Once Louis' leash landed, I had quick proof of life. That's not difficult with a passive device. Louis had recommended three days of cruising before any critical bruising. To leave the big room open for parallel gigs, my Irish calisthenics took place upstairs. Here Cen.Grand's Silver Fox drove HifiMan Susvara off a COS D1 DAC with remote-controlled analogue volume. Here my off-line server is a FiiO R7 with 1TB SSD card. That sends USB digits into a Soundaware D300Ref USB bridge which then supplies the converter with coaxial data. If you're a fan of exotic musical crossovers, check out L.Subramaniam's composition Double Concerto for violin & flute. Its classicist setting with South-Indian modal interludes is an enchanted soundtrack, particularly the 2nd movement. Stylistic gears shift in astounding transitions and technique is high as we'd expect from Lakshminarayana and consorts. That those would be the Brandenberger Symphoniker and flautist Michael Martin Köfler is the surprise. So expand your musical horizons. Hop on the Mysore Express. Flag down a chai wallah. Happy travels. I set mine on an endless roundabout of a playlist to clock the requested conditioning hours. Then I played musical chairs with sundry hardware combos. I'll spare us the process to jump straight to the result.

Take a super-simple 24/96 recording like Øystein Sevåg & Lakki Patey's Visual 2 on Siddhartha Records. It combines concert grand and guitar in slow-mo elegiac dreaminess that's unabashedly gorgeous. Here FoH heightens the visibility of connective tissue. That's the presence of ambient space made audible like oscillating air over hot tarmac becomes visible on a very hot day. Its presence creates virtual moisture between and behind so around the two instrumental images. Instantly notable on the piano's shorter more quickly damped high strings, being enveloped in this connective tissue enriches tone with micro reverb. It also gives transients rising inside the overhang of prior tones a less wiry texture. All of this is gossamer stuff.

Yet turning it off by removing FoH dries out this atmospheric element. That also hardens the sounds occurring within in. It's easily demonstrable with just two clicks from reseating two XLR4 plugs; headphone into amp or amp into FoH into headphone. Starting with a structurally minimalist recording of good production values and proper dynamic range is the easiest way to catch hold of this effect.

It's naturally magnified by headphones of superior treble tracking, in my case the twin and triple ribbons of Raal 1995's Magna & Immanis. But Final D8000 planars and Palma's dynamic caught onto it without any stress, too. It goes beyond just more suchness of space. It allows us a deeper look into the ephemeral play of harmonics which give instruments their individual timbre. With FoH out of the signal path, that overtone spectrum dried out just like the atmospherics.

Cascaded LHY network switches ⇒  Audirvana ⇒  Singxer SU-6 ⇒  iFi iDSD Pro Signature ⇒  Kinki THR-1 ⇒  FoH ⇒  Raal transformer ⇒  Immanis