Here are some of the things that I can share from our observations:
1. The magic that you will hear with the QSA-Lanedri line of cables has very little to do with the cables themselves. The cable is merely a vehicle for what is most important and that is the QSA treatment process. The cables that are being offered were chosen because they have properties that lend themselves to optimally manifesting the QSA process. Should you purchase a QSA-Lanedri cable, feel free to chop it up (although that would obviously void the warranty and make them unreturnable), inspect it, and compare it. I have done this myself and I still have no clue what this treatment is.
2. There is NOTHING that Anas and I have encountered in the past that compares to what QSA treatment offers. Not even close. While we do not have measurements to prove it at this time, to our ears, once treated, a conductor seems to behave more like a superconductor and that is the best assessment we can offer. Yes, feel free to laugh and be skeptical (this is what we expect any sane person would do) but any preconceived ideas that we had about ideal conductors, wire geometries, and expected relationships among R, C, and L had to be thrown out the window. It is easy enough to lower R, just go bigger. You can play around with L and C but usually, as you improve L, it is at the compromise of C and vice versa and so there is always a catch. With QSA, these rules don't seem to apply but I think it's more than just about R, C, and L. I think QSA treatment is impacting resonances as well. Regardless, QSA treatment works amazingly well on audio as well as video. No golden ears or eyes required. Feel free to blind and double blind test these cables and it's not something that takes hours or days to appreciate. With most cables, we appreciated it instantly even though there is a burn-in process.
3. As humans, we each have our own unique sensitivities to things and so perceptions will vary and in some systems, certain QSA-Lanedri cables will have greater impact than others but the impact of treatment is generally a much lower noise floor, greater dynamics, better control, a more substantial sound stage, more air with better separation, better definition, clarity, speed, and truer timbre. With the more expensive Infiinty line, where the amount of treatment applied is essentially doubled, these qualities improve further but you also gain more lifelike body, density, and decay. Are these cables ruthlessly transparent? Yes and no. Compared to untreated wire, to our ears, QSA-treated wire is far more transparent and can be ruthlessly so but QSA treatment can be applied in grades and can be adjusted to balance transparency with musicality (i.e. more air, more body and density, more liquidity, etc). While transparency is always the goal in a well-sorted out system, based on feedback received from a small test group, the cables being presented have had treatment applied in a way that we feel has the best balance of virtues to the broadest audience of audiophiles. If these cables work as well in your system as they do in mine, you won't care about the debate between tubes or solid state any further as you should hear the strengths of both without the negatives of either. In the future, more fine tuning options may be made available but that is not something that will be discussed or offered at this time.
4. QSA treatment had a positive impact on everything we treated but the higher the purity of the starting conductor, the smaller the impact of the treatment. This meant that if we treated a certain manufacturer's cable that used 7N (99.99999%) purity copper and then treated that same manufacturer's cable using less pure 3N (99.9%) copper while keeping everything else constant, once treated, both improve but the less pure 3N copper cable now outperforms the much more expensive 7N copper cable. There seems to also be a favorable impact by treating copper alloys such as brass and even certain platings such as tin. The impact of treating silver is less predictable and not yet well studied but the bottom line is if you are interesting in submitting your uber expensive monocrystal interconnects or power cord to QSA for treatment, save your money. We ran those experiments and we were disappointed. Having said that, if you are a manufacturer and you feel you have a product that is unique and are interested in potentially being included in the QSA-Lanedri line, feel free to reach out to Anas.
5. The greater the mass of conductor, the greater the impact of QSA's treatment. We suspected this from the beginning but we didn't realize just how important it was until we ran tests. I think I pushed for giant wire gauge more than Anas did initially. Maybe it's an American thing. Here in the U.S., we are the land of the "thirsty two ouncer", the originator of the Super Size McDonald's meals, the Hometown Buffet, big block Chevy V8s, and DDDD implants. We might not outfinesse or outlast the Europeans on the track, but I like our chances in a 1/4 mile drag race. So is it not a coincidence that most of the giant gauge power cord and speaker cable manufacturers I could find like Tara Labs, Stage III Concepts, Evolution Acoustics, Danacables, and Shunyata come from the U.S. and that my target when designing the Ultimatum speaker cable was the massively humongous Tara Labs Grand Master Evolution with an aggregate gauge size of 000 (or 3/0) AWG? Is it not a coincidence that our latest prototype Ultimatum speaker cable is an even more massive 0000 (or 4/0) AWG wire? Lol, does Shaquille O'Neal wear size 23 shoes?
To be continued...
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