˻ PREMIERE ˼

⌈ KATHARSIS TECHNOLOGY is the youngest Polish audio company because it was registered only on September 1st this year. The man behind it and chief designer is Mr. STANISŁAW PRZYBYLSKI. We are testing its first and so far only product, an RCA analog interconnect called COINCIDENCE. ⌋

HAD TO CHECK THE E-mail archive to find out how long I had known Mr. STANISŁAW PRZYBYLSKI, the founder of Katharsis Technology. It's good that I do not delete e-mails older than ten years, even though there are now tens of thousands of them, because thanks to this I found it: it was on January 7th 2014 at 4:43 pm. Mr. Stanisław wrote a short e-mail to ‘high five’ to what we wrote together with the Krakow Sonic Society team about the complete dCS Vivaldi system; KSS № 92, more → HERE.

As I read from the e-mails, from dCS we quickly moved to more general topics, and then, in 2016, we focused on cable-related topics. The owner of Katharsis Technology quickly decided to explore this topic. And because the problems are best explored in action, he designed his cables himself. For the first time, if I remember correctly, he revealed them during the AUDIO VIDEO SHOW 2016. He presented them in the AUDIOSTEREO.pl room

Mr. Stanisław called them "cable-filters", which turned out to be quite a good description of their operation. As he emphasized then, the boxes visible on them were not filters of the type used by MIT or Transparent Audio, but something like electromagnetic filters. His point of reference were the Siltech cables and it was the analysis of their structure and operation made over the last six years that led to the creation of the Coincidence interconnect.

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| A few simple words…

STANISŁAW PRZYBYLSKI
Owner, designer

KATHARSIS TECHNOLOGY INTERCONNECT Coincidence is the result of my over 35 years of experience in high-end audio. It has been designed specifically with digital sources in mind. It is a necessary element for the filtration of digital-to-analog converters. Through a unique proprietary filtration method, it removes the remains of D/A conversion (converter noise) in an extremely selective and effective way.

Thanks to this, we get a significant increase in the resolution of the reproduced sound, extracting the true, natural tonality and improving the stereo panorama. The filtration used in the cable is the natural filtration of standard cables, the difference is only in its level/strength and exceptional precision which is not available for other competing cables.

Due to its Teflon/air structure (the center conductor’s insulator is mainly air), the Coincidence interconnect behaves like a superconductor in the field of acoustic frequencies. It minimizes inductance, resistance and, most importantly, capacitance (25 pF/m), which is one of the smallest on the market.

The effect of the filters goes far beyond the acoustic frequencies: from 2-4 MHz to about 25 GHz, so they do not affect the acoustic band. Coincidence is the result of many audiophile comparisons with ultra-high-end designs and dozens of less successful prototypes, which, through continuous improvement of technology, allowed me to obtain a mature, truly high-end product. SP

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▌ COINCIDENCE

⸜ TECHNOLOGY THE COINCIDENCE INTERCONNECT LOOKS quite ordinary. Were it not for the “cans” placed in the middle of its run, one could say that this is yet another audio cable. It may be quite good, but technically absolutely ordinary. And yet ... Its assumptions do not have much in common with almost any other cable I know, except - as we have already mentioned - products from the Siltech and, let me add, Crystal Cables. That is, companies that consider the control of electromagnetic fields and the shaping of higher harmonics of the signal to be the most important design element.

During the six years that have passed since the presentation of the first "cable-filters", Mr. Stanisław wrote to me quite regularly, reporting on his research and tests. Some were more interesting, others were not entirely understandable to me, and some felt crazy to me. During the course of the research, however, the search line began to crystallize. This designer drew attention to the unusual behavior of the Dutch manufacturer's cables.

With time, he came to the point that a great part of their sound is shaped by the manufacturer's "boxes" at the beginning and end of the cables, combined with the monocrystalline silver used by this manufacturer. So the filter is the whole system - the conductor, boxes and plugs. While they look like decorative elements, mechanical at best, they're actually involved in strengthening and weakening the electromagnetic field around the cable. And this field directly affects the amplification and suppression of higher harmonics.

