 7m (700cm) and we think this will be impossible to realistically make. Of course, nothing is impossible, but ... Well, but at least we must try once before we really know.
70cm is the shortest length which is mainly because of the somewhat odd bending capabilities of the cable;
At the "A" side of the cable (this is the PC side) the cable is made so that it can bend up and down - not sideways. At the "B" side (DAC side) it only bends side ways.
Both combined implies that you need a bit of length to go from the one device to the other.
AvailabilityWe are right in the middle of NOS1a/G3 upgrades, but because we face a small break, at the moment of this writing no NOS1a's are in-house so right now we produce Lushes until we drop. But this is only for a couple of days and we can't tell yet how many we will have by the end of the day tomorrow (the last moment of shipping this first batch). Also, somewhere next week we will have one extra day for production (still no NOS1a in-house).
Anyway the message is clear : first come, first serve.
Nothing unusual really, but this time the fun is that after this first batch, production will be rare and only when nothing else can be done coincidentally (say because of poor logistics planning
). As how we see it today, this situation will last until September / October, when the G3 upgrades run to an end.
Please announce yourselves in this topic and not by email, so it will be clear to everybody who was first.
You can subscribe for longer lengths than 300cm but we won't producing such lengths at this time.
Peter
