I got up this morning and fixed a nice double espresso to get the day started, fired up the stereo, and started listening to Gil Evan's New Bottle Old Wine.

In a sudden inspiration, I decided I wanted to try a short length of Western Electric WE16GA in the high-frequency section of the Duelund CAST crossovers of my Westminster Royal SE loudspeakers, so I shut down the stereo and went to work.

Duelund CAST External Crossovers

I had some WE16GA that I had already conditioned on my Audiodharma Cable Cooker, so I cut two pieces to the same length as the blue length of  20 gauge Neotech solid-core UP-OCC silver wire with a Teflon jacket that you can see at the top of the crossover in the photo above.

I then removed the silver Neotech wire from both crossovers and replaced it with the Western Electric WE16GA that I'd prepped for insertion, which you can see in the photo below (the red & black wire just below the Duelund CAST silver capacitor in the upper left-hand portion of the photo).

Honestly, given the fussy nature of the Westminster's high-frequency driver, and its usual preference for silver wire, I didn't expect the Western Electric WE16GA to work at all. But it did work, and brilliantly!

On the opening section of New Bottle Old Wine the brass sounded a little bit unnaturally tizzy with the silver Neotech wire, but with the Western Electric WE16GA in place it sounded more natural, more timbrally correct, had more body, better tone color, and the whole album had a greater sense of space, detail, and musicality that I found really appealing.

Well, you know what that means. More Western Electric WE16GA is going into the high-frequency section of the Duelund CAST crossovers.

Stay tuned, more to come.

UPDATE:

I had a few errands to run this morning, then went for a bicycle ride along the river, then rewired the rest of the Duelund CAST high-frequency crossover with Western Electric WE16GA (that's the bottom half of the crossover in the photo below).

When I first fired up the system and did a little listening the music sounded a little ragged, and I was worried I had over done it with the Western Electric.

I played music for a couple hours, and the Western Electric settled down nicely, sounding like I was hoping it would: rich, detailed, expansive, and with beautiful timbre & tone color.

I'm listening to Neil Young's Tonight's The Night right now, which is part of the The Neil Young Official Release Series Volume 2 limited edition box set.  It's really good, and if you really enjoy Neil Young's music like I do, you'll want to add the box set to your music library. I quickly found myself just enjoying the music, not thinking about Western Electric, sound, or anything else. That's a good sign for sure, but it's also obvious that the WE16GA in the high-frequency crossovers is deftly casting the Western Electric magic on the music. Really good stuff.

Ok that's it for now, and I'm declaring the Western Electric experiment in the Duelund CAST crossovers a success! Next up will be the low-frequency crossovers, but it'll probably be next weekend before I get a chance to do the rewire, as I need to put some more WE16GA on my Audiodharma Cable Cooker to prep it.

Ok, now it's time to kick back and enjoy a little music listening, then it's off to the 2015 ANVIL Award dinner tonight to find out who this year's audiophile not very intelligent lately is.

Many thanks to Mr. Yazaki-san for telling us all about the Western Electric WE16GA - it's wonderful!

More to come.

Thanks for stopping by.