by Michael

How Much Fun

We have so many things in the queue … so many things lined up to try, that it gets a little overwhelming. The exact sequence of things gets a lot of discussion and seems to be updated on an almost hourly basis.

We have:

1. Compare the charged ELROD powercord that has been on the Nordost ViDar cable burner to a charged ELROD that has not been on the burner – i.e. How does the ViDar affect performance? We already did the cold (uncharged) Vidar’ed ELROD compared to the hot (charged) un-ViDar’ed ELROD. [Note, ELRODs take about 3 days or so to charge up their capacitors]. While this was ijntersting, and we will report on it, not being the brightest bears in the woods, we finally realized that this was kind of confusing [I bet you are confused, too, by now :-)], overloading the charged versus uncharged test with the Vidar’ed versus un-Vidar’ed test.

I said it was fun. But it also requires a degree in Research Methods… apparently.

2. Compare the Kegon Balanced with the old high-gain Kegons. We can do this on the Kharma Mini Exquisites – which we anticipate will show that 1) … well, let’s not make any predictions [see, I’m getting smarter. Maybe there is hope…]. But the Kharma is actually quite hard to drive, especially the bass – especially if you want that big open Kharma sound [Kharmas always sound exciting and delicious and big, but not always that room pressurizing wrap-around that many people crave like hot butter on potatoes].

3. Compare the Nordost ODIN speaker cable to the Jorma Design PRIME speaker cable on the Marten Coltrane Supremes. This will be… well, there may not be a winner. I expect the ODIN to be more dynamic, which the Supremes love, and the PRIME to be more detailed, which the Supremes love. But for all I know I am getting it exactly backwards. That’s what shootouts are for. Proving it one way or another [at least with respect to the equipment we have here – we do try to perform part of a shootout on a completely different system to make sure that out results more or less reflect the general case].

4. Compare the Kharma Mini Exquisites to the Audio Note SEC High Efficiency Signature speakers. OK, yes, completely different… but both are 2-ways and, well they were the same price but now the Minis are $60K [seen the dollar lately?] and, well the AN speakers are… we’ll know when Neli gets the price list out [uh, oh, she’s gonna smack me when she reads this… I am already bracing for the impact… hurry up and finish this so I can delete it before she sees it :-)]. I expect the Kharmas to be more detailed and the AN more dynamic. Duh. AN is almost horn-like and Kharma has that legendary midrange resolution. But what else will we hear?

5. Compare the M1 phono stage to the Lamm LP2 phono preamplifier. OK, Neli thinks this test is stupid too… but I want to hear the difference in character between the two. We’ve had a number of other inexpensive and expensive phono stages in here, so this is not all THAT outrageous.

6. Compare the old EMM Labs CDSA to the new one with the upgraded transport and feet. We should be getting close to getting 700 hours on the new CDSA soon now, one would think [I don;t have a little 700 hours cooking timer on it or anything].

7. Oh yeah, we still have to do the interconnect shootout where the signal is quite large, between the preamp and the amp. We actually point to a system periodically and say ‘oh, this would be a convenient time and configuration to perform the aforementioned test’ [well, we don’t use the word ‘aforementioned’ in casual conversation, sorry]. But do we sit down and do the shootout? Noooooooo. It does take about 6 or 7 hours of focused concentrated listening, so it is hard to find the time. But soon….

8. We want to compare the high-power ELROD powercords to the low-powered ones on the Lamm ML2.1. At what point to low-powered amps draw high-power? Just what IS the difference in sound between the two?

9. I am sure there is a 9. And 10….

in Audio Note / Elrod / Emm Labs / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Jorma Design / Kharma / Nordost 0 comments
 by Michael

Burning in the ELrod power cord on the Nordost Vidar

We have to jury rig the Vidar in order to burn in power cords.


The Vidar passes a very complex sequence of low power signals over cables when it is burning them in. We have run two full cycles, about 8 – 9 days, s far.

How this works for power cords, which one might think would like to be broken in with, say, a monstrous 10 amp signal, we’ll see in the upcoming shootout between this and the exact same powercord that has just been sitting in the system on a transport.


We will probably have to do two shootouts, because it takes about 3 days for an Elrod power cable to full charge up, because they have a large amount of capacitance.

So two shootouts, unless the Vidar’d powercord is obviously better: one with the Vidar’d power cord straight off the burner,. and one with the Vidar’d power cord sitting in the system somewhere charging up for 3 days so that both it and the UN-Vidar’d powercord are BOTH charged up.

Hard work these shootouts…. or maybe just hard work sometimes explaining them 🙂

in Elrod / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Nordost 0 comments
 by Michael

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 :-)].

in Audio Note / Elrod / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / HRS 0 comments