Adding up. Disregarding their specific pay-to-play ratio where all big and little spenders must count for themselves—you earn your own money, you decide how and what to spend it on—what Verictum's X-rated stuff does seems rather more universal. Something very similar can happen with certain cables. Samuel Furon's Ocellia models come to mind. They surround nude solid-core silver conductors with two grades of crushed crystal powder, then sleeve it all in Indian rubber aka kautschuk with strictly specified mineral content. Even the RCA, XLR and banana connectors are custom hollow silver pins in wood bodies. The sonic effect of these cables and the Verictum add-ons is a tacit sense of enhanced scale in general—things sound bigger and freer—plus increased contrast ratio. Recorded space becomes more audible and better organized. Layers are more specific and concrete. Different from the Canadian silver cables at least with our hardware choices was a slight treble sweetener effect from the Polish devices. That's how a reduction in glare, hash or glassiness manifests after all. Without sacrificing resolution or apparent detail, textures soften a bit. It's the difference between wearing a sun-dried shirt and one dried by machine.


To take our daily jelly-bean meds—"what's it mean?"—we are forced to admit that if left unchecked, growing ultrasonic noise has a detrimental effect on our hifi. One needn't know at what frequencies various solutions filter, at what attenuation strength they do this or on what materials they're based. One needn't understand any of the arcane mechanisms. Using nothing but one's pink bits and well-recorded music in a hifi that's set up with care, minimizing radio-frequency and higher noise pollution relative to our signal path has sonic benefits. Basically, these benefits occur in the third dimension. They uncover secondary and tertiary data which describe and map audible space. The what and where (performers situated across the stage's width) are so basic that even the dumbest of stereos get them right. Specificity in the depth domain (how far does each sound arise from us) is more advanced. Sensing the overlay of venue onto our own acoustic with recorded reflections and decays depends on making out the cobwebs which connect the performers to the 3D space they were recorded in. For that we must lower the noise floors of our systems; and drain/strip the signal of interference generated, somehow, by being exposed to constant ultrasonic toxicity. It's hifi's equivalent to UV blocker and avoiding skin cancer from sun exposure.

Verictum's solid-silver Demiurg power cord with passive non-X filter.