The website reads:

Each cable, whether for audio or other applications, is a specific filter in the field of high frequencies and very high frequencies. All you need to do is to precisely manufacture such filters using electronics to obtain cables for audio applications with the best possible sonic properties.

In Katharsis cables, we use tuned comb filters based on our own proprietary mathematics with the use of symmetrical multi-axis geometry. As computer simulations and measurements have shown, cables with filters in their operation significantly exceed the sonic capabilities of super-pure metals, including monocrystalline silver, as the least resistive conductor known to man.

⸜ TECHNOLOGY, → KATHARSISTECH.com, accessed: 2.09.2022.

This post can be considered raving, megalomania, and finally a mistake. Believe me, however, this is the result of many, many years of work. A thoughtful, worked-out statement that the designer came to through experience. I have seen the progress on a regular basis and can attest to its honesty. At that time, I did not advise the designer at any stage, did not instruct him in any way, or even direct him. At most, I encouraged him to keep up the research.

⸜ CABLES Coincidence interconnects come in a simple wooden box with an engraved logo on the top. However, this is one of the most popular packaging strategies of young producers. And it is one of the more difficult aspects of introducing a product to the market. Many good designers have done it. Wood is the simplest, proven choice for small-scale production.

Inside, however, we can find something that probably all young and even more experienced manufacturers forget about. The box was filled with a hard foam with a cut-out space for cables. It would be hard to deny that Siltech boxes were the inspiration. And that's a good one to follow. In addition to the cables themselves, the cutouts also feature plastic nets that can be used to cover cable boxes and plugs. This is a standard in audio. The one who comes up with a practical and aesthetic way to replace this type of cover will make a fortune.

The cables themselves are quite stiff. They have a carmine color of the outer sleeve over which a rather stiff, black mesh is stretched. The cable is almost traditional. In a Teflon tube there are 45 left-twisted, mutually insulated, pure copper conductors with a diameter of 0.1 mm each. They are in 95% isolated with air and only at 5% supported on Teflon supports.

The ground also consists of 45 insulated wires wrapped around the inner Teflon tube and is twisted to the right; this part is insulated with polyolefin. On top of it there are copper-nickel rings of various widths, mathematically selected, "tuned" by the designer. The counter-clockwise and clockwise twisting of the cable is to minimize the impedance of the cable. The positive and negative conductors are connected with filters via two 15 pF capacitors. So the filters work far beyond the acoustic band.

⸜ FILTERS The most important element of the Coincidence cable are filters. They were placed in metal boxes in the center of each cable. However, referring to them as "cans" is not exactly a precise term. According to the manufacturer, these are microwave resonators in which passive, specialized electronic filters are mounted, removing selected ranges of super-acoustic noise, in the range from 2-4 MHz to about 25 GHz.

Mr. Przybylski explains their influence on the sound in the following way:

Since I have lived in London for a long time, I have attended hundreds of different kinds of concerts, with virtually every genre of music. So, in designing cables, my point is to bring real music from concert halls, recording studios to home as faithfully as possible.

When developing cables, I pay special attention to the purity and timbre fidelity of instruments and voices. No artificial, disturbing and tiring artifacts can appear there, even at high volume levels and with dense, large ensembles (choir, opera). Each instrument and each voice should play as “separate” as possible, but also “together” in a deep, “aired” and wide stereo panorama. And all this must be presented in the most beautiful, addictive form, so as to blur the difference between reproduction and live music as much as possible.

⸜ PLUGS Coincidence is a cable designed as a whole, not a cable plus plugs. Mr. Stanisław initially designed it with Furutech CF-102 plugs. They are specially designed and the internal and external shape is important. As the creator of Coincidence writes, this is an advanced engineering work by Furutech and these cutouts and shapes cause the formation of appropriate harmonics in the microwave ranges. Which is supposed to improve the sound. The purity of the cryogenic copper in these plugs increases the goodness of the harmonic peaks (they become louder).

