It's always a jolting, life-renewing Ka-BLAM when a new experience shatters your preconceptions of the order of things. From the moment you realize your dad isn't running right alongside you as you fly down the sidewalk on your first two-wheeler, to when you become a made man, these experiences forever alter how you view yourself and the world around you.

Okay, so maybe cable isn't in the same white-knuckled league as riding your first Schwinn. But I just had one of my longtime preconceived notions blasted apart like a clay pigeon, and all it took was five seconds of listening to realize that all these years I'd been completely wrong.

Lately, I've been trying to come to terms with entry-level hi-fi, and the going hasn't been as easy as I'd hoped. There's some really cool budget-priced gear out there, but having a $30k Linn/Well-Tempered/Sumiko/Theta/Exposure/Melos/Muse/Aragon/Kimber/NHT He-Man rig in the very next room makes it hard as a mofo for even the best entry-level gear out there! I've got a pretty boss Real World system up and running right now in my living room as I sift through the genre trying to separate the wheat from the chapped, but all it takes is a sweaty session in the He-Man room to put things into harsh perspective.

So what was that preconceived notion of mine that got shattered? It was Hi-Fi Myth #69: "The virtues offered by the most expensive cable may well only be audible in the context of a topflight, very expensive system." And where did I glean Hi-Fi Myth #69, you ask? I took it right from the itty-bitty print in Stereophile's own "Recommended Components" listing.

John Atkinson, who penned this deathless prose, had it all wrong! See, I'd always accepted the notion that the further down the food chain your system is, the less important it is to use high-quality wire. I mean, given that the cable's task is easy, understandable, and much less of an issue than the active components in a given system (Hi-Fi Myth #68), it only makes sense that, the lower the overall capability of your associated amplifier, preamp, CD player, etc., the more the inherent coloration of your system is going to mask the benefits of good cable, right?

So when I started putting together a Real World system in my living room to evaluate affordable entry-level gear, I got hold of some inexpensive cables from the various lines and didn't think twice. Besides, compared to the He-Man rig, the entry-level system sounded hazy, muddled, and pretty uninvolving. You know, the way affordable gear's supposed to sound.

But one day I found myself with one too few budget interconnects, and half out of necessity and half out of sheer whimsy (footnote 1), I used a meter pair of my reference Kimber KCAG interconnect 'twixt the JVC CD player and the Acurus integrated amp.

Sacre bleu!!! I couldn't believe how much better the entry-level system sounded! I'd long accepted Hi-Fi Myth #69 as fact, but here was an honest2god less-than-highestfi system whose sound became dramatically better across the board just by substituting a single pair of He-Man cable for the $50 budget cable I'd been using. This Real World system, for which I'd been trying to lower all my hi-fi expectations, suddenly had depth, clarity, detail, imagingall the things I'd thought it was incapable of by virtue of economy, and all the things that were right there all the time, just waiting for a great cable to stop throttling them! It was obvious that, in order to really do justice to all the entry-level gear I'm currently reviewing, I had to find some truly kick-ass entry-level wire to hook it up with.

Dirty rotten scoundrels

Now, talk to most of the nose-up-their-butt reviewers around Stereophile and you won't find much enthusiasm for entry-level anything, much less affordable cables. One old goat actually told me he wasn't interested in listening to anything that wasn't very expensive. Another boasted of all the top-o'-the-line wire he has on handhe likes to see cable manufacturers ask him, "How high?" when he tells them to jump. If I were editor of this mag, both these goats would be cabrito roasting on my spit. But JA's not going anywherethe goats can rest easy. (For now!)

You can see that with all the high-dollar wire being thrown around to reviewers Roman orgystyle, none of them has ever needed to search for equally good sound in the Lower Reaches. It is only I, ever your most humble servant for all eternity and a day, who wants to talk about killer cheap-ass wire. Why? I just want to make people happy.

Now, for speaker cable, the only truly cheap-ass wire I've found that really comes this close to the best is AudioQuest's $2.25/ft Type 4, which has actually sounded better in my various systems than some other manufacturers' most expensive offerings. The Type 4 is much better than AudioQuest's other cheap speaker cables. (The 85$c/ft F-14 is fairly decent when you first buy it, but my experience has been that it tends to oxidize pretty quickly. I used a run of F-14 to hook up my pappy's system less than a year ago, and when I recently had to cut off the ends to reterminate it for a shorter length, I found that the wire inside the PVC jacket had become tarnished and dull. Type 4's polyethylene dielectric is bound much tighter to the solid-core copper conductors, and I haven't run into any of the F-14's apparent long-term oxidation problems with Type 4.)

