Before making a recommendation, the team at Art's Excellence, a well-respected audio retailer in the Netherlands, works hard to become intimately familiar with the latest products from the brands they carry. AE isn't merely selling gear — they're living with it, using it as their customers would, pushing it to its limits. In that way, they're able to provide deeply informed, well-considered recommendations that their customers know they can trust.
Recently, AE's Max Delissen and team spent quality time listening to AudioQuest's latest ZERO-Tech speaker cables, Lone Ranger and Brave Heart, placing them in direct comparison with their predecessors, Robin Hood and William Tell, as well as the award-winning ThunderBird. The results were illuminating.
While Robin Hood presented music with good detail and did a fine job of communicating the space around musicians and their instruments, Lone Ranger surprised the AE team by drawing them even closer to the musicians, enabling greater transparency, detail, and impact.
In turn, Brave Heart exhibited a close family resemblance to its smaller sibling, Lone Ranger, but took meaningful steps toward the Mythical-level performance of ThunderBird, in some ways — harmonic richness, for instance — even exceeding it.
Delissen explains, "The performance now gained so much more coherence and fun that we saw the musicians just about in front of us, nodding to each other in rhythm with grinning faces that said 'oh yeah!'"
