Optimizations Ongaku

Things have been a little in flux here… which gave us a chance to listen closely to the Ongaku in several different configurations – primarily:

1. On the Rix Rax Outpost amp stand with a $2 OEM black power cord

2. On the Rix Rax with a $1600 Elrod Signature 3 power cord

3. On HRS Nibuses on an HRS M3 Isolation Base on the Rix Rax Outpost amp stand with the Elrod PCs…

And the winner is… 🙂

I wanted to try out #1 because that is what some of the diehard AN experts suggest sounds best, and we will try this again in a system cabled with just AN cables and with AN components, but….

Adding the Elrod PC:

a. Removed some of the compression. In some of the guitar notes on Sailing to Philidelphia, really simple notes by the way, with the OEM PC they sounded hardened near the top of the note envelope, like the note just ran into a wall – splat. With the Elrod there was a smooth rollover as the note went from getting louder to getting softer.

b. The Elrod revealed more harmonic content

c. The Elrod removed an ‘scratchy agreessive edge’ that the sound had had. As expected. A lot of people associate this edge with ‘immediacy’ (quickness, speed, etc.). If they don’t here it they may think something is missing. It is unfortunate that it is often the case that to get immediacy one has to accept this edge. In this case it did not seem to me to be the case, however, as I listened carefully for just this sort of tradeoff.

Interestingly, some people will sacrifice everything to get a little more immediacy, real or IMAGINED(!) (like AvantGarde owners :-)) and some will sacrifice everything to get rid of the ‘edge’ (like PS Audio, MIT, and SRA owners…. etc. etc.). The latter group significantly out-numbers the former, in my experience.

d. Finally, the Elrod brought EMOTION to the party. The music became engaging,. Enough so that it was much more difficult to listen to the sound because the music kept distracting me.

Presumably this was because some of the nuances were being lost with the cheapo power cord – or perhaps the ears were shutting down / shuttoing out nucance to protect themsleves from the ‘edge’ and ‘comrpession’ artificats.

When we added the HRS under the amp… first, what a tower, looks very Chinese ….

a. the first thing was very much improved bass response. Everything tightned up – but it was mostly the bass that now had a degree of slam that was quite … impressive.

b. the next thing I noticed was that HRS has a ‘sound’. Not sure what this sound is, but with 9 HRS bases here, and after trying them under everything (usually not in soup-to-nuts HRS setups though, but we are gaining more experience here as well), there is a quality to the sound that is recognizable. This is a sound that is hard to do better than – but it is becoming hard for me to analyze anymore – the old noggin just shuts down…. I could convince myself that this was less, the same, or more emotionally satisfying than the previous setup.

Perhaps over time it will be easier to settle this – and one should spend some time evaluating system mods like this – especially if one is subject to emotional swings on a minute by minute basis [aka doing system setups with one’s spouse :-)].