Dear Caelin, Grant, and Matt,
I have been an avid audiophile for over thirty years. I have been fortunate to have the ability and means to own reference grade electronic and loudspeakers and have a purpose built, sound treated listening room outfitted with an electrical sub panel, grounding system, and more than enough dedicated electric lines.
Around 1986 I got into digital, scraping my Goldmund turntable, as I found that records, no matter how good they sounded, always contained some amount of background noise or either in the form of tick and pops, or just plain old low level rumble. The problem with digital is that it created a noise of its own — grunge back on the electric line. I have used various manufactures’ power conditioning equipment over the years, but it was not until I wired my entire system with your ANACONDA ALPHA HELIX power cables, V-RAY conditioner for the front end and HYDRA 2 for the amplification, did I realize just how damned great my digital now sounds! My listening room is library quiet — almost eerily so, as again it is an isolated room both acoustically and eclectically from the rest of my home.
This room quiet, really allows your Shunyata power conditioning equipment to make my system sound like the sonic equivalent of watching a 35MM film. Everything is simply layered bare in front of me in a 180 degree and three dimensional panoramic vista of sound that is outright scary!!! Voices and musical instruments just hang in air, and when the music gets complex, it is only complex in its composition and performance, not in its conveyance through my loudspeakers. Everything is dead quiet. The high notes sparkle and the low notes growl. Your power conditioning equipment simply makes the music easy on the ears, as the brain has so much less work to do in deciphering the music and its inherent complexities of dynamics, micro dynamics, rhythmic interaction, image placement, sound staging, harmonic nuance, cohesiveness, correctness of timber, and an overall finely delineated “wholeness”. My audio system not only has been elevated to a whole different and much higher level, but it is at a level that I have never heard from any other audio system before!
Last week a good friend came over for a visit, and we listened to the music system for several hours. He initially commented on how shockingly quiet my audio system now sounds. After further listening he commented that there was now so much more information coming through my speakers that it was now hard to process — he was hearing familiar recordings that were, in his experience, revealed with much greater fidelity and resolution. At the end of our listening session he commented — Wow! Thank you for sharing that with me! What a treat!!!
A few further thoughts — I lived with a HYDRA 8 for a couple of months before I upgraded to the V-RAY. While the HYDRA 8 was excellent, the V-RAY’s performance is a definite across the board sonic upgrade, easily that of upgrading a major component. I also tried the PYTHON HELIX power cables, and I must disagree with Robert Harley’s assessment in Issue 168 of “The Absolute Sound” magazine, where he writes that the PYTHON is 98% of the ANACONDA’s performance. From my experience the PYTHON, while a most excellent power cable (better than anything else that I have ever used before it!), does not deliver the bottom half octave of bass nor the micro dynamics of the entire audio range with the same authority of the ANACONDA power cable. Perhaps a 20% performance upgrade from the PYTHON to the ANACONDA is a more appropriate percentage relationship. In the context my system, where I am using eight Anacondas, all of those 20% performance differentials add up to a huge and stunning total performance upgrade.
In summation, I am so pleased with your top grade power conditioning equipment, that it makes all other power conditioning gear that I have employed in my audio system over the past three decades sound simply wrong. I now have a mistrust of all audio reviews that I currently read that were written by reviewers who are not using Shunyata for their power conditioning, as they are not getting a true “read†on the products that they are reviewing without your equipment to properly condition the power!
I want to thank you for designing, developing, manufacturing, and marketing such amazing equipment that allows me to enjoy and appreciate my music collection as never before!
RAC