The small print. It goes without saying. The degree of our system's resolution or magnification power determines how big, small or absentee its reactions are to tweaks. What superior systemic resonance control of Hifistay pedigree does is to remove generic blur and bloat as generated by low in-room bass and its mechanical consequences on your audio circuitry.
These actions don't just affect overall clarity and transparency. They specifically intrude into the all-important midband like squid ink does in the sea. They render it more opaque, hence clumpy. Remove the sonic fallout of physical vibrations and not only does focus, separation and precise imaging improve. Dynamic contrast ratio too heightens. There's more amplitude range. Within it, there's higher gradation.
Playing at more subdued levels in particular shrinks it by moving all the difference markers ever closer together. Here the benefits of wholesale resonance control from a properly engineered equipment rack and speaker isolators cannot be underestimated.
Having recently reported on this again in a review and two separate features here and on Darko, I was still close enough to these before/after changes to feel rather evangelical about the subject. With a tiny angelical creature on my should now, it does pave the road into today's gig.
To maximize BOP's effects hence relevance mandates a system where beyond proper component and speaker/room matching, power delivery and resonance control have been handled at a high level. That ought to be obvious. The nature of small print is simply that few read it. Then it's better to get preachy about it, not undersell the implications. Done!
The devil had the first laugh. Impatient to delve into the Korean mystery before my allotted 24 hours were up, I wired up three component power cords and the longer LessLess C-MARC Entropic Process that connects power conditioner to wall. Regardless of voltage strength, I couldn't hear any effect. What I did hear had already happened. Just plugging the BOP box into Puritan's very last receptacle removed a minor shoutiness aka subliminal glare from dynamic peaks. That gave the overall reading a slightly warmer mellower woodier tinge with more gravity. To verify this, I not only unplugged the QF leads from the box, I removed them from the power cords altogether. I then unplugged the nasty switching power adapter to take the batteries off-line. Thus back at full bypass, I refreshed my take on 'normal', then put just the batteries back online.
Why an octet of small batteries to represent a possibly very low-impedance cell—charged by a cheap wall wart as the only connection to the power conditioner hence active gear—should or could make any difference was far above my pay grade. By addition, subtraction then addition again, I did hear it as a small but persistent and welcome benefit. Any gains from active DC fields around the power cords remained MIA however. "Mama mia" mocked the devil in quiet but obvious glee. I had to revisit the whole sequence two days later to see whether recommended break-in would change a thing. Otherwise it was rinse 'n' repeat with signal cables, first digital then analog IC then speaker cables. Should that net nada, I had other systems to experiment with.
John Lim: "I forgot to mention that QF cables should be applied only to power cords which connect directly to components, not to a cable that connects a wall socket to a power distributor. And according to Mr. Han, when he combined his device with active AC/DC filters, the results weren't good. He prefers passive power distributors instead where the BOP Quantum Field will operate as intended." Damn. The instructions were getting more specific still. The devil tisk-tisked loudly, the angel just shrugged her wings.
