I took the Sidewinder off the amp last night, and put it on the CD50. I put the Tiffany Electronics cord back on the amp, and am letting these SETTLE until tomorrow (May 15) before I do any more listening.........What I conclude (subjective though it might be) about the Shunyata Sidewinder with my KAV-250a amplifier (after a week of settling time):.........There were some improvements. The bass got very slightly more extended, and became vastly better defined in pitch (it was awful at first, worse than a boom car system, with a "one distorted note" quality). The treble brightness receded slightly. The grain present thru the entire frequency range mostly went away, and so timbre was much more liquid. Listening fatigue went down a bit. All of that was good......But, other drawbacks remained. Stage depth was still more shallow than it needed to be. Dynamic contrasts/weight/solidity in the bass/extreme low mids were still missing in action, as was most of the bass below 50 Hz that I've been able to coax from the Maggies with other power cords on the amp (i.e., Synergisic Master Coupler). But, the bass "snap" factor was there in abundance, almost as much as the Magnan Signature, and about equal to the ESP Power Flo (the Magnan being much faster still with less bass dynamic contrast, and the ESP besting both Magnan and Sidewinder in the bass overall...had the best combination of speed, punch, slam, roundness, fullness, definition. It had a forward presence region though, both with amp and CD50, and that was annoying).........The "separation of instruments" became very good indeed with the Sidewinder, but still not quite what the Magnan was. As I've said before, the Magnan's treble equaled that of my analog rig, with "ONLY" my CD player (all of this is still with the MIT Z-Cord 2 on the CD player)! BOTH OF THEM HAD A FORWARD TREBLE with the amp, and so were/are not tonally neutral in my book.......Another bad thing that crept in with the Sidewinder was that the midrange became as much forward as the searchlight-bright treble was in the beginning. So now, tonally the Sidwinder was shelved up, from about 500 Hz, all the way to the top. Dynamic contrasts in the midrange and treble were quite good, with the upper midrange taking on an occasional "hard" character at times, moreso than the treble range (except in the beginning). This gave all solo and accompanied piano music a "tin" or tipped up quality, with the "left hand" work radically recessed and over-polite. Most every midrange instrument's edges were almost "hyper-delineated" in space (such as in symphonic pieces), giving a false sense of image definition in my opinion, and erasing the 3-D depth of each instrument's individual "image". And make no mistake, they were projected about 15 feet closer than they actually are, with regard to the rest of the orchestra. Very distracting. Also, the size and height of each instrument's image seemed artificially small, and out of proportion to the space they occupied...as if cellos were the size of violins, etc. I attribute this to the tonal problems, and the inadequate dynamics from the lower mids and downward. THE SIDEWINDER MIGHT SOUND RADICALLY DIFFERENT WITH THE CD50, I DON'T KNOW. We'll see....
