I’ve had the Synergistic UEF Black in the system for a week.
Let me get the questions posed out of the way.
Yes, it looks like the Pass Seymour outlet.
I did not do the magnet test: I had put it in immediately after it arrived. However, I wrote Synergistic and asked if the backstop was magnetic. Their response? It is a "magnetic alloy." So much for my theory...
Now, on to the sonics.
The first 14 hours, from the minute I played the first cut, around noon on October 27th until 2 a.m. on October 28, it showed promise of being a dazzling performer. The entire presentation was 3-D, meaning it had front-to-back depth instantly, instead of coming into it slowly. Voices (Rick James, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Mick Jagger) were extremely good in their closeness to their analogues in real life in regards to dynamics. Instruments and rhythm and timing were great: funk sounded funky and get-down-gritty. Waltzes sounded like ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three. I went to bed happy.
6 hours later. I get up, go into the room, and things have turned dismal. (Not that I didn’t expect this: I did. But still...) Voices blurred, instruments flat as a pancake, no space in between performers and zero depth. The next 24 hours, the music became shrill (it was NOT that way upon insertion). It sounded like a bunch of hissing cobras had attached themselves to the system, and instead of "ss", I got "szzzzzzzzzzzz". I finally left the room, waiting for that to pass. 24 hours later, it did, but then the system’s depth and inner detail disappeared. It sounded like it had gone from - visually - an accordion fully extended, to an accordion, fully compressed. NO depth. Voices were stiff and the overall sound dulled in the upper midrange and treble. Inflections (also called ’microdynamics’)??? What inflections?????? Everything sounded as though it played in a nearly anechoic chamber. Disconcerting, even though I knew it would change. Eventually. It was just breathtaking (and not in a good way) how much the sound had disintegrated. Incoherent. Listenable only because I’d heard it at 5 minutes after I put it in and saw its promise.
I got inventive and hooked up a space heater for a day, thinking (somewhat magically, in retrospect) that that would ’speed up’ the burn-in, but then realized how expensive that would be if left on 27/7 for weeks. And that current was current and as long as something was coming thru the outlet, that was probably good enough. (I’d had fans on the outlet via Shunyata’s PS8 strip (itself breaking in), but wasn’t sure if that would work as well. Hence the space heater over a 24 hour period a couple of days ago.
Yesterday was exactly one week at 12 noon. Still sounded good-ish, but still a bit stiff, although it was clearly improving. Listened yesterday for a few hours, stopped around 5 p.m. when a friend invited me over to dinner. Returned home at 8 p.m. and immediately went into the room to see what small changes had happened.
MERCY!!! Who switched stereos on me while I was out?!?!? Now, keep in mind, at one time I owned a Versa Dynamics 2.0 and 2.3 turntable, Goldmund Mimesis 9, Wilson WATT/Puppies (several generations of them), Convergent Audio, Jadis, Clearaudio cartridges, MIT, Transparent and Nordost stuff (which I got rid of before I left the West Coast. I say this only to indicate I’ve owned some very upper-tier equipment, so it is not easy to surpass that, given my current system is Shunyata power cords (Sigma and Alpha), an NAD C326BEE (the control amp for all experiments) Nordost Frey 2 interconnects, Nola Contenders and an old Aracm FMJ23 CD player, as well as a Rega 3. Nothing near what my old system was like. Oh, and the CJ ET3SE, which I’ve kept out of the system, because this IS a controlled experiment and the CJ would automatically advance the sonics rather dramatically.
So, the sound: Janis Joplin, singing Summertime on the Cheap Thrills lp, sounded dazzling. Her rasp, which previously, had been present, but nothing special, was suddenly magically present. The guitar solos had all the distortion and "buzziness" they should have had on other systems (except I didn’t listen much to classic rock, although I have a thousand albums, at least) of that. But even on this old CD, it was hard to pull myself away and go to bed. The system’s transparency had increased in the way it would if I’d not had the NAD as my amp, but instead put in say, a Hegel H80 amp. Along with a CJ ET5 preamp.
I played Nina Simone, and suddenly, there’s a room around her, and the piano is lilting and lyrical, low-level detail such as the volume of a hall, is far more evident than I’d heard it even (based on memory) in my "Big" system from years ago.
Since this is only at 192 hours now, I have a ways to go (Synergistic wrote me and said, "300 hours"). But this far surpasses the Tesla SE unit and, keeping in mind that I own both the Furutech GTX-D Rhodium and the newer NCF outlets, is serious competition for the NCF. The ’fragility’ of instruments and voices has advanced far past what I heard.
It’s disturbing to think that the ac outlet has so much effect on sound. It makes me wonder what my older, ’BIG’ system would’ve sounded like if we had the kind of outlets then that we have now. Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to have a $50k system like I had back in 1991 to achieve the immersion into the music that can be achieved now, although, of course, back then, I was less knowledgable about room acoustics, electricity and especially tube trap placement (which’ll kill your system faster than anything if you have the placement along the walls, or the orientation of the seam even remotely out of place).
I marvel that my dealer, with a room with a $100k system in it, does not approach the delicacy and fragility of my $15k system. It irritates me to hear his system, because it’s WATTS (the Alexia), ARC’s 14k preamp, Ayre monoblocks and Nordost Odin all throughout. Yet, it is so lifeless, I can barely restrain myself from barricading myself in their room, disassembling everything and putting it all back together myself. NO delicacy, although people will still think it sounds ’very clear’ and ’BIG’ (but only if you turn the volume up). It just plays music, but is not particularly engaging. I could easily read a book in their room while music was playing, something that is exceedingly unlikely to happen in this music room at home. There’s just too much being revealed in the way of the backup singers’ phrasing, infections and dynamics, placement of those singers, layering in the depth field. (Airiness is good, but not stellar at this point, but it’s an NAD amp: not known for upper frequency openers). It is hard to ’look away’ because the system is becoming highly transparent (NAD aside) and one can hear the dueling guitars in the Summertime break, as well as Patti Austin’s voice doubling itself in some songs, but backup singers in other songs, recognizable because the timbre of voices is so truthful, and the harmonic information now separates out individuals as individuals, rather than just a bunch of background singers lumped together. Can you get better? Of COURSE. For a huge amount of money. But can you be mesmerized by your modest system? If your electricity, line conditioning and room acoustics are all ace, you sure can.
Speaking of which, I played Summertime last night and measured how low the sound level could be and I could still be emotionally mesmerized by Joplin’s vocal renderings (it really is a much more breathtaking rendering of Summertime than I had previously even recognized on this disc): 60db. It was 5 a.m. and I’d woken up, and gone into the music room before I went back to bed. I intended to stay 5 minutes. I was in there for an hour.
When a system can mesmerize you at 60db, the components have become highly ’invisible’ and the music is now what’s running the show.
I’d like to hear the experiences of anyone else with this outlet. I can’t be the only one who has it. I am NOT saying it is ’IT’. I AM saying that what it does for $250 is more what I would expect from a newer and much superior preamp around 5k - or higher. Or an amp around 10k (which in old days, would be 4k).