And it could have been done with Furutechs. Only the cable would then be much more expensive. And that was what Mr. Przybylski wanted to avoid. So he tested many plugs from lower price levels and, as he says, it turned out that the gold-plated VR109G plugs from the Chinese company Viborg turned out to be a good compromise between quality and price. The plugs are made of cryogenized, oxygen-free copper, with a Teflon dielectric and an aluminum cap, and their shape resembles Furutech products.

Let me add that the cable requires at least 100 hours of break-in in the system. It can be borrowed for testing for a period of ten days. And the name? - The name was taken from a quote from Einstein: "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous".

▌ SOUND

⸤ HOW WE LISTENED The Coincidence interconnect was tested in the "High Fidelity" reference system and compared to the Siltech Triple Crown cable on the one hand, and to the Crystal Cable Absolute Dream cable on the other. It connected the output of the Ayon Audio CD-35 HF Edition SACD player and the Ayon Audio Spheris III preamplifier input; both devices use gold-plated RCA WBT nextgen sockets. The test was an A / B / A comparison with A and B known.

Recordings used in the test | a selection

⸜ CHET BAKER, Baker’s Holiday, Verve Records B0003279-16/SUHD 009960, Test Press SACD (1965/2004).
⸜ TSUYOSHI YAMAMOTO TRIO, Misty, Three Blind Mice/First Impression Music FIM SACD 062, SACD/HDCD (1974/2004).
⸜ THE DAVE BRUBECK QUARTET, Time Out, Columbia Records/SME Records SRGS 4535, Super Audio CD (1959/2000).
⸜ CHARLIE HADEN & PAT METHENY, Beyond The Missouri Sky (Short Stories), Verve Records 5371302, Compact Disc (1997).
⸜ DEAD CAN DANCE, Spiritchaser, 4AD/Warner Music Japan WPCB-10078, „Audiophile Edition”, SACD/CD (1986/2008).
⸜ JOHN LENNON, Imagine, Capitol Records/Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab UDCD 759, Gold CD (1971/2003).
⸜ PERFECT, Live, Savitor SV001, „Lipiński Pro-Audio Mastering”, Revisited version, Master CD-R (1982/2017).

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THE COINCIDENCE INTERCONNECT FROM THE VERY FIRST MOMENT gives you a good idea of what it is doing in the system. Its main advantage is the ability to focus the sound. It does it really well. Compared to the Siltech Triple Crown it shows a slightly less weighted bottom end and a withdrawn foreground. The bass does not lack mass, and we just get more information from the top of the sound spectrum and its midrange. In turn, the panorama is built differently here, further behind the speakers.

But that's not what I started with, but with the ability to focus the sound. This one is above average. Even much more expensive designs do not always cope with it as well as the Katharsis Technology cable. For example, CHET BAKER's vocal from the Baker's Holiday was precisely placed with it in the space in front of me, a bit behind, but still in front of the accompanying instruments.

The tested cable showed the studio work very well. The energy of wind instruments is many times greater than that of a human voice, especially as delicate as Baker’s - after all, a trumpeter, not a vocalist. And yet Coincidence allowed them to sound just like the sound engineer and producer intended. So on the axis, further than the brass, but not quieter at all.

Mr. Stanisław spoke in A few simple words ... about resolution - and it is true. I think it is about it. Because when I played the second track on the TSUYOSHI YAMAMOTO TRIO’s Misty written by the leader, the energetic Blues, I heard the same. This is a strong, clear instrument on the axis - a double bass - and a piano (slightly to the left) and drums (to the right) spread out in a panorama. Everything had a good balance, and the instruments did not "shout". Nevertheless, it was immediately clear that the piano is the most important element here.