For line-level interconnect and digital cable, I recently discovered a new cable that has blown the lid off my level of expectation for killer cheap-ass wire: Kimber's $62/meter pair PBJ interconnect. Affordable enough for entry-level Real World systems, this cable is right at home in even the most glorious He-Man Rigs o' the Gods. But don't take my word for itfor once, here's some reference-level wire you can actually afford to BUY and TRY YOURSELF! (footnote 2)

The Kimber Kult

Using Kimber's KCAG interconnect ($350/m pair) long-term in my He-Man reference rig has really spoiled me for other cables. Nothing else I've tried even comes closethe best and brightest from A to Z have come and gone, and the Kimber remains the one to beat.

The $350/meter pair KCAG is remarkably simple cable: three identical legs of ultrahigh-purity multistrand silver in a pearlescent Teflon jacket (one for signal and two for ground/shield), tightly braided and then terminated to Kimber's own mystery-plated RCAs. And that's it. Although the two ground wires do afford a degree of RFI/EMI shielding due to the tight twist of the braid, the lack of a full overall shield does mean the KCAG is more susceptible to hum and RF pickup than most cables. Me, I use a 25' run between my preamp and amplifier and I've never had a problem with noise pickup, but you definitely have to try this stuff out in your own home before you drop your wad, to make sure you don't have an environment noisy enough to preclude the Kimber.

Kimber also makes a $70 entry-level cable called KC1 that's identical to the KCAG except for the use of high-purity copper conductors instead of the KCAG's silver. The KC1 also comes encased in an overall shield, a layer of conductive fabric grounded to the RCAs with a drain wire. That's why the KC1 has an outer jacket and isn't a "nude" cable like the cool-man KCAG.

The KC1 should sound close to the KCAG, but it doesn't. It's good stuff for the bux, but, compared to the KCAG, there's definitely a loss of purity in the highs and a marked decrease in overall clarity. KC1 just doesn't sound nearly as open or as crystal-clear as the KCAG. Ray Kimber himself will tell you that the KC1 is no match for KCAG, although its electrostatic shield will offer improved immunity to noise pickup.

Enter the PBJ

For some time now Kimber's been supplying hardware manufacturers with an unshielded version of the KC1 for use in internal wiringthe Muse amps, for one, use this stuff for audio cabling inside the chassis. Also, RATA's Russ Andrews, the British Modkateer Parts King, has been supplying the nude KC1 as DIY interconnect, and selling a lot of it. The consensus seems to be that it's the electrostatic shield that limits the sonic performance of the stock KC1do away with it, and you have an affordable cable that comes very close to Kimber's $350 KCAG.

Ray Kimber resisted marketing the "copper KCAG" hookup wire as terminated interconnect, but he's finally responded to pressure from both sides of the pond. And he's done so in a totally cool-man manner. The interconnect is entry-levelpriced at only $62/meter pair, and Ray's calling it Kimber PBJ!!! To keep fancy packaging materials from jacking up the price, he's shipping the PBJ in those cheap plastic samwich baggies your mom used to pack your lunch inyou know, the ones that could deafen your best friend if you blew one up and popped it right in his ear. Is that the coolest or what?! PBJ in a plastic baggie...you just can't get any less audio-elitist than that, which is why I jumped on this cable like it was a real PBJ.

Crunchy or Smooth?

So how does it sound? Very, very close to silver KCAGin fact, in my current system, I'm not sure I don't actually prefer the PBJ. At the moment, every piece of gear in my He-Man rig is either ruler-flat at the top end or very slightly to the sharp side o' cheddar, and the slightly softer-sounding PBJ may actually be a better match for all this ultra-sheen than the razor-sharp KCAG. Compared to the KCAG, the PBJ tends toward a smoother, less-forward character. While every other interconnect I've tried has a markedly duller and less focused sound than the KCAG, the silver Kimber can be less of a good thang if the rest of your rig tends toward brightness, which is just how things are right now in my He-Man rig.

