Already the ThunderBird and the FireBird have shown that the cooperation of company CEO Bill Low and Garth Powell, whose developments catapulted Audioquest's mains technology to an extremely high level, facilitated enormous progress in the speaker cable design. Here comes the top model of the three Mythical Creatures: the Dragon.

I have to start the article with a correction of the prices for the Dragon implied in the report about the FireBird. I had quoted an amount of just under 60,000 Euros for the standard length of three meters in the bi-wiring version, and that is correct. However, the price for a Dragon of two meters, as I would need it, is not only reduced – as erroneously written – by just under 10,000 euros, but by precisely 18,700 euros. But even in this case, the ratio of the necessary investment for the speakers, the Göbel Epoque Aeon Fine, and the two-meter Dragons is highly debatable. But it's not about a purchase recommendation for the Dragon in the context of my set up, but about whether one can still notice a clear sonic improvement when swapping the Dragon for the FireBird.

When looking at the technical specifications for FireBird and Dragon in the "Pricebook" – the scope of the cables listed there in different lengths and with different connectors as well as the other products certainly justify speaking of a book – one cannot discover any differences between the creatures mentioned, apart from the price and the color of the braid. Only the schematically displayed cable cross-sections reveal that the Dragon uses more conductors made of "Perfect-Surface Silver": In the full-range cable, the ZERO, six of eight conductors are made of the precious metal; in the Firebird, only four are. In the BASS cables, the ratio is six and three out of twelve, respectively. In both the Dragon and FireBird, conductors of different cross-sections are combined to achieve the desired sound, which Audioquest calls "Sonic Signature Conductors“. Of course, both the Dragons and the two FireBirds boast "zero characteristic impedance". The two BASS cables feature Audioquest's "Ground Noise Dissipation technology“. If you want to know more about this, I can only recommend the articles about the ThunderBird and the FireBird or right away Garth Powell's White Paper.

Given the Dragons' pricing, a comparison of its single-wiring variant with the bi-wiring version of the FireBirds is a natural choice. And that's why Audioquest's Mythical Creatures shipment also included two Dragon ZEROs that were not assembled for bi-wiring. However, it didn't seem to make sense to use the proprietary Lacorde Statement jumpers to connect to the bi-wiring terminals of the Goebel speakers. So I ordered a set of Audioquest Jupiter: four 20-centimeter-long bi-wiring jumpers made of Perfect-Surface Silver.