Hi Juan,

Actually the Lush is nothing more or less then the next step at the hardware level after all the B'ASS/G3 upgrade has been accomplished and is in production. So notice that only such a stage allows me to proceed with anything next. And for me, USB is the obvious thing to grab at the horns at this moment.

Maybe in the original post it wasn't make clear all that much (I wrote the post as a whole two times before I thought it was honest all over ) but it was my explicit attempt to make a USB cable for audio specs (but notice that it would be my own specs as such) instead of Clairixa which is a USB cable make to USB specs (as good as I could). And both are completely different.

In the end it was nothing else as an attempt to again improve on the USB cable, knowing that the could not be "it" for audio. But mind you please, back at the time (over two years ago I think) I couldn't do anything else than create the cable to USB specs, which appeared might difficult already. The step I could take now is based upon more experience, mostly with the isolation and its behavior and sound. Thus there too, we already learned that isolation and isolation are two completely different things, were it for audio sound. From there I worked on the cable.
... And in my view it is beyond belief what it can achieve (laying many various albums by now) ...

Best regards,
Peter

Hi Mani,

In your case it is the best not to try it at all.
What one doesn't know, can't harm.

Really ?? Hahahaha

Now test yourself.
But really, just don't get it.
More really, just don't get it.
Or get it just in case but don't try it.

Bzzzz
:-)

What you see here is something I totally forgot to tell.

For the Lush to sound best, the USB power (5V) must be cut and you can do it at the A connector as you see above. However, this has not been tested "in general" - only with the NOS1a/G3. So ...

So what you really see above is the A connector of the short "loop through" cable which you will see stick out of the NOS1a/G3's left leg. Watch out : this can only be at that (short cable) position for the NOS1a/G3 because else the Phisolator (which is internal) is not powered and USB will not work at all.

Almost everybody who received the Clairixa also received such a small piece of tape. But it is easy to make yourself anyway. The most important part of it, is the part which folds to the bottom of the connector (not visible here) which allows for removal of the tape easily.

No matter how confusing it might be, try to keep in mind that the Lush cable itself has been explicitly made to deal with the 5V USB, which also is how NOS1a/G3 owners will use it. And I said explicitly (as in : don't use that and the cable will be out of "balance"). However, this does not mean that the NOS1a/G3 is at its best when that - behind the (Ph)isolator is fed with 5V, in this case.
Of course you can try it with the 5V, because nothing breaks. But if all is right, the sound will become very "tight" because of it, which is sort of the opposite of musical.

Peter

Hi Matt,


Why does this sound inappropriate to me ?

But for 37 euros you're the man (in the US of A). OK, for the shipping, I meant.
Invoice coming up later (shipment will be in a week anyway).

Thank you and regards,
Peter

Ha !

Thank you again for sharing, Richard.

FWIW (additionally to your outlays) :
Three days ago I myself was sure I couldn't stand the sound any more and I could only dedicated to a necessary reboot (which had probably been a month ago). And for sure it helped ...

Related or not, the DAC is shut off regularly (say daily) for whatever test purposes.

Thank you,
Peter

First small batch ready for shipping.

Hi Jayce,

Please see your email (you're special as of now )

Thanks !
Peter

Yesterday I was crossing the country and people in The Netherlands will recognise that it is a bit hot-ish these days (like 36C this afternoon which is not really what we anticipate (most have no airconditioning)). So ... yesterday it was my bad luck that 10Km before my last exit on te highway I ran into a queue which held me for over an hour. And this in this bloody hot sun.

The effect was that I was too late back in the office to order a new pile of USB connectors, needed for the Lush. And, with the orders as of now, this means that even next week, when we have this small window of 1 day to finish the last Lush'es as of then, we can only make 8 more compared to the current orders.
Side note : fact of life is that I can't order anything today either, because we won't be there to receive them.


Peter

Dear people,

All of you who applied so far just were sent the invoice. We try to finish your Lush before somewhere (our) mid day tomorrow, and if you can take care it has been paid for (visibly !) we will take care it's shipped tomorrow at last.

Thank you all !
Peter

Hey Esau,

Hmm ... No, I did not know that expression. Well, I know it in Dutch of course, and say that I like that state of being. Haha.
So no, not intended, but why not.

Thank you !
Peter

Gerard, goood to see you can still manage to be the first !
haha

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As you can see I try to keep ahead of things. And as you can imagine, it gets more and more difficult to improve. But maybe I managed.

Now who is Lush. OK, here : Lush Cosmetics Ltd.


When I myself think about "lush" as such, it is something which is soft. A breeze through something. No hard colours. But it is also about wealth in the sense of a wealth of things.


