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December 9, 2006 by Michael

Audio Federation welcomes Acrolink to their Product Lines

[… talking about ourselves in the 3rd person unfamiliar… now we must be ready for politics or rap-stardom. Whoo hoo!]

Box with Acrolink 7N-PC7100 power cable

We auditioned the Box with Acrolink 7N-PC7100 power cable awhile back and were really impressed.

There are not too many times these days when we can listen to something for the first time, broken or unbroken in, and be impressed. Hmmmm….’course we talk about all those times here, so maybes y’all don’t know how many times we are duly UNimpressed…

These power cords, and what we have heard of the Acrolink line, is in my mind somewhat similar to the sound of the Nordost Valhalla. But more distinctive.

[Neli says: “I’m not sure they’re more ‘distinctive’ than Valhalla … Valhalla power cords are quite distinctive. The Acrolink are distinctive, differently from the Valhalla, not sure I can right now put my finger on it — it’s been a while since I heard them back to back, I guess I’d say that the Acrolink is even more resolute.”]

[Mike snorts and retorts: ” I meant it in the sense that the Valhalla sound is more like the sound of most other cables – better than most, in our opinion of course, but closer to the pack… not as… ‘distinctive’ :-)]

Box with Acrolink 7N-PC7100 power cable

The sound:

The 7N-PC7100 powercord, $2895/2 meters) is very detailed, more so than the Valhalla power cord, with more HARMONIC resolution (not so much ‘body’ as variety of colors) in the mids. Notes are less rounded in the mids as well, but there is so much resolution it is hard to notice.

The 7N-DA6100 interconnect $4995/1 meter) is also very detailed, a little less body than the Valhalla, not as round, but cleaner, clearer sounding, and better resolution in the upper frequencies.

At least that is my impression of the ‘Acrolink sound’ – I expect these two descriptions to converge over time because of The Remarkably Similar Sound Within ‘Most’ Manufacturer’s Particular Product Lines [more later, later meaning soon. No, really.].

Closeup Acrolink 7N-PC7100 power cable breaking in.

The Acrolink build qaulity is second to none, and the cables are bendable :-), and do not use WBT connectors (which may be a good thing or bad thing, depending on where you are coming from).

Anyway, another arrow in our quiver… !

December 6, 2006 by Michael

More on Number 4 Setup of the Powercord Shootout

We listened to this setup more this morning.

Even awake, which I was this morning, it was a very interesting sound with the Satori on the EmmLabs digital front end and the Elrod on the Edge amps.

The soundstage was quite different from the one we are used to, not at all like the suspension-of-disbelief transparency that makes one be able to squint one’s eyes and see the orchestra laid out in all its glory.

The instruments were indeed where they were supposed to be, but … it was like the information about how things were laid out In Relation To Each Other on The SoundStage was instead replaced with something else…

Now, this is going to sound weird… 🙂

But it was like it was replaced with information on how things were Related to Each Other in Purpose, or perhaps, to be a little more easy to understand as a strawman concept, Related to Each Other in Time instead of Space.

Listening to Radiohead, it was like each group of distinct notes, I do not know what they call them.. a riff perhaps, or a sub-melody, had its own life. But it was also related to the other riffs, connected by the key they are playing in, by the scale and rhythm they are all part of. And also by this point – counterpoint kind of plat that composers seem to use a lot, scripting riffs both in opposition and support of other riffs.

So, ANYway….

This system caused me, anyway, to be almost forced to be absorbed by these different aspects of the music as opposed to how I normally listen to music, which is to ‘see’ the musicians playing and hearing the music as it passes by, the words, the basic linear progression of the composition.

This is different from the ‘life’ or ‘psychadelic’ nature of the music which the Pranawire Satori added to the mix. And to think it was just adding them to the CDSD and DCC2 that made this change.

I told Neli at the time that it was like a geometric relationship now between the notes and ‘riffs’, but I do not want it to be confused with the traditional distance relationships that the images of the different notes have in a soundstage.

This is more like make visible the multi-dimensional relationships between notes, composed of tone, duration, texture, similarity of note envelope, etc. etc. and, yes, purpose – WHY those notes were composed to be there – as opposed to just where in the soundstage the musicians (or their notes, which may be located elsewhere do to those Wily Soundboarders) are located.

So two questions remain:

How do we get both the Real and this Uber Real in the same system?

and

How does a powercord, so far up in the chain, make such a difference?

Later, we put back the Shunyata powercords, one an old Python, on the Emm Labs, and the transparency and soundstaging was back to ‘Normal’.

Don’t know whether to be happy or sad.

So I’ll just be confused, instead.

And, yes, this was somewhat like our A funny thing happened on Planet Abraxus experience with the Coltrane Supremes at CES 2006.

But where that was a very ‘solid’ extra-dimensional relationship visualization experience, this was a more spiritual,…no, strike that, a more perceptive, deeper yet more ethereal experience…

We need to try the Satori, the Jorma Design ‘Prime’ and the Coltrane Supremes all together sometime…. Then maybe we can get Real, Perceptive and Solid Visuals all at the same time.

Can we handle it? [My daughter is a psych major – will she get her PHD in time? 🙂 ]

December 5, 2006 by Michael

Shootout at the PowerCord Corral – Shunyata, Pranawire, Elrod

By the wagons we got the Shunyata Anaconda Helix Alpha.

By the well we got the Elrod Signature 3.

and By the barn we got the Pranawire Satori.

OK. Ready. Set. Play!

The system we compared them on was the following: Kharma Mini Exquisite loudspeakers, Edge Signature One amps, Lamm L2 linestage, and EmmLabs DCC2 SE / CDSD SE CD / SACD front end. INDRA interconnect between the DCC2 and the L2, Valhalla between the L2 and amps, and Jorma No. 1 between the amps and speakers.

