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Post relocation and after setting up the audio kit, it became time for a first listen. That was an ordeal on the order of Dante’s descent into the underworld. However, the sound we were getting—it sure wasn’t music—is what many modern non-audiophile listeners put up with all the time. Most modern dwelling sport hard bare floors of tile or laminate, reflective walls and sparse furnishing. It was time for counter measures. The first was a listening sofa a meter from the back wall to set up behind it a full-width bookshelf. Then we applied our Franck Tchang lessons and arranged a series of sugar cubes, resonators and diffusers throughout the house. Except for a nasty bass boom, we were quite happy. The bass boom got sorted out quickly when we sent a photo of the setup to Franck who slapped our hand by return e-mail and pointed out that we had one resonator too low on the back wall.


The real problem was power delivery. First, the listening room and most parts of the new house are devoid of proper electrical grounding. Only the wet area has fully grounded wall outlets. So our hifi system suffered from severe hum and buzz through the speakers. What’s more, the Audio Note amplifier buzzed mechanically at  50Hz. We took the amp to our friendly audio doctor for a checkup. He found nothing wrong except a leaky WE 300B. Before an eventual tube short might blow the amp, he advised new valves. Lesson learned. Check your tubes regularly for leaks indicated by the whitening of the shiny area, in case of the 300B at the bottom of the bulb. We thus had a different problem altogether. After due measurements, we isolated a DC component that rode on the wall AC. A PS Audio Humbugger III successfully filtered that out and the amp returned to being as mechanically quiet as we knew it from before.


The real project was attending to proper grounding. After trying to tie into the existing ground of the adjacent shed through a hole in the wall—worse than no grounding—we drove a copper rod into the ground just outside the listening room. With our ground water level only 40cm below the garden’s surface, 3 meters seemed sufficient. After soldering a copper wire to the rod on one end and connecting a wall plug to the other with only the ground in use, we finally hit pay dirt. One final hurdle turned out to be mechanical. We eventually understood that the new heating pump was sending a pulse through the embedded pipes of the listening room floor. After adequately isolating the equipment from said floor, that problem was finally history too. The entire process of packing, moving, unpacking, installing and fine-tuning the new space consumed a few months. But we did arrive at a listening space which rivaled the former on sonic performance.

Let’s backtrack now. Before packing up our belongings, we had the LessLoss Firewall up and running in the Rotterdam apartment. Prior to running it in with industrial appliances, we tried the huge apparatus in our audio system and weren’t pleased. The first base line was zero filtering straight into the wall. Then came the LessLoss DFPC power cords which, compared to the non-filtering cables we used before, lowered the noise floor for better dynamics and deeper relaxation. This became our new baseline. Against it, the FireWall had to be condemned to proper break in first.


Revisiting it six weeks later involved some effort. The log-shaped device is not only bulky and hard to place, its layout of outlets is challenging too. One end has the IEC receptor, 76cm away on the other end sit two sets of four Oyaide outlets. We had to alter our cable layout to accommodate the FireWall. With five DFPC cords running the equipment and one DFPC Signature between Firewall and wall, how did it sound? First off, we now could lower our standard listening volumes without suffering losses. With 6wpc coming from our 300B amp into the 107dB Avantgarde Duo Omega horns, little power always went a long way but now less became even more. Lower SPLs conveyed greater nuances, albeit not by Photoshop contrast heightening with edge pixilation but as intrinsic nuances revealed by a cleaner electrical environment. Within this optimized power delivery, the process of the music signal traversing various components to the loudspeakers seemed better synchronized and apparently performed with higher efficiency.

In particular small jazz ensembles and classical chamber music gained in involvement. Dynamics smoothed out as not wild bursts of energy but naturally tracking steps in loudness. The claimed cascading effects of five DFPC cords and the 120-times potency of the Firewall filter apparently removed electrical gremlins which relaxed the music without slowing it down. Much power line garbage of course ends up there injected by the audio gear itself. Grouping a set of audio components together in a small space creates an EMI/RFI furnace that radiates interferences.


