April 2011
Audiolics Anonymous Chapter 137
My fond remembrances of Allen Wright plus Pure Power PP 2000 Regenerator, Mapleshade USB-S/PDIF Reclocking Adapter, M2Tech and audiophile personality Romy the Cat.
Article By Bill Gaw

  It is early March as I write this and I’m in a glum mood. The weather is crappy, with the umpteenth snowstorm of the season, I’m waiting for my third PurePower PP2000 unit to return from its update so my system is not completely isolated from the electrical gremlins that destroy great playback, and I just got off of the phone with Clark Johnsen. While I usually look forward to talking with my first high end guru, his news has certainly not improved my mid winter blahs, as he notified me that one of the best high end engineers, a friend, and developer and maker of my two monoblock preamps and four monoblock 300B tube amps, Allen Wright, had recently died. On contacting his wife, it turns out he had been suffering from cancer for a couple of years.

I first met Allen about 10 years ago through Clark, who brought him and his wife Hanni, up to my house for a listening session. Allen, a New Zealander by birth, an Australian by upbringing, a German through his earning his livelihood for several years in Munich, and finally a manufacturer of his equipment in Switzerland, was a meticulous engineer who produced superb high end tube electronics and silver interconnects and speaker cable.

Over many years he had developed various ideas on both electronics and wire construction and had recently moved from Australia to Munich, Germany to open Vacuum State Electronics to sell his products. He had brought along some of his interconnects and speaker wire as written in AA Chapter 5 made of silver foil that could be constructed as a home project for a very reasonable price, and they blew the pants ( or should I say shielding) off of the wire I was using at that time. Thus, sight unseen, I commissioned him to build a combination preamp-phono stage-electronic crossover for my main speakers (see AA Chapter 13. As the unit was superb, and replaced three pieces of equipment and interconnects, it remained in my system for about 10 years until I no longer needed the phono stage.

About four years later I received his first-off-the-line DPA 300B amplifiers for review and immediately ordered two more to run my main speakers. These still hold center place in my system. Unhappily, I never did get to evaluate his SACD and Blu-Ray player modifications. Allen was a true gentleman and superb audio engineer and I and his many friends and associates will miss him. His bio. can be found at this link.

Romy the Cat, Audiophile Extraordinaire
This past weekend, I was privileged to listen to one of the best systems I’ve ever evaluated, at Romy Bessnow’s new house. I had heard his original system about a year ago in Boston, in a cramped below street level apartment just before his move to the suburbs, and was thrilled with its sound. He has worked for almost a year to get his system in his new house up to his expectations, the history of which can be followed in his blog at Good Sound Club and he finally felt it was worth inviting people over for a listen.

Well, the system was superb, filling his entire space with some of the cleanest sound I’ve ever heard, replacing the natural room acoustics with the original concert hall on the recordings. The only thing lacking for me was a roll-off in the low bass area due to his horn woofers only going down to 40 Hz. He does have some superb Dunlavy subwoofer towers, but he prefers the clearer sound with them off. I preferred them on, but can understand his preference as in their present position; they did muddy the mid bass a little. Anyway, the sound was superb, and considering he designed both the speakers and amplification as a hobbyist, it is actually amazing. Today, he wrote in his blog that after some experimentation he has solved the problem through time alignment, and the subwoofers are now functioning to his expectation. Guess I’ll be driving down for another listen in the near future.

Pure Power PP 2000 Regenerator
These superb electricity cleaners were reviewed previously here and here and they’ve worked very well in my system since. Romy Bessnow, alias Romy the Cat, noted that their new units did not sound as clean as their older stock so the company went back and found an anomaly in one series of their circuit boards which they’ve corrected. Unhappily all three of my units, which sounded great, were of that vintage, so over the past month they were shipped back to the factory for repair. The three units have been in my system for about two weeks now and the sound has improved considerably over their previous iteration. The noise floor has dropped another step, the bass, especially midbass has become more taught, and the midrange and highs somewhat cleaner. All in all, there’s been a significant improvement. The company insists that only a small number of the units had the anomaly, and all were shipped as 120 volt units to the US, and will be happy to do the repair on any high-enders units.

In the words of Richard Janzen, their spokesman:

They all looked very good on our scope and listening tests and as Romy has confirmed there is negligible difference between wall and battery operation and from unit to unit. That is the way  the original units performed from the start five years ago up to the modification we made the month we shipped your units. The mod was to improve the clipping discovered in three units. So the period containing that revision level was the middle half of 2010 - and the change only applied to North American shipments of 120 volt Model 2000. It does not apply to any 230 volt units or units shipped in 2011. We will be able to tell by ship date any unit that will benefit from the update we made to your unit. It would have to be from May/June 2010 on to December 2010. All the customer has to do is to call us. You will note that the units we originally shipped you still performed very well overall - but it did introduce a difference between wall and battery operation that is now rectified.