Interestingly, I could say the same about the THE DAVE BRUBECK QUARTET’s Time Out. On it, in turn, in the piece Take Five to which I am referring, the leader's piano is on the right and the drums are on the left side of the stage. Before us there is a double bass and an alto saxophone. The Polish cable showed perfectly who the artistic axis of this design is and that it is not the listening axis. Even with Morello's solo, when the drums have a stronger volume and volume level, the same fragment of the piano playing throughout the loop was the driving force of the recording.

At the beginning I mentioned the high energy of the treble. That's true. But like any mature product, the Coincidence interconnect does not emphasize this range. Instead, it shows a lot of information that makes up something larger than individual "sounds". It never happened that the presentation was too clear with it. So there was never any fatigue. It was, unlike other cables with strong treble, relaxing - it's really something!

Neither with the piano hit very hard by Yamamoto (the musician is known for it), nor with the percussion instruments from the DEAD CAN DANCE album entitled Spiritchaser, there was even a hint of brightening and sharpening . And yet there was, so to speak, much more treble than with the Siltech and the other cable that Coincidence was compared to, the Crystal Cables Absolute Dream. And this is important in this type of music because it is based on rhythm. And rhythm instruments must have an even bandwidth from the very bottom to the very top. With any tilt or phase blur, everything "crashes". Here the instruments had a perfectly guided attack, regardless of the timbre.

The other end of the band should appeal to even those who do not like fleshy bass. "Meat" isn't here so a point for them, but it's not a "lean" range either. The second track on the DCD’s album, the Songs Of The Stars, begins with a very low wind instrument sound. It is somewhat reminiscent of an alpine horn, although its sound is modulated slightly differently during play. In any case, it is low and was also shown low by the Polish interconnect. It was really realistic, that is to say, giving the impression of being real, of conveying its timbre.

It seems equally important to me that the Katharsis Technology cable perfectly shows the differences between different low-set instruments (sounds). And when the recording is lighter, like the fourth on the aforementioned disc, wonderfully sung by Brendan Perry, Song Of The Dispossesed, the cable does not weigh it down and allows it to "lift up" a bit. Again, there is no shortage of bass here, it is not a lean sound. It is a focused, controlled and differentiated sound, but without energy at the very bottom of the band.

The presentation with Coincidence has momentum and a large scale. The stage is not as deep as with the Siltech and is not as saturated with small information "in between" sounds as with Crystal Cables. The significant difference in price, however, justifies it completely. Compared to other cables for the money in this respect, the Polish cable is above average good. Because both the drums on the Time Out album and a really good remaster of JOHN LENNON's Imagine, released in 2003 by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab and released on a Gold CD, in a word, everything I played with it had momentum and high energy.

▌ Summary

AND MAYBE IT IS ENERGY, combined with focus, that are key features of this cable. The music listened to with it is a true experience and a kind of theater, as it was - for example - with the unofficial remaster version of the Live album by PERFECT, prepared by Damian Lipiński in 2017. It means there is always something going on on stage in front of us and there are no compositional "holes". What is certain is that everything makes sense, that it has been directed and well cast. The Polish interconnect perfectly controls everything without resorting to sharpening the sound or flattening it - which would make it much easier.

This translates into a presentation, on the one hand, largely transparent to the way recordings are made and the way they are released, and on the other hand, one that goes so deeply into the sound that errors or not fully understood choices of people from the "other" side of the glass are not annoying. I would even say that the tested interconnect draws our attention to the good elements in music and sound. It has a strong treble. It has an energetic large part of the bottom and delivers a grand scale presentation. And yet it does not generate a sound stream, but an orderly musical presentation. A perfect example of what many years of research and passion can result with.

It seems to me that this cable will add value to any system, regardless of our musical choices and sonic tastes. Its price in no way reflects its class. And this one belongs to high-end. Hence our ˻ RED FINGERPRINT ˺. ■