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Reviewer: Marja & Henk
Financial Interests: click here
Sources: CEC TL5100, Audio Note tube DAC; Philips DVP 5500S SACD/DVD player
Preamp/integrated: TacT RCS 2.0 room control system, modified Audio Note Meishu with WE 300B (or AVVT, JJ, KR Audio 300B output tubes); Trends Audio TA-10; Qables iQube; RSA Predator
Speakers: Avantgarde Acoustic Duo Omega; Avantgarde Acoustic Solo in HT 2.0 setting; Podium Sound Podium 1 [on loan]; Duevel Planets [in for review]
Cables: Audio Note AN/Vx interconnects; Siltech Paris interconnects; Gizmo silver interconnect; Qunex 75 reference interconnect; Crystal Cable CrystalConnect Reference interconnect, CrystalDigit S/PDIF RCA/RCA and RCA/BNC, Y-cable, Crystal Cable Piccolo iPod to XLR, CrystalPower Reference AC-Eur/IEC CrystalSpeak Reference; Audio Note AN-L; Gizmo silver LS cable. Nanotec Golden Strada #79 nano 3; Nanotec Golden Strada #79; Nanotec Golden Strada #201 nano3; ASI LiveLine interconnects; LessLoss DFPC [in for review]
Power line conditioning: none
Equipment racks: Two double sets of Solid Tech Radius; Acoustic System amplifier shelf
Sundry accessories: IAR carbon CD damper; Boston Audio graphite CD damper, Denson demagnetizer CD; Furutech DeMag; Nanotec Nespa #1; Machina Dynamica Magic Box; TacT RCS calibrated microphone and software; Exact Audio Copy software; Compaq server w/Windows Server 2003 and XP; iPod; wood, brass and aluminum cones and pyramids; Xitel surround processor; Manley Skipjack; ASI TopLine; Boston Audio Design TuneBlocks
Room treatment: Extensive set of Acoustic System Resonators, Diffusers and Sugar Cubes; Gizmo's Harley Davidson cap
Room size: ca. 8.0 x 4.70m with open extension to a 2.20 x 2.40m A/V bay and open kitchen. Ceiling height is 2.50m, reinforced concrete walls of 45cm, reinforced concrete floors and roof of 30cm. Room has on one side a large glass bay.
Price: $749 for two meters, discounts from 12% for 2 cables to 24% for 7 cables and more.

Some weeks ago, we were contacted by Louis Motek. Were we willing to review his power cords? Hmm. We have auditioned quite a few of them. The differences were at best noticeable but in 99% of all cases, too small to get excited over. A good power cable should deliver the juice and shield off unwanted influences for our precious music system. Next, it should have decent connectors with a good grip on the wall outlet and component inlet. What made Louis' product special that we would spend our time and energy on it?


With the Internet exposing a lot -- sometimes too much -- about a person, we typed 'Louis Motek' into our search engine. The topmost URL pointed to Louis' company site, LessLoss.com. Here we learned that Louis stems from a musical family. Nice. More important, he picked up studying several instruments - piano, cello and saxophone all had his attention. Besides whatever other instrument might be around. Reading this, our attention piqued.

Louis has pretty much been moving around the globe. He was born in Texas, USA, and spent the first 15 years of his life there. Germany became his next pied a terre for the following 8 years. He returned to the USA to find employment as a jeweler at Alex Sepkus and worked at the digital work bench of a Pro-Tools studio. For the past 14 years, Louis has been a happy citizen of Lithuania. The Pro-Tools mention compelled a detour and we hit a few more keys on the keyboard. This brought us to Baltic Sun Engraving, a company run by Louis that transforms hand-scribbled music scores into clearly legible typesetting [insert below - Ed]. Transposition services from one key to another are also offered. Hey, Louis' chimney has to smoke too.

With his diverse interests and escapades, plus the statement that he loves to waste time and enjoys a keen interest in things that current 'science' still can not explain but which nonetheless clearly exist, it was time to accept his review solicitation and cables. Plural that because even though one cable can make a difference, the system approach begs for a full loom. In our case, that meant five 2-meter snakes..


The LessLoss power cable goes by Dynamic Filtering Power Cable, DFPC for short. It implies a filtering capacity. Do we already see hairs on end? Shouldn't filtering be done by specialized devices or (re)generators? With a central filter comprised of capacitors and chokes or transformers, unwanted signal components can be removed and 'clean' power distributed to all connected equipment. The point of contention is that such filters might strangle the punch and kick out of the music. The signal that is finally fed to your speakers is nothing more than a modulated version of the AC power from the (world-wide) grid. If you want unrestricted power, you may not want any filtering. But if you want clean power, you need filtering. What a dilemma.


Enter LessLoss where Louis together with electrical engineer Vilmantas Duda created a solution that does both. We already stated that Louis loves things current mainstream science has no direct answer to. So here's a pop quiz item: How do you filter AC without filtering it?


The cables arrived in a friendly alternative way. Our nice UPS man rang and delivered five separate plastic envelopes from Kaunas, Lithuania. Each contained a plastic bag with a cable inside. Simple and effective. Why bother with a box? As a manufacturer, you'd need various sizes for one, five or fifty cables.

Handling the cables felt nice. Though weight does not mean much for a cable's electrical performance, in audio it is important. Will a cable drag a component off the rack by sheer weight? Is the cable flexible enough to be useful behind the equipment? Lessloss handles these aspects well. The beautiful braided leads are not too heavy and flexible enough. In fact, the braids do remind of long-ago school days when a certain girl could do very special things with her braids. But we digress.


Louis and Co. ultimately chose for ends the beautiful -- for plugs that is -- Oyaides. The Shuko variant we need are Oyaide's 079 type with their double polishing and double gold plating. Louis performed a complete study of all available plugs on the market, from cheap to expensive, and finally picked these. Though the plug housing consists of 30% glass in the polybutylene terephthalate crystalline polymer which forms a strong and stable base for the pins, there is more to it. As we deal with sound, hence vibration, the resonance-suppression characteristics of a plug have an impact. All materials have their own resonance factor which is influenced by external triggers. With a power plug, the first outside influence is the incoming 50 or 60Hz AC. The Oyaide sockets appear to be highly optimized to do the job well.


Here in Holland we are lucky to suffer no fixed layout for the three electrical paths regarding wall plugs. Hot and return can be either the 'left' or 'right' prong. In France for instance, the ground is fixed at a pin from the wall outlet. This prevents turning the plug 180 degrees to swap current phase. Try reversing a power plug in the US or UK!


To evaluate the LessLoss cables on their own merit, we skipped power filters or (re)generators. The latter meant we no longer had the benefit of balanced power. Now we had to figure out correct AC polarity. The IEC connector had a marking for L or live so it was expected to have the hot there. With a hot finder screwdriver, that was easy to validate. However, connecting all hots to the same side never assures that all equipment is wired correctly internally! Many websites offer tips how to find and establish correct phase/polarity by measuring a non-connected piece of equipment. You can do that or do as we did - use your ears. Once you have run through the exercise a few times, it becomes easy. To make life easier in the future, once you have found the real hot pin of the power inlets of your components, mark 'em as such. It then only takes the confirmation of the hot wire being connected properly to the power socket. With the complete set of LessLoss cables at hand, all wiring proved correct. Reviewing is manual labor.