So if you think you have one of the units built during that period of time, please contact Richard at richard@purepoweraps.com for possible return and repair. It’s really worth the effort for the improvement.

Mapleshade USB To S/PDIF Reclocking Adapter
As you can gather from previous articles, I’m an advocate for using computers for audio and video storage and playback. I’m just against the exorbitant prices being charged by most companies for specially built server units. Computers are a great way to record, store, and play back all of your music (except SACD which cannot be played back using any computer program available to the consumer). With the proper program they can also play back Blu-ray and even HD-DVD recordings. A 2 terabyte hard drive can now be bought of less than $100 and should be able to store just about anybody’s entire collection. Of course, with the fallibility of hard drives, one should have a second drive with all of the same information so that if one fails the other will be available for recovery. The information can also be read with far less jitter from the hard drive than off of the original disc. In addition, if a program is used that reads the information off of the RAM instead of the hard drive, even less jitter is present.

One can use an internal sound card for D/A conversion or transmission of a high grade digital signal through its S/PDIF output, a decent pro soundcard can cost several hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. Or one can either use the SPDIF, Firewire, HDMI or USB output of the computer to an external D/A unit, saving the expense of the soundcard. Each has it inherent problems and jitter, and except for HDMI, will only carry two channels of digital information.

Until now, I’ve used the HDMI output of my Asus Xonar 1.3 Soundcard as it allows transmission of 7.1 channels of 24-bit/192kHz audio and high definition video and really does sound excellent. But I’ve heard through the grape vine that HDMI has inherently high jitter levels for two channel audio. While Firewire was originally developed for professional audio applications, I know of no high end D/A converters with FireWire input for home use. SPDIF would therefore be the obvious choice, but not all computers have a decent electrical SPDIF output. Finally, typical USB outputs and their interconnects have inherently high jitter rates, and most D/A converters don’t have good USB inputs.

So what’s an audiophile to do? Several manufacturers have come out with USB to S/PDIF units that allow direct digital transmission from computer to D/A converter. The problem is that they do not decrease the jitter. Thus a couple of companies have produced units that do what’s called asynchronous transmission by reclocking the digital signal. One such  is the M2Tech hiFace  USB-SPDIF Converter, previously reviewed by Ron Nagle here and also the Evo version reviewed here.

This unit has some major advantages over other units out there in that it directly connects to the computer USB output without intervening USB cord, saving further jitter and expense, and will put out up to a 192 kHz 24-bit stereo signal that can be passed to a normal digital RCA or BNC cable. At $199, effective March 1, and the fact that Ron Nagle recommends it, I decided to go ahead and make a purchase.

But then I got a catalog from Mapleshade Audio, purveyor of high end wire, tweaks and equipment modification who has modified these units. I’ve been using their AC cords on some of my equipment for at least 10 years, and love the CD’s which they record with their own modified equipment. They have taken the hiFace and added a vibration controlling low dielectric absorption maple enclosure which replaces the plastic shell of the original, and perform a cryogenic treatment of the unit, all for an additional $39 to the price. (At the time of this writing, Mapleshade was still charging $189 for their unit, but it will probably be higher soon.)

Mapleshade Reclocker
The Reclocker has two low jitter clock oscillators that asynchronously buffer and re-clock the data. This allows one to obtain very low jitter digital signal up to 24/192 two channel without the need for an expensive sound card. As far as sound is concerned, I must admit that while I do like the ability of the ASUS Xonar card to handle 7.1 channels, with two channel audio, this little wonder sounds far superior to it, and I  prefer the audio coming from my computer now compared to my $2000 highly modded universal player. Whether the Mapleshade beats its less expensive sibling, I have no idea as the distributor for the hiFace is changing hands to TEAC’s high end division. And if this unit, which produces $22,000 SACD players and $20,000 rubidium re-clocking units is carrying the original, it must be very good.

But come on audiophile! Splurge on the Mapleshade unit at $189,( original purchase price probably to go up with the price increase from the manufacturer), keep an American company in business, and you certainly won’t be hurting the original manufacturer and distributor as the units that Mapleshade mods have to come from them anyway.

Next month I hope to have at least one or two more re-clockers in for review which should make for an interesting review.