On the Margins:
"This is Good Enough," Part I: "Audio Satisfaction" Revisited
Tom Davis

When is "Good Enough" ... Good Enough?

Loving sound means craving change in perception. That’s why audiophiles compulsively move between different ways of "making sound." Whether it’s from solid-state to single-ended tube to digital-direct amplification, or from cone to horn to 7.1 surround, or from LP to CD to SACD, such moves don’t converge on the "the absolute sound." They exhaust one way of hearing a difference in favor of another. Such migrations won’t end until you either let go of loving sound for its own sake, or, having amassed a whole variety of qualitatively different "sound systems," you simply have fun learning how to listen better from those multiplied perspectives. Alas, I don’t have the bucks for the "multiplied perspective" solution. And is it in the end really a solution to audiophile nervosa? Over the past two years I’ve tried to bring a single perspective on the reproduction of music in my living room to the point where I can let go of my past fixation on the means of reproduction. Before I move on to limiting myself to discussing music here at PF, I’d like to lay out the details of how I came to say, "This is good enough." Perhaps for those of you who also take delight in the gift of the human voice in intimate settings, a system similar to what follows might help you say, "This is good enough."

I’ve divided this full system review into two parts. The synergy that makes or breaks a system as a whole (setting aside for now the question of the speaker/room interface) is built up from smaller sub-system synergies. In a purist two-channel system, the main sub-systems are the front end, which I’ll cover in Part One, and the amp/speakers, which I’ll cover in Part Two. Over these past two years in true obsessive-compulsive audiophile fashion my system has almost entirely changed — almost, except for the Rowland Synergy preamp (with its BPS-1 battery power supply) that I’ve owned long enough to have upgraded to "II" status. I could not have built the system to be discussed in Parts One and Two without the battery-powered Synergy’s crystal, yet still gentle, clarity.

The rest of my "This is good enough" system consists of the 96/24 Electrocompanient EMC-1 Reference CD player, Electrocompanient AW-180 Class A solid-state monoblocks, Audio Physic Avanti Century speakers and Luna sub-woofer, with all electronics sitting atop Symposium Ultra platforms, and all balanced interconnect and speaker cabling JPS Superconductor II. Here in Part One, I’ll discuss the issue of "legacy CD players" by way of the stunning Electrocompanient (hereafter EC) EMC-1 Reference, saving the amp/speaker combo (and the Symposium Ultras) for Part Two. I’ll begin, however, with the way power gets handled, specifically the importance of isolating digital and analogue "pathways" as completely as possible.

The Difference (Isolated) Power Makes
My digital "pathway" consists of plugging the EC player into the $995 PS Audio Power Plant 300 with a $1500 JPS Kaptovator powercord, and then using another Kaptovator between the PowerPlant 300 and the wall. Nothing else gets plugged into the PowerPlant 300.

The EC player connects up with the battery run Synergy with balanced JPS Superconductor II. And another balanced pair of Superconductor IIs take the output signal from the Synergy to the EC monoblocks plugged into the Equi=tech balanced power conditioner with, again, Kaptovators. The monos have the Equi=tech all to themselves. If I could, I would have given the digital pathway and the analogue pathway their own custom-wired circuits, but alas, that’s not possible in my living room. Given that limitation, analogue and digital pathways are as isolated as possible, and I now have a quiet system. Let’s get more specific.
 

The PS Audio Power Plant 300
Instead of trying to clean up what comes out of your wall, the Power Plant 300 literally regenerates a new carefully distortion controlled output. Since I’m no techie, I refer you to www.psaudio.com for details. I ditched the stock power cord in favor of JPS Lab’s new Kaptovator (more on this below). And since you can control the "power factor" output frequency (from 50 Hz to 120 Hz, again see their website), I played with the full range before settling on a fairly standard 65 Hz output, which gave me all the benefits I’m about to describe without a curious kind of skewed fowardness at the higher "power factor" output frequencies (here I’m certain your mileage will vary).

