The mythical creatures first appeared among the power cords. Then we spotted them among the speaker cables, and more recently, my colleague Wolfgang Kemper tracked down a few HDMI cable specimens. Now, Richard Drees, Sales Director for Germany, and Rob Hay, Marketing Director for Europe, released the NF cable variants directly into my listening room.

Probably the Mythical Creatures' first sighting can be dated even more precisely. But it's enough for me to know that Garth Powell, who previously developed power supply technology for Furman, a company with a good reputation in the pro audio field, had moved to Audioquest before the first Mythical Creatures appeared: the Niagara Power Conditioners were his first creations there, followed soon after by the Low-Z power cables, which have no characteristic impedance. These innovations' immensely positive sonic impact led my colleagues and me to award Audioquest's Low-Z/Noise Dissipation power supply technology with one of the first two Statement-in-High-Fidelity awards in November 2019. But the power cords were just the beginning of Audioquest owner Bill Low and Garth Powell's immensely productive collaboration. How the differing views of the pragmatist and the strictly scientifically oriented engineer conflicted at first, for example, on the subject of "directionality of cables," but then a creative solution in the matter of noise dissipation emerged from it, is described by Garth Powell in one part of the interview, he gave to Hifistatement related to the review of his power supply technology.

In particular, the Low-Z technology led to new approaches in designing the speaker cables ThunderBird, FireBird, and Dragon. The latter, by the way, harmonizes in the bi-wiring variant excellently with my Göbel Epoque Aeon Fine – no wonder that I was very excited about Audioquest's new NF cables and approached them with high expectations. But since Richard Drees and Robert Hay first wanted to hear how the new cables performed in my set up, I had to wait until after their visit to get my impression of the fabulous creatures' performance. And you, too, will have to be patient before you hear anything about the sonic influence of ThunderBird and Co. For now, Garth Powell's white paper on LF cables is on the agenda.

The developer begins by emphasizing how far Audioquest has already come by using Perfect-Surface conductor metals, a balanced triaxial topology, and directionally oriented conductors, as well as the FEP Air Tube dielectric and the patented Dielectric Bias System. A large part of the performance of the cables available to date would also be due to the noise attenuation or shielding provided by multiple layers of conductive carbon and aluminum foils. However, optimizing these different technologies would no longer promise any far-reaching sonic improvements – at least if one tried to verify them with the standard laboratory measurements. Even serious laboratories concentrate on so-called "audio frequencies." One would measure with a frequency sweep with a relatively high signal level at the matched impedance of a test bench (source and load) – without complex, dynamic music signals. In such an environment, almost all cables should behave acceptably. Further, Garth Powell states: "Real-world analog audio circuits virtually never have matched impedance at the source and load, and none of them behave that way at radio frequencies. This is key: In today’s environment, we are besieged with radio-frequency (RF) induced noise. This has always been true, but not to the extent presently experienced, and not to the extent where noise signals can be so very small that capacitive coupling renders basic filter circuits, chips, and components to be increasingly limited in their ability to dissipate enough of this induced noise.”