We tried out all 3 power cables on the Edge Signature One amps.

First up were the Shunyata Anaconda Helix Alpha (who win the award for the longest name). Usually we like the Shunyata Anaconda Helix Vx cords better than the Alpha cords on the Edge, and now was probably no exception, but the Vx cords were on the Audio Note M10 linestage power supplies on a different system… so…

We played the first track on Radiohead Amnesiac. My thought when it was all over was that nothing was going to beat this – the resolution and imaging and ‘techno feel’ was first rate. And I was right, as far as it went, that nothing did beat them in these categories – there are other categories however… always more categories…

Photo taken after the shootout. Here we see the power cables with the red label (Shunyata Anaconda Helix Alpha), the green label (Shunyata Pyython [sic, WordPress has a bug that does not allow this to be spelled correctly, since this is also the name of a computer language it is confusing the poor thing…] going to the Soundlab speakers – not in the shootout), gray label (Shunyata Anaconda Alpha that were powering the Emmlabs), the silver-braid shielded power cords are the Pranawire Satori, and the big (but not as big as their brothers!) Elrod Signature 3 power cords. Oh, and the cords that look like red and blue stripes is the Valhalla going to the Lamm L2 linestage.

We also played Mark Knopfler’s Sailing to Philidelphia – first two tracks. [Pick this up if you like Mark Knopfler and high-quality music and sound – we’ve had many people who wrote the name of this CD down after hearing it here].

On the first track, Mark plays several licks that are up front and can be biting unless there is a lot of support from the system in terms of not just resolution, but harmonic integrity – the notes have to swell just right or they rise too fast and sound ‘bright’. It is in this respect that we prefer the Shunyata Vx cords on these amps – they handle the notes in a more relaxed, organic manner that seems to fit most of the music better.

Next volley was heard from the Pranawire Satori. Pranawire has a trademark sound that is, what we call ‘psychedelic’ [or acid-like …including flash-backs] (and the Jorma Design Prime cable has some of this too, but in a different context, as do the Kharma loudspeakers). This sound is very very engaging – somewhat like 2A3 tubes in a good amplifier in that it is very subtle yet readily recognizable. Which is to say it does NOT distort the sound in order to entertain the listener in some kind of gross way by catering to the common human weakenesses for syrupy or euphonic sound.

It is a sound that is hard to describe – it is like adding ‘life’ to the music, or ‘color’ where there was none before but we were colorblind and did not know it. Anyway, with the power cords on the amps we heard this ‘effect’, which we have heard in their top-of-the-line cosmos speaker cable, but not so much in their cosmos interconnect. YMMV.

As for the sound, per se, solidity in the soundstage was better than the Shunyata for various instruments, accompanied by a reduction in resolution and – if I remember correctly (Neli is at the gym) a reduction in mircodynamics and air but an increase in the ability to swell dynamics from one state to another.

In many ways this was similar to going from solid-state to tubes – it is a tradeoff and depending on you and your system, you may or may not like it. I liked it, and certainly from the point of view of being a system builder: now I could add this ‘sound’ without having to deal with the somewhat large Cosmos speaker cable – which had some other side-effects – or having to swap out amps of source components or anything. I.E. swapping powercords for for the listener [who might be us!] who wants something a little more engaging (albeit a little less real) at the moment is now as easy as switching a power cord or two.

Radiohead’s voice and Khopfler’s guitar were all wonderously colorful and alive – there was however some reticience in the transition from one note to the next which we interpreted as probably resulting from these powercords being not quite burned in yet. [If you have been following the Blog lately, you might understand how we are growing impatient waiting for things to finish breaking in around here… 😉 ]

The Elrod mosey’s in with the shotgun.

The sound of these was surprising to me … more detail (though not quite as much as the Shunyata Alpha) and much more separation – the soundstage really cleared up. The solidity was about the same as the Pranawire (the Anaconda Alpha had better pinpoint imaging than either – but it was not as 3D or ‘solid’). The Shunyata Anaconda Helix Vx has been our reference on these amps – and will continue to be so as it has performed well in 100s of system configurations we have set up – but the Elrod Signature 3, which we are learning more and more about, did much of what *we* like in a system, which is walk that fine, fine edge between real and musical. It entertained our minds, fooled our minds, and warmed our hearts (though that last not quite as aggressively as the Satori 🙂 )

As a final test, we replaced both the powercords that were powering the Emmlabs transport and DAC with the Satori, they were what I think are from the photos Anaconda Vx (not the new Helix) . Could we hear the Pranawire effect even with the cords on a low current device like the digital front end?

The asnswer was yes, but it was only about between 15 and 25% of the effect it had when on the amps, in my estimation. It also clouded up the soundstage some,,, I think. It was weird. Maybe I was too tired at this point. Instruments and voices just sort of appeared in the soundstage, solid, but then faded from view somehow. It someway this was much more REAL than anything I have heard before in terms of what happens when a musician plays something then stops for a few moments. Or it was totally wacky and unnatural as the msucians did not seem to be in the same universe – much less in the same studio – but who knows, maybe they weren’t.

Anyway, more experiemtation is needed with mix and matching of these cords together in various systems.

Finale.

Acrolink burning in on the Winter burn-in device

So. We didn’t get to hear from the Shunyata Anaconda Helix Vx, nor from the Valhalla (which is on the Lamm L2 in this shootout – but we do not usually put it on the Edge, but in a shootout, ANYthing can happen 🙂 ), nor the Acrolink 7N power cords (which in some ways are the ultimate powercord, having both most intensly detailed resolution we have heard in a PC along with an even handed approach to harmonic body).

in Edge / Elrod / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Kharma / Reviews / Showroom 3 / Sounding Off 4 comments

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