The immediate and most important advantage of using the Power Plant’s regenerated juice to isolate my digital front-end from the rest of the system was a striking noise floor drop. We’re not talking subtle here. Music seemed louder at the same volume setting, a telltale sign of decreased distortion, as was greater inner detail. When so moved, I can play music louder and longer without fatigue. And all from a lower noise floor.

The quieter your system, the less it gets in the way. While PS Audio has measured decreases in distortion artifacts (again see their website), the proof is in the pudding, the pudding here being expressive freedom. From the timbral signature of instruments to vocal inflection, musical nuance is simply more "there" to hear. I just can’t see how you could go wrong by isolating your digital front-end with PowerPlant 300/Kaptovator combination.

The JPS Labs Kaptovator
I know there are even more expensive power cords on the market that I haven’t heard, but the Kaptovators wrought an improvement I simply didn’t expect over using the PowerPlant 300 with its stock cord. For while I certainly noticed the noise floor drop without the Kaptovators, using them further dropped the noise floor enough to bring out bass articulation that had gone missing before. A sub-woofer is almost guaranteed to be a royal pain in the ass, but a good part of "dialing in" the Audio Physic Luna began with "dialing in" the front-end with the Kaptovators. I’ve read about the importance of the "foundation" for harmonic overtones; well, hearing is believing. And once heard you can’t give it up, however much I, for one, don’t want to get stuck on bass for its own sake (more on that when I turn to the Luna). The point, yet again, is musical nuance, a word not often used in bass reproduction. Adding the Kaptovators to the Power Plant gave me articulately nuanced bass.

I know $1500/power cord is expensive, even at reviewer accommodation it’s nothing to sneeze at. But the basic reason I settled on JPS Labs several years ago was cost-effectiveness. Perhaps only an "over the top" audiophile could call $1500 power cords "cost-effective," but now I’m not tempted to fiddle. The improvements were clear and repeatable, and I wanted them to be consistent throughout the whole system, so having bought the pair to isolate the digital front end, I got another pair for the EC monos, and a final one for the Equi=tech. That’s what it took to get to "This is good enough."

The Equi=tech ET1.5Q balanced power conditioners
It’s been almost a year since I added the Equi=tech ET1R to my system. Balanced power has become the rage in powerline conditioning and for the same reason I just emphasized : reduction in distortion artifacts and thereby a lowering of the noise floor. For technical details go to www.equitech.com. But here again you just can’t go wrong with less distortion, and this strategy for getting rid of noise was first patented and pushed by Equi=tech. This is no nonsense, last a lifetime rugged, pro-audio gear. The only distraction, beside their loud yin-yang corporate logo, was equally loud transformer hum with the ET1R. I lived with it (you can’t hear it with music playing), because, after the ear-opening clarity of the Synergy, it was the noise floor drop provided by the ET1R that set me off on my search for even greater quiet. Which, ironically, made the hum ever increasingly annoying. Enter Equi=tech’s new "Q" transformers. Innovation at Equi=tech is about better and better isolation transformers, and theyıve scored big with the new "Q" series transformer in the ET1.5RQ.

First, hum-wise it’s dead quiet (and I mean dead quiet). Second, the noise floor dropped even further. (Just how far can it go down? I suppose we’ll have to see where SACD plugged straight into digital amplification will take us). Third, it’s not just bass articulation, but soundstage improvement. Indeed right off my room grew and the layered placement of instruments and vocalists became both easier to discriminate and more natural in presentation. Which made a strength of the Audio Physic Avanti Centurys even more compelling (more on this below).

I want a soundstage that helps music communicate. I don’t have home theater and I have yet to hear a musically compelling multichannel system. (How long will it take producers and engineers to develop a mature multichannel recording aesthetic? 5 years? 10 years?). I honestly enjoy stereo. Don’t you? The reaction against soundstage pyrotechnics that developed at the late Fi, and continues at Listener is, in the end, misplaced (though Art Dudley certainly has his heart in the right place when it comes to putting music first). I can better let myself be drawn into following a musical idea when it’s clearly present before me. I don’t have to be immersed to be compelled here, but effective stereo helps. I’ve never had more musically effective stereo than that produced by combining an isolated digital front-end with the equally isolated EC monos plugged into the Equi=tech ET1.5 "Q" conditioner.

