This is the HOTLINE speaker cable from Swiss company Ensemble, which I used for a while several years ago. There are still various successor models around, but at some point Ensemble products seem to have disappeared from the Japanese market entirely. It’s a product from the early days of high-end audio cables — around the mid-1990s — and I believe the price at the time was somewhere around ¥60,000–70,000 including tax for a 2-metre pair… I’ve forgotten the exact retail price, but if a new version came in now it would probably run into the hundreds of thousands. It has a hose-like texture and is, in a word, thick and heavy.
Ensemble is a high-end brand with connections to the likes of Goldmund, and perhaps that accounts for the extraordinarily distinctive sound of their HOTLINE speaker cable — connect it up and you get the impression that the sheer volume of spatial information is simply overflowing out of the speakers.
It’s a different character from the kind of super-clear, wide-range-at-both-ends spatial presentation you get these days; it’s more a feeling of rich, dense sound spilling out from within a somewhat compressed bandwidth, with a slightly enlarged image. From the midrange down into the deep bass there’s a strong forward push, and it had a musically lively elasticity and sense of energy. The carnal expressiveness in opera, for instance, was frankly indecent. That said — and I think this is a character common to Ensemble’s products generally, their speakers included — while the midrange and below in the musical frequency band is full-bodied and the sound comes at you with a great whoosh, the high frequencies, or rather the extreme top end just beyond the upper limit of the audible range, are delicate and extraordinarily nervy. To put it kindly, it’s a treble that evokes the clear, ice-cold touch of a Swiss winter’s air, but it does make your ears tired after a while, and gives you a slight chill.
How to put it… to use an unflattering analogy, it has that peculiarly Western quality of being super-friendly and full-bodied on the surface, but when you get to know them properly, revealing themselves as severe, logical, and deeply judgmental — a tiresome sort of sound, this… And yet, if you had an ultra-high-end system with high component precision and no unpleasant distortion in the upper frequencies, the HOTLINE’s voicing might well be perfectly fine. But in a half-baked desktop Hi-Fi system where the components and accessories are constantly bouncing between entry-level and mid-range, there was simply no way to keep that nervy treble and extreme top-end under control, and I ended up giving it to an acquaintance who was using an ELAC FS247SE. It apparently suited the FS247SE quite well, and he was absolutely thrilled, which was lovely. But for the early version of the Vienna Acoustics Mozart T-2, the SILTECH pure silver single-core FT-12G3 does seem to be the better match after all. (Do bear in mind, incidentally, that around 90% of SILTECH cables sold cheaply at auction on eBay or Yahoo! Auctions are counterfeits.)
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