Testimonial from van den Hul Integration Hybrid Owner submitted 6/27/06:

Hi Mark:

Well, here is another testimonial and you may use it, if you want.  Here goes...the difference between my old Fender Vintage Voltage cord, and the new The Integration Hybrid is sort of like the difference between a cheap, solid state robot-made amp with circuit boards and a nice, point-to-point, hand-wired nicely-circuited tube amp -- in short, there's much more usable eq all the way around. 

I play through a nice, tight tube amp -- very early 70s vintage Fender w/reverb (that I mike with a nice Sennheiser for bigger gigs) --  and even it gained much more usable range from the new Integration Hybrid.  

Overall, it gained a great, calming clarity, as if your new cable smoothed out the final waves going to the speaker because it began with a smoother signal going to the effects chain and amp -- it was something like a quantum leap in the amp's sound, something like fixing a bad connection or replacing some "eureka" component after running previously mismatched or worn-out ones.

I have high-end, nice pickups and high-end nice pedals, and adding this cable was as beneficial as getting rid of poor pickups or discouraging, crippling pedals and replacing them with good ones. Honestly without trying to hype it up, it is a breakthrough improvement of a very real-world nature.

Or, let me say it this way.  In the same way that "you don't know what you've got, until it's gone" so it's also true that "you don't know what you've missed, if you've never had it -- until you get it."  Then, you don't ever want to go back again to the old mediocre stuff.  

Or, well  maybe this cable is like the difference between a great girlfriend versus an okay one...frankly, at this point, I'd rather be alone and wait for a great one again rather than to spend time and effort in a mismatch. A great girlfriend, like a great guitar rig, has "more usable eq" in the words that come out of her mouth, and more great "effects" in the cool things that she says and does to help "your sound" -- ie., she helps you to put the "nice" back into the things that you say to her and others because she makes it more effortless to be alive!  She brings out the best in you!  This cable is kind of like that.

Sooooooooo, whereas before, I had a more narrow band of pleasant sounding range coming out of my various guitar effects, I now have, well, I'd say, roughly a 30 to 40 percent increase in usable good tone range on basically every potentiometer of every effect.

Here comes the confessional.  I must admit that I was a little freaked out when I first plugged in the new cords.  This was because I began playing my effects without re-adjusting them after I added your cables.  I heard improvement, but I didn't initially hear $220 worth of added difference to my rig -- until I began tweaking knobs and I realized what the cables had done. Initially, I thought, honestly, well, is Mark a rip-off?  Did I buy snake oil?  However, those internal questions only lasted a few minutes.  After I began tweaking, I found a profound difference -- quite enough to justify the price paid!  The cable had simply changed my old presets so much that they were no longer optimized. I gained an incredible amount of useful tone within the parameter ranges.  The effects were freed up to do what they do, because they were set free from the new, better signal of the new cable.

In essence, I'd say that I gained about 30 percent of overall "ability" (usable eq) to my amp, effects and guitar rig.  (My humbuckers have much more usable "cream" and secondary harmonics).  And no, Mark is not a rip-off.  The product is excellent.  The service was excellent. Thanks.

Anyway, I'm a real person, not some fake testimonial...and I know tone pretty well...been playing about 25 years...but, the quest for tone is rather hard to end.  (Yes, there is some even better tone-making secret weapon somewhere in the world that I don't know about, yes, it must be true!)

Back to my testimonial, though, in addition to the outstanding increases in usable tone on the various pots, is the leap forward in usable decibels on my rig.  I can boost the volume by maybe 20 decibels over the old levels and still maintain clarity.  Prior to that, I would have gotten some unpleasant mud and/or piercing shrillness.

I would say that the waves are just smoothed out.  I don't have to worry as much any more about frying speakers because I'm not making mud.  I'm making smoother tone, clear tone.  Yet, when I want some pschadelic, grunge or metal, I've got a vast increase in secondary harmonics and creamy tinkerbell dust detail as well as an increase of maybe 20 percent precision in hearing pick-attack detail. That's what it seems like, to the best of my observation.

As usual, any change to my rig means that I am having to tweak my effects all over again, but the final eq quality of my rig is, well, honestly superb by most standards, and worth the effort to re-optimize it.  For me personally, it's as pro of a sound as I've ever been able to get, and I already received a fair amount of compliments on my rig sound prior to that. This was an expensive mod, but very well worth it. That's just the truth.  Not every musician needs these, but earnest musicians would be probably want what they've been missing, and didn't know it.

Thanks.

Jay