Summing Up the Difference (Isolated) Power Makes
Once I discovered just how quiet my system can become, I think the importance of isolating the different "paths" of your system is clear. It was Positive Feedback’s own Clark Johnsen who first insisted that paying attention to power pays off. Just be sure to isolate your power pathways, be it by way of isolation transformers or power regeneration. By adding such isolation to a system balanced from the EMC-1 player to the EC AW-180 amps, Iıve taken noise reduction as far as analogue amplification (and my apartment’s wiring) will allow.

Is there a down side? Again, it’s expensive. OK, but musically? When distortion clues have been reduced to just bad engineering decisions, there are moments when, on well-recorded material, there is a startling clarity that doesn’t call attention to itself, but just lets the music speak. Getting power right in an already mature system is one of the last steps you’ll need to take to say, "This is good enough." For me, however, that step was built on a foundation provided by Electrocompanient.

Legacy CD Players:

The Electrocompanient ECM-1 Reference
Does it make sense today to buy a $4000 CD player? Linn’s $20,000 CD-12 has pushed the notion of a "legacy" player, but the coming introduction of relatively cheap 24/192 upsampling chips will soon make such sums of cash for a dated technology appear, well, crazy. If any technology is designed to make fools of both "early adopters" and nostalgic hangers-on, it’s digital’s 6 month (or less) turnover rate. And of course that’s assuming neither DVD-Audio or SACD take off in a big way. Does the idea of a "legacy" CD player make sense in the way a "legacy" LP turntable does for those of you with large record collections? I suspect that depends on how each pretender to that role sounds. Electrocompanient’s very first CD player sounds damn good.

The European take on this player is that it sounds "analogue." My last analogue front-end is ten years gone now (with my ex-wife). But I enjoy listening to our Editor’s full Linn setup when I "go visiting." And I’ve also heard Linn’s CD-12 in David’s system. Using those fond memories as a standard, does the ECM-1 sound "analogue"? Analogue is all about resolute ease: being drawn into musical detail comes so naturally you don’t notice you’ve already let yourself in. By that standard the CD-12 and the EMC-1 both come close to "analogue," though you’ll spend $16,000 more to enjoy the Linn.

Of course you won’t get the Linn’s build-quality; I can attest to its being one of the few true "jewels" of audio architecture. But the EMC-1 is quite handsome with its thick acrylic front plate and clean overall design. Sitting atop my Sound Anchors equipment stand on a Symposium Ultra platform, it shows itself off quite well, except for a too bright red "standby" light.

Given this player’s almost 50-pound weight, you might think the Ultra platform a bit of overkill. But here I’m just augmenting the design strategy announced with the letters "EMC": Electro-Mechanical-Cancellation. And although the player’s bare bones manual is not exactly forthcoming on how they’ve gone about canceling vibrations, EC’s philosophy is to treat the laser pickup analogously to a turntable’s tonearm/cartridge. Looking inside, you’ll find the Philips "pro" top-loading CD drive embedded in its own 18 pound suspended sub-structure. The 24/96 Delta-Sigma chip-set is upgradeable, but don’t expect SACD or DVD-Audio. The strictly CD accomplishment here is a gentle clarity, cousin to analogue’s resolute ease, unexpected from previous digital reproduction. I haven’t yet heard SACD, perhaps I’ll be blown away like a growing number of others, but the question about a "legacy" CD-player represents a different concern than comparing the apples and oranges of different technologies. What I want to know is whether I can happily replay my 500 or so CDs on the EMC-1. Yes, I can. But there’s a story here.

Before ending up with the EMC-1, I decided to see what the 24/96 DAD hoopla was about and got a Pioneer 414 DVD to feed into a (bought used) Mark Levinson 360 DAC (with a JPS Superconductor II digital cable in between). The ML-360 tempted me as a "final purchase" because of its software upgradeability (for example, its HDCD is software, not hardware, based).

