Review: Wyred4Sound Remedy Reclocker

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.