I need/want a more neutral playback system than I've grown accustomed to lately, so I've 86'd the big VTL tube amps and started using high-quality solid-state muscle amps from Aragon and Muse. The VTLs did a lot of things really well, but the longer I lived with them, the more I grew to suspect them of coloring the overall character of my rig too much, even with the forgiving load of the ProAc Response Two and Spica Angelus speakers I was using them with. With the Aragon 4004 Mk.II and Muse Model 160, my He-Man rig is now much less "samey-sounding" and far more revealing of both recordings played back on it and gear changes made upstream.

But the downside to all this improved neutrality and focus is that I no longer am buffered (by the seductive softness of the VTL amps) from the HF hardness that's in 99% of all recordings and hi-fi gear. The cool-man solid-state amps I've got now pass on everything that they're fed with a minimum of editorial rounding; sometimes the sound can get a little fatiguing on top. The PBJ's smoother balance goes a long way toward countering this HF hardness, but not at all in the detrimental fashion of the VTL amps. The tubes caused a subtle loss of information and rounded everything off to a smooth yet removed perspective, but the PBJ let all the HF air and hyper-detail through and avoided tilting the system's overall tonal balance into disturbing brightness.

But while the PBJ may have less ultra-sparkle and U-R-there vividness than KCAG, it was heads'n'shoulders above every other cable I've ever had through here in terms of HF detail, air, clarity, and tonal accuracy. I've had flagship cables from AudioQuest, Straight Wire, Cardas, XLO, and others in my rig at one time or another, but the PBJ sounded better than anything I've ever used, except Kimber's own KCAG. None of the other cables, except the KCAG, could match the midrange clarity, bass slam, and three-dimensional soundstage I heard with the $62 PBJ. For use as a reference interconnect, I'd choose the PBJ over all of them.

After using the KCAG for so long, there's one area of its performance that makes other cables fall flat by comparison: the Kimber's uncanny sense of side2side and front2back dimensionality. The KCAG just killed everything else I've tried in this respect, and endowed the system with an amazing sense of real instruments sitting in real space. No other interconnect has been able to match the KCAG for throwing up a vividly detailed and totally believable soundscape when the recording has one to begin withthe Kimber really did sound much less flat and fettered than anything else I've tried.

Anything else, that is, except Kimber PBJ. The PBJ essentially duplicated the KCAG's exciting sense of virtual-space realism, freeing a system to deliver the best soundstage and imaging it's capable of. And this ability is not reserved only for Class A, Fantasy Island rigs, eitherI heard the same dramatic improvement in soundstaging and imaging in my entry-level Real World system (Acurus DIA-100 integrated, JVC XL-Z1050 CD player, NHT SuperZero satellite/SW2 subwoofer speaker system, AQ Type 4 speaker cable) when I replaced another manufacturer's $60 interconnect with the PBJ.

To be sure, the KCAG was better than the PBJ. Focus of image was tighter, and so was the solidity of that image within the soundscape. The KCAG had a ringing clarity, an extremely clean and clear sound, that I haven't experienced with anything else. The PBJ came closer to the silver Kimber in these areas than any other cable I've tried, but the KCAG did, marginally, edge it out.

You know what, though? Not by much. Definitely not almost $300 worth more. And that makes the $62 PBJ an extraordinary bargain in today's clogged, chaotic cable crowd. If Kimber's amazing KCAG didn't exist, I'd use the PBJ in my He-Man rig before I'd use anything else. And who knows? The reference system sounds so killer wired up with PBJ right now, I'm in no real rush to put the KCAG back in!

Conclusions

There you have it: Kimber's $62/pair PBJ interconnect, a budget-priced cable that really shakes up the whole game. No matter how affordable (or expensive) your system may be, test Hi-Fi Myth #69 for yourself with these two inexpensive overachievers. At these prices, shaking up the whole game has never been easier!

Footnote 1:is also the title of my best-selling autobiography, co-written with the guy who helped Shelley Winters do hers.

Footnote 2: To Significant Others of Audionuts: If the thought of actually relying on his own judgment made your audionut pass out, try waving smelling salts under his nostrils or playing an Amanda McBroom record to rouse him.