How did this combo sound? Damn good with more detail reproduction than the EMC-1. Yet still I sold the ML-360 (whose new owner then discovered a channel that didn’t work, though the channel I’d used did, so take that into consideration in my following remarks). An intermittent distortion problem showed up that I traced to the RCA digital out of the Pioneer 414, though, perhaps, given what its new owner discovered, there was also a problem with the ML-360. That set me to thinking about the vagaries of multiple digital boxes, as well as the vagaries of early adoption. By the time I was done thinking, and after hearing the Linn CD-12 in David’s system, I decided I wanted a one-box legacy player. Let’s go back to the detail retrieval superiority of the ML-360 over the EMC-1.

High-end’s distinct advantage over live music is following the intimate inflection of a voice or a violin in detail at your leisure. That advantage then depends on how such detail is presented. With my previous Resolution Audio CD-50, I slowly came to realize (listening to the Linn CD-12 helped) that the so readily available detail was actually too "forward" for the music’s own good, as if reproduction had been "tilted up" to precisely emphasize detail. "Music’s own good" means keeping the different "parts" of a recording in relevant balance. But once noticed, the CD-50s forwardness became a distraction: too much irrelevant detail was being pushed up front to compete with the relevant detail of, say, the singer’s vocal inflection. The ML-360 got the detail retrieval right: the forwardness retreated (if anything things got a little laid back), yet there was clearly more detail to be found when one wanted to listen for it. Greater detail was there, it just wasn’t pushed in a way that distracted from the main thematic focus.

The EMC-1 fits the Mark Levinson paradigm. It retrieves almost as much detail as the 360 and gets the distribution of relevant and irrelevant right: you hear further into the main musical thematic focus (like the inflections of a singer’s voice) without being distracted by supporting themes, which are nonetheless there to be heard in detail when you turn your attention that way. So if the EMC-1 is not quite the equal of the ML-360 in detail retrieval, is it superior in any way? Well, yes. Instruments and voices sound "more themselves" on the EMC-1, though here, again, the difference is small. That’s what I’ve heard, but does it make sense?

Consider: if the ML-360 retrieves more, if only slightly more, detail, shouldn’t that translate into more accurate timbral reproduction? I think it should, but in my listening notes, it did not. Listening to the EMC-1, I found myself going, "Well that sure sounds more like a cello." And that on very familiar tracks. I honestly don’t know how to account for this difference, but there it is. And to repeat one last time, there could have been something wrong with the ML-360, but looking back I just don’t miss its ability to dig out a few more details than the EMC-1. What I do miss, however, is the ML-360’s ability to play HDCD disks. And though I have only a handful, they simply don’t sound as good on the EMC-1, which can’t decode HDCD. That’s a loss that, I suppose, could grow larger if more music I listen to goes HDCD. I doubt that will happen, but who knows?

Ergonomically, the EMC-1 is a genuine pleasure to use: you push back the clever "set into the body" top-loading "drawer" (which allows you to put it inside most racks) to expose the CD-drive, place the CD, plop down the magnetic puck (which has been resting on the provided circular felt pad on top of the unit), close the drawer, and listen. The remote has a convenient layout for my left-handed use (I keep the remote for the Synergy in my right hand). The only control I miss is turning the display down or off. Of course, like a true dweeb, I tend to listen in the dark with my eyes closed. What can I say? The fewer the distractions the better, because the EMC-1 is presenting music so well that I just don’t worry all that much about what Sony and Toshiba are doing. That is the definition of a "legacy" CD player.

Is CD an outdated format? Yes. Will the vast majority of the music I listen to over the next four years come out on CD? Yes. Do I really need to save money for a down-payment on Julia and my home-to-be? Yes. Can I afford to wait four years to see just where multichannel is musically going? Yes.

Given all those "Yeses," was buying the EMC-1 as a legacy player a good decision? Yes. But it was even better, since dealing with the Electrocompanient importer, Alan Warshaw of Jason-Scott Importing, proved to be such a good experience that I decided to try out the AW-180 monoblocks. And, yes, one great thing quite literally led to another. I’ll turn there in Part Two.

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