Hi! Richard, I pray this email finds you well. I’ve been wanting to write and brag on the Venom phono cables for several months. I am 61 years old and have never written to a manufacturer in my life. I research what I buy and I expect it to meet or exceed my expectations. I’ve listened to, played and recorded music all my life and consider myself to have very discerning ears. I’m not big into “gear”. I’m into music. I added a dedicated listening room to the house and am very pleased with its acoustics. My system consists of a VPI Classic and Soundsmith Zephyr feeding a Sutherland 20/20 which in turn feeds a low-wattage SET pushing a pair of high-efficiency drivers and a pair of REL subwoofers. My last component upgrade was the Sutherland which I added about 4 years ago. At the same time I bought a pair of $1000 phono cables which sounded exquisite, but were accompanied by a low-level 60 hz hum. After quite a bit a tweaking and experimenting, I determined that my system requires a fully shielded phono cable and that the phono cable must be grounded to the RCA plugs at both ends. Otherwise it will hum. I paid several hundred dollars and bought the only phono cables I could find in my price range that met the criteria. The hum was gone, but the cables lacked the detail and transparency of the $1000 cables. They weren’t bad, and I learned to live with them, but I knew they were the limiting component in my system. Fast forward 4 years. I had surgery in March and knew I was going to be down for a few weeks and would be listening to music a lot. I decided to treat myself to a system upgrade and the obvious target was the phono cables. After a couple weeks of research I concluded that the Shunyata Venoms were my best bet. You were good enough to confirm that the Venoms were fully shielded and that the shielding was designed as a conductor between the RCAs. I ordered them and they arrived a week before the surgery. My hope was that they would have some of the transparency of the $1000 cables. I was not prepared for what I heard. Right out of the box they were an incremental improvement over the old cables, but within the span of 2 or 3 LPs they were in another league. By the time they had 20 or 30 hours on them they were just as transparent as I remembered the $1000 cables to be. On excellent recordings, complex orchestral passages are fully sorted out. A dozen violins is no longer a mass of sound, but 12 violins. But there’s more. The Venoms are quiet. As quiet as I thought my system was, the silences in music were now startling. Microdynamics and macrodynamics are noticeably more dynamic. And because of the lower noise floor and improved resolution, imaging is noticeably more holistic. I am not generally a big fan of superlatives, but the Venoms, at $400, have proven to be one of the great bargains in my system, and I consider all my components to be high-value components. They represent an upgrade at least on a par with the turntable and the cartridge and the phono pre-amp at many times the price. They really are that good. I can hardly say enough about them. I just wanted to thank you for the outstanding customer service I received from you and for the remarkable Venom phono cables.
Sincerely, Ted in Texas