This is the Lush.
If you look closely you see how The Lush operates. It is palpable. It whispers to you. You listen to it. It gives you wealth. It is nature. It is the real thing.

---

Some say the Clairixa is the best USB Cable ever. Well, it actually is; It is well possible that nothing was made better to USB spec than the Clairixa. It would anyway be very hard to accomplish.
But who actually tells that the USB specification with its - mind you - wide margin can't be improved for Audio ?
So that is exactly what I did ...


First it took two months or so of throughput before I found how specifications as such would influence the sound. Yes, you heard me right, I said sound (as in : let's drop the "quality" part). Then the direction was determined of which way specifications were allowed to go (think a simple plus x or minus x here). Then the margin was determined as in "too soft now" or "nice but too strange".
Lastly a topology had to be determined which would make it feasible to ever construct the cable. This includes the sleeve which actually is part of the topology again (it is a dielectric).
Oh, I almost forgot : the last trajectory has been the listening for 4 weeks.

And here it is :


The Lush USB Audio Cable

---

Sound (1)

Allow me to compare with the Clairixa;
Clairixa is the best 1:1 translation from digital.
Err ... from what ?
Right.

Clairixa is a most pinpointed razor blade sharp machine.
Lush is a pile of musicality. If you hear it right out of the box there will be one thing jumping at you right away : the harmonisation of ... the harmonics. Ehm ...
Well, yes; Of course I am inclined to say that it is the harmonisation of the musicans etc., but while this would be completely the truth, it is about the technical thing underlying that. All "tones" swing.

Again it is so that all detail remains. Again it is so that the cable is as fresh as nowadays is required. But there's a "connecting droop" that turns digital into analog. And you know what ?

There hasn't been one single time in the 4 weeks I am listening to the Lush now, that I was disturbed by one or the other things which urged for improvement. And it is right here where the difference with Clairixa is : Clairixa shows the lesser parts (from the source) or it just is the lesser cable for some material or sounds. Actually, when listening to the Lush, what should come to mind is the analogy with analog :

Analog won't go wrong. It always works.
This is the Lush. But now with the advantage of the dynamics and "no noise" from digital. It really works, you know.

Sound (2)

(this is the description I already made on June 1 - the description above I just created again, objectively)

All is relative and for me the sound is relative to Clairixa;
Clairixa, as her name tells, is clarity, crystal and clear water. Combine all these and you have a most clear sounding cable but which also can be bitchy. It can bite. This is no problem, unless you hold something against it which has the properties of "lush".

We now must be careful because "lush" in my own language does not exist as far as I know; working with the sound of the word only, there is softness in it. A sweet softness. On the other hand, when I look at the explanation in English, one of them is "green meadow". Now combine this with a nice breeze through that meadow and you get close to the sound.

If you watch closely at the descriptions I tend to give to such a vehicle as an audio cable is, you may notice that they are always technical. So, maybe you had another idea than technical with "green meadow", but my idea about it is really technical. It is "a means to" (create a specific sound). However, for the very first time I now dare to give a very  normal audiophile description : this cable is musical.
If this cable is to be rated for its musicality, it will receive a 10 (out of 10).
All sings and dances together and you can hear the harmonics doing that. So actually the harmonics work togteher.

Comparing with Clairixa we can say (or at least I do myself) that this is a piece of machinery that adds nothing and passes on what it is given. If you listen to the Lush for a week and put back in Clairixa, you will say "oh my, what a d*mn good cable is that ! - how is it actually possible ?". However, for you as the yet unknowledged, I can tell you that it will be this what you hear from the Clairixa when you listened to the Lush for real :

When you again listen to the Clairixa, you start to notice that not every day everything sounds as good as you liked it to be. It doesn't really bother because you are used to that anyway and all you hear is the "goodness" of it all.
On a side note : During the path to the launch to the NOS1a/G3 upgrade (Clairixa in the chain) I have said this several times lately :  you can hear that things are not perfect but you are not bothered by it because it is as it is and you can not see possible improvement (and now it does not annoy either).
Not so with the Lush ...

For a 100 times I have thought "okayyyy NOW I achieved 100% pure analog". It just can't go wrong.
And that's how it is. It can't go wrong ...

Yesterday too, I explicitly watched for any wrongness or disturbance or annoyance etc., but in 4 hours of time I could not find anything. Instead I thought "OMG what have I done this time".

Sound (3)

Under "Sound (2)" you read that the original description was made on June 1, and I can tell that "Sound (1)" was made on June 13. Today it is June 21 and I have this addition :

This cable will change audio (or something of that order);
Because I obviously was able to play more in three weeks than in two weeks, it becomes clear more and more how something like this cable is able to dig out super profound say "melodies" which weren't there at all before. Think like being used to e.g. Talking Heads - "Once in a lifetime" for the major part of your life, and suddenly there is a synthesizer in there playing the main melody for a larger part. This really makes you think like "huh ?!?".

