Let's start with a disclaimer: I am not
associated in any way with Wyred4Sound or any related commercial
enterprise. I should also state that my knowledge of electronics and
physics is pretty basic, probably just enough to be dangerous. My
approach to audio is musical rather than technical. This review is an
entirely personal statement.
A few weeks ago I began a thread in
the Digital section of Audiogon's forums seeking opinions about CD
transports. My current disc spinner, a Cambridge Audio 751BD
universal player has worked well enough for DVDs and Blu-rays,
especially since I added a Bryston BDA1 DAC to the system but I
didn't think I was getting all I could from CDs, of which I have a
pretty extensive collection. At first glance the Cyrus CDt seemed an
attractive alternative, but a convincing majority of responses came
down heavily in favor of PS Audio's PWT, though even in the used
market this unit weighs in at well over 2 grand. Yes, I could afford
this, but thought it worth experimenting with a less expensive
solution first.
Enter Wyred4Sound's Remedy Reclocker, a
$399 box just a bit larger than palm of your hand. It accepts coax
and optical inputs—there's a manual switch to toggle between
them—and has both optical and coax outputs, the latter accepting
connections from either RCA and BNC cable ends. There's also a manual
on/off switch. An LED logo illuminates the top of the box when it
senses a signal. The unit comes with a plastic 9v “wall-wart”
power supply (more on this later) and that's pretty much all there is
to it.
The stated purpose of the Remedy
Reclocker is to reduce jitter—the timing mistakes that happen when
digital information is read and processed—to an infinitesimal
level. (A really useful and thorough explanation of how CDs are read
and how they produce jitter can be found in the 6 Moons Audio review
of PS Audio's PWT:
http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/psaudio7/perfectwave.html).
For my 751BD, the owner's manual states a measurement of <50pS,
that is, less than 50 trillionths of a second. This should be, by any
reasonable standard, a pretty low rate of jitter, but Wyred4Sound
claims their little box reduces this by an order of magnitude to a
just few fS, or femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). The real
test is: what effect did this have on the actual sound?
To help explain this, I'd first like to
describe how I perceive music. Leaving aside the admittedly important
issue of how music affects us on the emotional level, there are many
different ways of experiencing music, some the result of your own
range of hearing and some the result of how your brain is wired. For
example, a musician friend of mine who has the most extreme case of
“perfect pitch” I've ever encountered describes music as a visual
experience—notes have color and intervals have shapes. Clinically,
this is a form of synesthesia, a condition where one sense (in this
case hearing) stimulates another (sight). He hears and sees music as
an integrated event, from which he can identify each harmonic and
melodic element without external reference. Even though we're both
professional musicians, I have a completely different way of
experiencing what I'm hearing, as I my brain is not wired that way.
Using vision as a metaphor, I hear music in much the say way as I see
the world around me: it is comprised of any number of discrete
elements and if I focus on one of them (the melody, say, or an inner
voice, or some part of the accompaniment), that comes to the
foreground and everything else, though still part of the whole,
recedes to the background, rather like seeing it in peripheral
vision.
The point of all this is that it
affects how I want my audio system to sound. Focusing on each of
these musical elements requires that they be clearly defined in the
image (using the vision metaphor again) and that the whole image is
pleasing (we often describe this as “musical”) enough for me to
enjoy it. Thus, a stereo image that is not as sharp as it might be,
or an instrument or voice that has an unpleasant ringing quality
(often described as “glare”) will significantly diminish my
enjoyment of the music. These are the things Wyred4Sound's Remedy
Reclocker have so effectively addressed in my system. By upsampling
to 96Khz and reducing jitter to this extremely low level, the whole
image has become tighter, the placement of instruments more exact,
and the glare virtually eliminated. Recordings in my collection that
had remained unplayed for years because I didn't like their sound are
suddenly quite listenable. An example of this is violinist Janine
Jansen's 2012 recording of Schubert's beautiful String Quintet in C
Major (Decca), a disc which had always sounded strident to me and now
sounds far more relaxed and controlled, each instrument distinct but
integrated naturally into the ambiance. A much older recording,
Mahler's Symphony No. 5 conducted by Sir John Barbirolli (EMI's
“Great Recordings of the 20th Century” series) is
brought vividly to life, especially the brass, which before the
addition of the reclocker, sounded edgy and thin and now has real
warmth and presence. The stereo image of this 1969 recording is
widened and brought into sharp focus. My favorite CD for testing
stereo image is the San Francisco Symphony's 1991 Grammy-winning
recording of Carl Orff's “Carmina Burana.” The placement of
baritone Kevin McMillan's voice in “Estuans intereus” (track 11)
should be firmly fixed and slightly recessed just to the right of the
conductor, but this can be more or less distinct depending on the
system. Before the addition of the reclocker, this placement was
reasonably good, but now it is pinpoint.
These are just a few examples of the
improvements I'm hearing. The Remedy Reclocker has made a very
noticeable improvement to the sound of my CDs and it makes me want to
listen more and more. Reading other reviews, it appears that this
unit would probably not make as significant a difference to the very
highest-end players, like the aforementioned PS Audio PWT, but for
most of us, especially those of us with older players, it is an
affordable and very worthwhile upgrade. I should also mention that I
found its effect on DVDs and Blu-Ray discs not as profound, and I'm
guessing this is because it outputs everything at 96 Khz, a
significant upsampling for CDs and DVDs, but the effect on higher
resolution formats is smaller. I assume that anything higher than
96Khz will actually be downsampled.
Another factor, of course, is the
choice of digital cable. You'll need two, one for input and one for
output. I use coax for both, one being the Nordost Blue Heaven LS
digital cable I already had, the other being a new Audioquest Carbon.
The latter seems to me to be the superior cable based on its
pre-reclocker performance, so there soon will be another of these
cables in my system.
And now a word about the power supply.
It an axiom in the audio world that better power supplies enhance
performance, but with regard to the Remedy, Wyred4Sound's website is
very equivocal about this. They have no specific suggestions for
power supply upgrade and won't even commit to the proposition that it
would improve the Remedy's performance. The specs are: 1A/9V (12V
will also work, they say), 2.1mm connector with (+) on the inside.
They won't cover damage from any third-party PSUs, so you're on your
own here. From my own bitter, embarrassing, and EXPENSIVE experience,
be very, very careful with this. After asking the folks at
Wyred4Sound whether my Pangea F-100 (12V/500mA) power supply would
work (these were an upgrade for Musical Fidelity's V-DAC II and
Cambridge Audio's DAC Magic), the folks at Wyred4Sound thought it
probably would. As stated at the top of this review, I know just
enough about electronics to be dangerous, so I thought I'd give it a
try. What I got, upon connecting, was a loud POP and the distinct
smell of burning circuitry. Of course the unit was thereafter stone
cold dead and had things rattling around inside. My only alternative
then was to buy another one. Well, at least I got a discount on the
second one. Lesson learned.
The rest of my system: Hegel H200
integrated amp, Bryston BDA 1 DAC, Arcam FMJ Tuner, Proac Response d2
speakers, REL S-2 sub, Clarus Aqua speaker and RCA cables, Audioart
XLRs.
