What is life anyway? The routine eat, work and sleep? Long before the birth of toy, men busy make babies. Hobby induces nonsensical behavior. Give me my toy and I will stop harassing you. We have property bubbles but how come no audio bubbles? Audio prices rise way beyond our salary, this indeed is a sad story. Smell of troubles? Let tomorrow worry for itself. I could not spend lavishly as some could but I can tweak, I tweak like no tomorrow.
Resonance control is one area not to be neglected. It's role is bigger than we could have ever imagined. Speaker stand is a very good example and do not play down the importance of audio rack too. Good audio racks do not come cheap, you get what you pay. ET spider rack serves me well, it is versatile too. It allows me to mix and match with different hardness coefficient, rather than the supplied rubber footers. Moving forward, power cord resonance control is a game changer. Virtual Dynamic adds sands in their power cord line up, Accustic Arts with ferrite beads to curb vibrations, EFI and RFI, what more cotton fiber filling, cable jacket and cable sleeve. That's how garden hose power cords come about.
Long before that, all plugs sit on a support for the sake of minimising resonance. You know it too, in some cases, the sagging connections are not tight fit. These are eye sore to me, don't they to you? A steady connectivity is vital to any system. Taking a twist, I sit my power cords on PU foam (fruit packaging) and egg crates.
Egg crate is a cost effective resonance control. I see many hawkers place their chopping board on egg crates for cushioning, each chop receives less feedback. I am using plastic egg crate presently until I get some paper egg crates. You can savage these things from your kitchen. Unless you have amber space to afford the luxury of placing your rigs on the floor, that would be ideal. The best that I can come up with is partial resonance control on the power cords.
Now, the most intriguing things about power cord resonance control, it brings different results with where the resonance control at. This, I had been told. You will have to get your hands dirty and bend your back a bit. A tip, fine tune at both ends of power cord by moving the supports. If that not satisfactory, you may want to sag the power cord at certain point for tuning. Transparency and tonal balance are what you get at the end of the day, experience the off loading effect. Ideally, you might want your power cords to be less coiled/less stressed and leveled. This is easier said than done.
Holy cow! My eyes pop for my system responds to the slightest things I do, it speaks up. Slap me, somebody! Constant tuning sort of sharpen my listening skills. I do not believe the golden ear theory. Your listening abilities are as good as mine but knowing what to listen is another matter. With the resonance control in place, the upper bass muddiness has been offloading, phenomenal. The sound gets lighter and swifter.
Ruggiero Ricci playing Wieniawski under Dynamic label, wow! The bow actions and the nuances and subtleties are crazy. Dynamic label is known for transparency and clean recording, all hifi attributes you ever asked for are there. Ruggiero recorded this album at 65, for many couldn't ever hold a glass steady at that age. Remarkable hand-mind coordination at 65, I just hope that I won't be needing a walking stick then. The pesticide in our vegetation, the beta agonists in our livestock, the food chemical ... are taxing our bodies.
This CD will reveal the shortcoming of ill balanced sounding system. Ruggiero's playing is fiery and explosive, working the strings like modern violinist. Great technical command, he is a violin tactician. He plays with Guaneri De Gesus, a violin known for its dark G tone, powerful perfectly complimenting his aggressive play. Now, every violinist has a playing signature, some are more distinct than the others. Ruggiero camps on Heifetz side, technical prowess and fast. Sounded a little cold, oppose to David Oistrakh or Itzhak Perlman, they fiddle the violin with tone color.
You have got to be careful with this CD, it will sound dry and agitated like not getting paid for his performance. With the wrong power cord, I can't help feeling the violin virtuoso is rushing his performance to get off the stage for his beer.
The complexity of piano harmonic can not be duplicated, the intermittent sub harmonics of keyboard, hammer, strings, sound board and pedals, all in one harmonic. The microphone could not capture the abundance of information of piano, in close distance, the nuances of piano is overwhelming. This effect fades when distance comes into play. Hence, listening from 10 feet away will not be better than what is reproduced from the CD unless you have Elf hearing ability. One of the measures of a system is how much rightness of piano reproduction and the overtones preservation.
Richter plays Debussy is one of my treasured CDs. Richter first live recording on CD, how about that! Sviatoslav Richter was a difficult pianist, he was reported walking out of a performance for no valid reasons. But his piano artistry is truly amazing, he is right there with the greatest there is. Far out weight his difficult personality, but we all forgive him when the maestro started to play. The CD is under a Russian label? I was skeptical about the recording nevertheless. Boy! The recording turned out to be sssu....perb.
The reverberations were everywhere. The wooden floor, the wobbling mike, the ventilation, scary realism. The ringing of the strings is forever, tide after tide. You do not get any better imperfection than this and the imperfection renders realistic. With power cord resonance control on, nuances become tangible as if I was on stage with him.
In short, we can not kill resonance but we can control it. The reward is transparency. Transparency allows us to count head in choral works, greater tangibility and spatial separation. This underlies a balancing act, transparency/density trade off. Mom used to say, you can't have your cake and eat it too. So, pandai pandai lah sendiri. The resonance control will dilute the character of power cord. My DIY WE power cord sounded as if had shed off some fat. I am happy to hear the overtones wholeness, that's to me is gold. And isn't this fidelity we all strive to achieve? Try this and tell me if I am wrong.
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