What's also new is that the Lush is able to let MQA sound more or less right, which the recognition that the properties of the sound heard, seem to spring from Hires in general. Say that there's a "hardness" in metal with a little sauce of roughness, which is almost the opposite of what you normally experience from Hires (at least I think it can sound too silky up to dull). So this realism in metal is almost the main characteristic and if you watch (listen) closely, you can see that it is this property which makes things infinitely more real.

Assumed that one day you will own this cable, you should start out with playing Tanita Tikaram - "Twist in my Sobriety" and drop dead from what you perceive from the larger hits on a larger drum while explicitly trying to think that she and the band is not with you in the room. Well, I perceived it as the most realistical representation of music in the room, that somehow still coming from a pair of loudspeakers. Btw, this counts for the whole of the Ancient Heart album.

The last revelation only springs from last night, but for this I must first go back so something else I recently found : the famous toilet test fails - at least when being outside of the house, door open, you being around the corner somewhere.
Toilet test : When being in the toilet, a couple of doors closed between you and the listening room, all frequencies should sound still even for level. No boom-boom, no hissing, just even and only lower in level. "Should" ... ?
Today this test for its "being outside" version fails because it seems that insufficient highs are available. No boom boom, but a kind of stuffed ears feeling when you try to listen to nice music, thus being in the garden etc., you speakers around a few corners.
And now this revelation :
Yesterday, for the very first time I was able to play music while eating outside in the garden, without being distracted by music. So, I am quite sure both just described phenomena go together : a bit of less pronounced highs which allow the music to be better background music.
The fun is too that when you go inside, you are overwhelmed with the exact opposite : spades of highs but which somehow don't like to travel around corners. It can also be that it works out like this for me personally, because I am relieved that it works so well, while being outside makes me doubt whether all is as good as I wanted it to be. Well, it just is and in double-fashion.

---

Price

The time required to make one of 100cm (~3ft) is a little bit longer than for Clairixa. Still I like to keep the price the same at 200 euros.
Otherwise we now work with standard lengths which is more economical with production so the price can be kept "low" :

070cm : 200 euros.
100cm : 200 euros.
150cm : 225 euros.
200cm : 275 euros.
300cm : 400 euros.

Edit : This is without shipping and is also without VAT; for those liable to VAT 21% must be added.
You can order your Lush here.

You can see that the price progressively rises with the longer cable, which is because of the difficulty of the topology and the sleeve which becomes harder and harder to slide on (think like cm for cm to push through and at 300cm it taking an hour).
Clairixa was sold at up to 7m (700cm) and we think this will be impossible to realistically make. Of course, nothing is impossible, but ... Well, but at least we must try once before we really know.

70cm is the shortest length which is mainly because of the somewhat odd bending capabilities of the cable;
At the "A" side of the cable (this is the PC side) the cable is made so that it can bend up and down - not sideways. At the "B" side (DAC side) it only bends side ways.
Both combined implies that you need a bit of length to go from the one device to the other.

Availability

We are right in the middle of NOS1a/G3 upgrades, but because we face a small break, at the moment of this writing no NOS1a's are in-house so right now we produce Lushes until we drop. But this is only for a couple of days and we can't tell yet how many we will have by the end of the day tomorrow (the last moment of shipping this first batch). Also, somewhere next week we will have one extra day for production (still no NOS1a in-house).

Anyway the message is clear : first come, first serve.
Nothing unusual really, but this time the fun is that after this first batch, production will be rare and only when nothing else can be done coincidentally (say because of poor logistics planning ). As how we see it today, this situation will last until September / October, when the G3 upgrades run to an end.

Please announce yourselves in this topic and not by email, so it will be clear to everybody who was first.
You can subscribe for longer lengths than 300cm but we won't producing such lengths at this time.

Peter

Hi,

I recall that I even compared the byte output (after the different means of attenuation) and there was no difference. But maybe this depends on the actualy music (file).

Peter

Hmm ... That would be about 100% my description. One quite important thing :

I am judging other things these days, and at trying PE I right away felt disturbed because it influenced my original listening. So really after 10 seconds I thought I shouldn't do this at this time (and switched it off indeed), but was left with something like the above description anyway. The "congested" would nicely summ it up because for me that was the most jumping at me.
I didn't report it because obviously this hasn't been "listening" at all. But now Anthony tells about the same ... why not admit I heard that too.

Peter