This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below

Now back to the power cords. If you recall, when first introduced I did not notice that they contributed much of anything new. This was good considering the excellence of the cables they replaced. With the Ocellia  interconnects in place, removing the Ocellia power cables for my reference power cables became unexpectedly audible as a thinning of body and tone - far more than anticipated in fact. At this point I had to admit that the Ocellia power cords reinforced the benefits of the other Ocellia cables to make the additional investment worthwhile in the context of a full Ocellia loom. Yet if you can only afford one set of these cables, the interconnects for me yielded far greater benefits.

So far I mentioned the interconnects in general because the audible effect was identical whether between phono preamp and preamplifier or between preamplifier and amplifier. The benefits were additive. The Ocellia cables brought more improvement over the Zu Varial than ASI no matter where the Zu was put. Against the Zu the gain was in transparency, spaciousness and speed. Against the ASI the improvement was primarily the addition of body, the sense of relaxation mentioned earlier and the superior resolution of complex harmonics.


The third cable I had on hand was Samuel’s coaxial digital link. Having sold my Esoteric X03se six months ago, I no longer use a high-quality CD drive. I have fully switched to computer audio yet my audio/video system now also includes a Panasonic BluRay player with a coax digital output which is normally connected to the Burson HA 60D with a cheap Monster cable coax cable to provide stereo sound for movie playback.


For the purpose of this test I upgraded the basic Monster cable to a single length of ASI Liveline. As indicated by Franck Tchang, the gain in transparency was huge, with far more ambiance cues and a greater sense of speed combined with much tighter bass. Switching to the Ocellia digital cable was déjà vu all over again however - still more body, greater resolution of those micro signals that make up the harmonics of instruments and a greater sense of separation. It simply was a more organic sound. I had  moved from hifi to real music. There’s no other way to put it.


The effect was obvious already with CDs spun in the admittedly low-fi player but became truly impressive when spinning some of 2L's hi-definition material recorded on BluRay. After a little fiddling with the various setup menus I was able to make the player output 24/96 PCM data via the coax from those BluRays and voilà! What had been a barely acceptable CD player turned into a halfway decent source when playing BluRays. Now the benefits of the Ocellia cable over the Monster and ASI became far more obvious and significant.


The question that kept bugging me and for which Samuel currently has no answer is why an MDI treatment on a digital cable would yield the same type of sonic improvement as it does on a cable carrying analog signal? I have no doubt that digital cables have a sonic signature. I have heard enough to be sold on that puzzling concept. The only way I can rationalize it is by accepting that digital cables have different jitter signatures. They either add their own jitter or modify the jitter spectrum of the data being streamed.

Following the same logic, the Ocellia has its own jitter signature. Yet why is that signature yielding the same sense of spaciousness, tonal richness and harmonic rightness as it does in the analog realm? Does it mean the Ocellia cable adds significantly less jitter than other cables; or simply no MDI-related type of jitter? No idea. It was a puzzling finding that would deserve to be replicated with a much higher-end disc spinner and DAC. It certainly made for a significant gain in terms of reduction of the digital sound syndrome. If reproducible in other systems it would make the Ocellia one of the most organic transparent and analog sounding digital cables. For me it was a real departure from any digital cable I have heard so far, balancing increased resolution against too much digital glare. Here the Ocellia in my somewhat unusual setup delivered resolution and organic sound in spades.


The combination of interconnects and power cords made a significant improvement in my system - far greater than upgrading from a $1000 to a $2000 DAC and far greater than any cable has previously made in my system. The gain in body and flow, in tonal richness without undue warmth or excessive weight, the overall rightness and naturalness of the sound lined up exactly with what Srajan described when he reviewed the first generation Ocellia cables. According to Samuel Furon the new Reference cables go even further but I have to take his word on that. Regardless, the Ocellias have taken my system another step up from where it was and I certainly did not expect that from cables. I don't know if the MDI theory is true but cables designed according to its principle certainly deliver on the promise of greater tonal truthfulness and elimination of artificial hifi colorations in the music. But this story wasn't over yet.