Shunyata Research's Denali 2000T ???

Triton v1 vs Denali 6000T

I have had the Triton v1 in my system for several years now and have been considering an upgrade to either the Denali 6000 or the Triton v3. I brought a demo Denali 6000T home this week from my friendly local dealer to first compare it with my trusty Triton v1.

Upon replacing the v1 with the 6000T, the first thing I noticed was that the 6000T sounded louder and this gave me the initial impression of more dynamics, more "meat to the bones" and a bigger soundstage. I had to dial the volume down by 3 clicks from the usual.

As I spent more time with the 6000T, I began to notice a smoothing effect, with less edge to trumpets, less airy highs, a blunting of transients and a slowing of overall speed. I reinserted the Triton v1 and lo and behold....every negative that I have heard with the 6000T simply vanished, returning music to all its full glory. Also, the noise floor of the 6000T is higher than the v1’s, negating my initial impressions above of more dynamics, more meat to the bones and bigger soundstage. The v1 actually allowed me to turn up the volume without any negative effect - providing more detail, clarity and fleshing out of instruments in an actually much larger soundstage.

The lesson I learn here is that one can easily get seduced by a new different sound which need not necessarily be better. You need to simply reinsert the previous component in the system before drawing any final conclusions about the new one.

If anyone is in the market for a Shunyata power conditioner, just grab any used v1 or v2 that you can find. If you already own a v1, the upgrade path should be towards the v2 or v3.

I would advise against getting the Denali 6000T without first comparing to the v1 in a home audition. Yes, the original v1 is that good and indeed gives up nothing at all to the Denali 6000T.

Just my humble opinion....Cheers!
J.

Thanks for the post jon2020. Unfortunately I've not heard any of the Triton's.

Hi lak,

I am sure you are enjoying the Denalis now because they certainly do sound good on their own.
My message is more to those who already own a Triton v1/v2 and who may have read reviews extolling the virtues of the Denali over the v1/v2, and like myself, are considering upgrading to the Denalis. 
If you do catch the upgrade bug one day and a used Triton v1/v2 happens to come your way, simply give it a listen at home as a comparison to the Denalis. You may just be amazed, like myself, as to how good the v1 can be. :)

Happy listening. J. 

@jon2020 If you are experiencing blunted transients and loss of speed it isn’t the Denali; rather, it’s something else in your system. The loss of air I believe will depend upon how your tweeters are designed. Noise floor - come on, it’s ridiculously low with the Denali - to say otherwise lacks credibility.

I purchased a 6000/S and after I purchased my D’Agostino M400 monos (which I expected to solve system speed and transients issues given the nasty impedance curve of my speakers) was experiencing all of the symptoms you are describing. For a sanity check, I pulled out the Denali and while the noise floor was higher, all the speed, attack, air and shimmer returned.

So I emailed my dealer just to let him know my experience and that the Denali was coming out of my system. He was really surprised and said that the Denali was one of the few products in his many years in audio that had almost universally positive feedback, particularly with high end systems. He said he’d email Shunyata and let me know. Shunyata couldn’t understand why the Denali was doing that but sent some things to try - one of which is to use the unit as intended (I had been sitting it on its side on two HRS nimbus assemblies due to lack of space - the 6000/T was too wide to fit in the same space due to its spread out feet).

I was planning on doing my biennial system cleaning anyway and stripped the system down completely and temporarily configured the system so that the Denali was used as intended - on its own feet on hard tile over concrete. Turned the system on and WOW were there transients, but the top end still didn’t have the proper air and shimmer.

I know my speakers and they are tipped down in the brilliance region (which generally helps with real world untreated rooms but is the region that produces air and shimmer) so I figured that the Denali was doing something Focal did not expect - delivering very clean power. Thankfully, this was solvable thanks to Focal’s wonderful jumper system - I set the tweeter jumper to high (a +1db boost) and the treble was again airy with the right shimmer.

So all good? Not quite. I started to reassemble the system and as I usually do, placed HRS nimbus assemblies under all components and cable network boxes. UGH! Sluggish again and blunted transients. Hmm... So I started systemically removing the nimbus assemblies, first from the speaker networks and then from the interconnect networks. Transient attack and speed returned to almost where it was before (for the components, the superior top to bottom effect of the nimbus assemblies warranted their remaining despite a shade of lessened transient speed - as far as I can tell this lessening has to do with my preamp not being on an HRS M3 platform (due to space issues) since it was only when placing the nimbus under the pre that there was any minor detrimental effect on transient speed).

Morals of the story for me - use components as intended/the manufacturer knows best, get to know your system (speaker measurements are invaluable although that’s more a result of the good fortune of having a stereophile review which includes measurements) and sometimes you can’t understand what something is doing until you take away other things (even if those things that you take away worked amazingly well earlier).