The system

I mentioned yesterday the separation attributes I am hearing now on the new music system, of which the Infinity IRS is the center piece. Several of you asked me if anything else had changed in the system that might account for this - so I'll describe the entire chain again - because three things have changed all at once: the speakers, the room and the interconnects. I will say that one of the good/bad parts of installing a speaker system that magnifies every little nuance as well as wart in the electronic chain is that if something's not right you hear it immediately. So one of my fears was "how would our equipment stack up under the scrutiny of this magnifying process?" Turns out it's even better than I thought - but let's face it - it could have gone the other way just as easily. Truly it was a crap shoot and one I would have openly shared with my readers. In the system now are 4 P10 Power Plants as the foundation for the power. 1 P10 is running the rack of source equipment, another is powering the PerfectWave Power Amplifier (which is not overkill because it can put out close to a couple of thousand watts if needed), and then one P10 on each of the woofer towers - as these are each powered by a 1500 watt servo bass amp. Each P10 is on its own dedicated AC line. The source rack has a PerfectWave Transport and DAC sitting on a PowerBase, a Clear Audio Master Solution turntable and arm, a NuWave Phono Converter feeding the output of the turntable into the PWD and a separate shelf in the rack for when we have new designs to test. Both the transport and the NPC are connected to the DAC through HDMI cables using I²S. The entire rack output is fed through a single pair of 15 meter Audioquest balanced cables that use their DBS system. That's really about it and the only real changes between this system and the last, aside from the speakers and the room, is the Audioquest cables. Previously I had a pair of our own Statement XLR balanced interconnects and those were replaced with the new AQ's. I just did a comparison between the original PS Statement interconnects laying on the floor, vs. the new AQ DBS based cables running through the walls and the differences were quite startling. The AQ's are clear, open and startling in their clarity - without even a hint of hardness. I am not sure what magic is going on here, but clearly these cables rock.