Returning to the DFPC-only baseline made a much bigger immediate difference. At the same volume setting, the music became less involving, even duller. At higher SPLs this leveled out but not to the extent as with the Firewall in the chain. It is quite scary to be reminded how quickly one gets used to an improved (or altered) situation. Only when reverting back to what one used to find satisfactory before does one fully appreciate the performance delta.

But then came the big move and our focus was on packing books, records, CDs, audio gear, kitchen appliances, clothes, computers, more books and the lot. The house was in strictly organized disarray for a few weeks before the movers arrive. At the new location all the packing had to be reversed. After the bedroom, the listening room was first to be rebuilt. To get acclimated, we listened for a while ‘as is’, i.e. with the ASI acoustic treatment and standard gear fed straight from the wall and the Humbuster in place. Some small adjustments were made with loudspeaker placement to increase usable living space. When we had a good grasp on the room and house, the Firewall—which hat sat idle since the move—returned to action. With the cable routing issues already solved from the previous location, we only had to mirror-image the layout as the wall outlet now sat at the other side of the room. One DFPC ran again from the wall into the Humbuster, then a DFPC Signature connected the Firewall from whence four DFPCs fed the transport, DAC, phono preamp and integrated amplifier.


Even without a proper second run-in, the difference was large. Our new home’s AC quality runs a dishwasher fine but without proper clean-up, is not really suitable for high-end audio enjoyment. The initial difference of adding the Firewall was so significant that eliminating it was out of the question. We thus decided to let the Firewall settle in while playing background music from a streaming server in for review.


After a week of background duty, some serious listening was in order. Though the Firewall is no power regenerator or stabilizer which eliminates those voltage fluctuations that momentarily make the lights dim or brighter, the Firewall did successfully clean up the power such that we could revert to the low listening levels and still enjoy all the nuances, pace and dynamic drive that release music’s emotional content. Without the Firewall, there was a stream of somewhat disconnected tones masquerading as musical performance. With the Firewall, there was musical performance built upon coherent interplay filled with spatial cues, proper timing and dynamic accents.


By now we received an email from Louis Motek on status. LessLoss had decided to take the Firewall off the market. Its bulky size and layout hadn’t gone over well. Combined with a steep price caused in part by the use of expensive Oyaide WPC-Z2 and SWO-GX outlets plus the Furutech FI-09 gold IEC inlet which swallowed up $1100 without shipping to Lithuania made it a painful but sound decision. LessLoss is now developing a more flexible smaller unit with the same technology but only one outlet. It should be more affordable and versatile than the discontinued Firewall but retains the name. At 9 x 9 x 30cm compared to the 20 x 18.5 x 76cm of the first incarnation, domestic logistics should be easier too. On top of that, looks have improved dramatically.

Louis Motek claims that "the new Firewall represents the epitome of our skin-effect filtering technology" and that "performance highly surpasses the big log. This is mainly due to advanced solutions for effective resonance control. Tapping on the new filter's electronics themselves results in a sound between a block of ebony and a chunk of amorphous granite". We guess that means as mechanically dead as possible. "We have made considerable progress and are well on the way of fine-tuning the sleek design of the new Firewall. Instead of oak we are using polished Tankwood (also called Panzerholz), a high-tech multi-layered and extremely densely compressed wood which sinks in water. This material is not only bullet-proof, it has among the best acoustic resonance damping characteristics known to show up in Formula 1 car chassis. Also of interest is its use as a neutron shield in nuclear research. Most important of course is the sound, which we are fine-tuning now."


Having lived with and then reviewed a product that is no longer available except for perhaps a few in inventory, we decided to still publish this article as an introduction to pertinent technology. If and when the new Firewall is ready; and if its results are in the same league as the large bulky log version, things will be fine. If the quality is not up to par, Louis will have a problem after setting the standard this high.

LessLoss website