Synergistic Research Galileo Cable and Interconnect (TAS 210)

The Whole Nine Yards

Here is a riddle: What has sixteen separate, current-bearing, actively shielded “air strings” of copper-silver alloy, pure silver, pure gold, or (if you choose) a combination of gold and silver, twenty separate LEMO connectors and twenty separate LEMO receptacles, four DC-biasing/electromagnetic-power-conditioning junction boxes (called “Active Mini EM Cells”) into and out of which the LEMO-terminated “air strings” are routed, a separate “quantum tunneled” Mini Power Coupler power-supply that provides the DC current for the active shielding and EM power conditioning of all those cells and precious-metal “strings,” and costs $25,000 to $40,000 (not counting the TESLA PowerCell 10SE power conditioner into which the Mini Power Couplers are ideally plugged)?

Give up? The answer is one pair of Synergistic Research Galileo interconnects ($25,000) or one pair of Galileo speaker cables ($40,000).

I’ve seen expensive, complexly configured wires before, but the Galileo system is mind-boggling.

Before you start turning pages to get to the next review, let me assure you that Galileo is a uniquely interesting product and that its upside is considerable. It won’t take a golden ear to hear what it does (although it may take a golden goose to buy it). In a nutshell, the Galileo system is the highest-resolution, most transparent-to-sources cable and interconnect I or any of my listening panelists or anyone else who has heard it has yet auditioned. Regardless of what it is connected to, tube or transistor, analog source or digital source, Galileo will preserve the signature of the components it conjoins without adding a marked signature of its own. Here you will find none of the bleaching (or excessive sweetening) of tone color, the bungee-cord-like constraint or flagrant over-aggressiveness, the liquid darkness or silvery brightness and grain of other competitive, ultra-expensive, ultra-high-end cables. Galileo simply reflects what is in front of it with less editorialization and higher fidelity than any cable I’ve yet heard—and it does this primarily by lowering noise.

Galileo will remove fine layers of RFI and EMI you didn’t know were there—very-low-level distortion added by your AC power grid, by electromagnetic fields generated by the equipment you use, and by the skin effects and reactivity of your cables themselves—revealing fine levels of detail you also didn’t know were there on just about every source. Just as importantly, Galileo (in concert with the TESLA PowerCell 10 SE and TESLA power cords) will remove layers of noise you did know were there—clearly audible hum and RFI, which, in my case, have been driving me nuts for almost twenty years.

How many times have I complained in this mag about hum and RF on my record players and phonostages? Try as I might—and I have tried everything from ferrite beads to Faraday cages to dedicated circuits to true earth grounding with a rod—for two decades I’ve never been able to completely rid myself of these banes, which is why I call the neighborhood I live in “RFI Valley.”

I’d all but given up hope of a cure when Ted Denney arrived three months ago with his new wires. Once my system was hooked up with Galileo and a special (non-actively-shielded) Synergistic phono cable—and all components, including the turntable and phonostage, were fitted with actively shielded TESLA IEC power cords and plugged into a Synergistic TESLA PowerCell 10 SE—guess what? No RFI. No hum. For an analog hound like me, this was almost a miracle—and I wasn’t using unsalted matzoh before Mr. Denney came a’callin’. I’d almost forgotten how much very-low-level information and large-scale dynamic information gets slightly veiled, darkened, modulated, or blunted by RFI and power-line grunge. For this feat alone, the Galileo earns an exalted place in my Audio Hall of Fame. But, this feat ain’t alone.

However, before I get into the other wonders Galileo hath wrought, let’s talk a bit about how it works, because how it works is, uh, different.

The objective of the Galileo project, which cost Synergistic several years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars to perfect, was, in fact, to do precisely what Galileo actually and audibly does—lower noise and increase resolution and transparency. Some of this was accomplished by building on technologies pioneered in Synergistic’s previous cables and interconnects and some of it was entirely new to the Galileo system. Of the legacy technologies, the most important are active shielding and what Denny et al. call “quantum tunneling” (apparently, and rather perplexingly, after the quantum mechanical phenomenon where a particle tunnels through a barrier that it classically cannot surmount because its total mechanical energy is lower than the potential energy of the barrier).