NIIIIIIIIICE!

now that is a great listening room

well done

JD

NICE pad !

Hi Guillaume Bougard, thank you for the compliments and your inquiry is not crass at all.  Those are called Tube Dampers and those specific ones are from Herbie's Audio Labs who sells all kinds of tweeks for micro-vibration and microphonics control of audio systems.  There is a lot of love for Herbie's around here and the Audio Circle forums as well.

Yes, very nice setup.  

How has that Ikea cabinet worked out for you?  It might be a bit wide for me, but worth looking into.

I actually changed a couple things, (1) I added a McIntosh D100 DAC (shown on second shelf below) which is better than my Rega DAC, so the Rega shown in the original post above is now residing in my bedroom system, and (2) almost all of my cables are now ZenWave OCC copper as well.

In the picture below I was also experimenting with Surge-X that was hot rod'ed out by ZenWave Audio wherein Dave does some nice upgrades to it which includes his own wiring, upgraded caps and Furutech outlets, etc. and he is now making some pretty sweet power cables as well (show below).





Note in this picture you can see that he left one bank of outlets standard (yellow ones) so you can compare them to the upgraded Furutechs.  This particular unit was on an Audio Circle tour and I got to play with it for a couple of weeks.  It's got passive filtration tech and the best surge protection that I know of.






Note the Mad Scientist Black disc on my other power cable. Not to mention the HUGE difference in plugs compared to a stock cable and the Furutech.

Fireblade wrote on 08/11/15 at 11:42:20:


Hi FB, last year I went through extensive listening tests for both interconnects and speaker cables.  It was the first time that I ever tried such a thing because I was in the "cables don't make that big of a difference state of mind".  But I started listening so intently that I finally started being able to tell them apart in such a way that ZenWave kept coming up as the best sounding and most reasonably priced.  Once I actually learned to listen for certain attributes within the music ~ that's when things started popping for me and I call it my "Lon" moment because Lon is always talking about the differences in the sounds of cables, but I could never hear much until I took the time to really get into it.

For ZenWave, IMO the price is pretty good for the quality of metallurgy and connectors that you get.  Interestingly I don't use all the same model of ZenWave interconnects throughout my entire system though.  

I found that with the Mac DAC although very musical and revelaing (and I love all that detail), it is a tad on the forward side and found that the ZenWave DD interconnects (which are Dueland silver with oil in silk) really brought a richness to it that still allowed all that detail to get through but without the forwardness.  I call the DD's "tone monsters" in that there is a harmonic richness and vibrancy to it that I find very special. that said it could be too much of a good thing on a more laid back component, so experimenting is suggested.

The ZenWave D3's on the other hand are IMO the sweetspot in the lineup and has a blend of OCC silver/gold alloy.  Compared to the Dueland they are more nuetral and accurate. OCC silver has a lot of great attributes, yet I find OCC silver by itself a little thin sounding, but with gold added into the mix - it brings a really litup/sparkly full bodied presentation and realistic tone ... so it has all the great attributes of silver without any of the drawbacks when used by itself.  I use these particular D3 inteconnects from my Mac preamp to the Decware Taboo.

Next up will be some extensive listening tests for power cables.  Although I have heard the ZenWave PCs there are a few more that I want to compare them too.  I'm slowly gathering a few different brands and already have the Decware, Bolder and a couple others and then I'm going to add some Shunyata and WireWorld to the mix and do a shoot out.

Sometimes Dave from ZenWave has demo cables lying around in his shop and if you are interested in trying a pair of interconnects out he'll send you a set to demo for a week (you just pay shipping) to see if they jive in your system ... you can't beat that.

What a great room and an even better looking system