Foreword

Neutral cable is a small enterprise, started recently by a fellow audiophile. I know the man behind Neutral Cable since long, and this made me wonder about the opportunity of this review, since someone might think there's something not fair behind it. At the end of the day, I decided to do it for two reasons:

1. the subject of this review is certainly a credible product

2. I am sure of my bona fide; if someone is not, it's their problem, not mine.

At Neutral Cable's web site, the entire cable range can be, which includes mains cables, interconnects, speaker cables and digital cables. The subject of this review is the top-of-the-range Avatar interconnect.

How it's built

The Avatar interconnect shows a plain, almost common look in its black braid. The connectors are good quality and seem to assure a firm contact, without being too tight (I hate cables which require too much force to be unplugged), but they are glued closed, so it's impossible to open them up. I am not happy about this fact, but that's life. Standard length is 70 cm, which surely improves electrical parameters, but might cause some problems in case the units aren't close enough; other lengths can be specified

Sound quality

First thing you notice is the "weight" of this interconnect. It's not the usual "silver cable sound" to which we are used, sometimes in our imagination, with shiny high frequencies and a charming but lightweight bass range. On the contrary, the bass range is powerful and extended; it's better, in my system, than the one provided by my Purist Audio interconnect; everything is very articulate and the bass lines are easy to follow; this makes this interconnect more neutral, as its name suggests, in comparison with other silver cables. The high range is rich and well-lit, as you would expect from a silver cable, while the mid-range is only good. I don't want to suggest that the mid range is letting down the overall performance; it might be that it's the excellent overall result which outshines it. Resolution is very high, details which earlier were masked are now easy to discern, but this doesn't, as in most cases, tip the balance towards the fatiguing, as the result is very musical and relaxing. Dynamics (if a piece of wire can be dynamic) are excellent, dynamic variations are effortlessly, naturally reproduced. The soundstage is wide and deep, there's a lot of air around the instruments, spatial information is well evidenced and this leads to a soundstage one could almost touch.

Summing up

The Avatar is a very good interconnect, its strong points are several and evident; extreme transparency and detail, neutrality, air, dynamics, a very extended frequency response are the most evident ones. The only slight drawback is a mid range that may be not the same quality of the other ranges, which, though, are really high level. Price isn't low and this, for such a young manufacturer, can be a drawback. Materials, though, seem to be, as far as I can tell, high quality, and I have to add that I have always thought that the price of any cable is way too high.