But as tempting as that would be, I can't indulge in the musical enjoyment just yet. It is possible that the best is yet to come: Richard Drees and Rob Hay now know my set up and the cables used in it quite well and had therefore also brought a six-meter Dragon for the connection between preamp and power amp. Already in the first seconds after I exchanged the Goebel for the Dragon interconnect, the latter makes clear that it can offer a little more: CODONA's "Malinye" is playing, and quite far to the left, Don Cherry plays the intro on the melodica, and that he does this in an ample studio space with some reverberation is probably familiar to me. With the Dragon in the chain, however, the reverb is traceable well past the center of the stereo base to almost all the way over to the right. These subtle signals might otherwise have been lost in the residual noise. Thanks to the Dragon, they are now audible. A similar effect appears in this piece when playing the cymbals: Their decay is noticeably longer than before. The Dragon reduces the SPL of the noise floor, making room for more detailed information.

You might object that such audiophile nitpicking has little to do with music, but I went along with it to avoid having to list again in which hifi disciplines the Dragon brings even more – albeit small – improvements. You and I rightly presuppose those. And I don't want to make it as easy for myself as it was in the relevant publications 30, 40 years ago, when one simply spoke of a curtain being drawn away between musicians and listeners. I will now stop putting into words the great musical experience to which the Dragons contribute a good part. I'd rather revel in Ferenc Snétberger's mellifluous "Empathy" from the album Nomad, which can be a lot of fun even through delicately tuned small systems. With the Dragons in a high-end chain, it becomes an experience not soon to be forgotten: an expedition into wide spaces!