Delta D6 with SSF-38 in the house
 

A reindeer-less sleigh painted Brown just delivered this a little over a half-hour ago. I've already installed the SSF-38 feet on it.

https://www.audioaficionado.org/pict...pictureid=5092

https://www.audioaficionado.org/pict...pictureid=5093

Listening impressions to follow after I've given it some settling time.

Thanks, Stephen, Ivan, and Caelin for your sage and invaluable counsel.

Perfect timing! :merryxmas:

Congrats! Enjoy and please post one of your fab reviews once it settles and gets "on the cam" as we say in motor racing.

The photos look a bit odd, I'm seeing some unusual extension distortion, it looks like? :puzzled-21:

The Delta's in a "pose" setting atop the home-office system flexy rack. I leave the top shelf vacant so the cat can perch there and look out the window...whether the curtains are pulled or not. (She's figured out how to part them so she can see the squirrels, turkeys, deer, bees, and birds that roam through the yard outside...and wonder why we don't let her out. That's because a--ahem--puma cat has been known to wander in and out of here now and then.)

I hooked up the Delta in the bedroom about a half-hour ago, parking it temporarily atop a 2"-thick maple butcher block that in turn sits on four Mapleshade iso-blocks on the carpeted floor. Put on some Copland, then some Berlioz, and first fleeting impression is..."Where in the name of fifteen different houses in London did all that space come from?"

Yup....that's a "classic" effect from the new Shunyata power conditioners.

Jim, congratulations on your new purchase!

I know there is a lot of rave about the Denali v2 so it's good to hear from the other power distributor offerings. I would be curious to know where the Delta D6 sits when pitched against the former Triton v1 and v2, or even the Denali v1. The Delta D6 is retailed at 2000$ and you can get a Triton v1 for about that price on the used market. Knowing how shunyata improves their products and technology while keeping the costs of entry low, I would expect the Delta D6 to outclass former top models.

It does. ~16 dB more noise suppression than my Triton V1, for example. And, the CGS ground noise reduction system, too. Better SS Footers and vibration management. At 40% of the price of the Triton V1's original MSRP.

So....just for giggles, how much of a reduction in noise is 16 dB?

Let's do the math (Caelin can correct me if I've used the incorrect decibel drop formula):

To determine the coefficient of sound (or in this case, noise) reduction, use the decibel drop in the following formula*: C = 1-10^-(d/20)

C = 1 - 10^-(16/20)

C = 1 - 10^-(0.800)

C = 1 - 0.15849 = 0.84151

If I've used the correct decibel drop formula here, this means that Delta D6, with its 16dB greater noise suppression is ~84% quieter than Triton V1.

So, when I think about this, if I may, I'll indulge briefly in a bit of an intellectual digression into technical product development, so please bear with me:

Back when I used to teach Design for Six Sigma, we used a simple formula to calcuate the Value Proposition: Value = Quality/Price

Quality is features or functionality in a product that the customer is willing to pay for that meets their needs. There are two basic ways to increase value: 1) keep the functionality & features the same and lower the price OR 2) increase the functionality/features and keep the price the same. Either way, the "ratio" for Value gets larger, hence the Value Propostion is larger.

Is this what happens in high-end audio? No. With each new update, rev, new product launch, blah, blah, blah, the features and functions (might) increase, but so does the price. Usually significantly. The value propostion almost always gets worse the higher up the ladder you go. This is what fundamentally drives the corollary of "diminishing returns" in high end audio.

What Shunyata has done that I find very interesting is they increased the Quality (e.g., by providing an 84% greater noise reduction, & new features e.g. improved DTCD, KPIP processing, higher quality Ar-Ni VTX wiring, ground plane noise reduction, improved vibration damping, etc.), over Triton V1 AND lowered the price by...60%.

What other manufacturer does this in high-end audio? Significantly increases features and stastically verifiable functionality while concominantly significantly lowering prices?

No one else I can think of with the possible exception of Schiit Audio and Rega...:scratch2:

In my book, that is a helluva Value Proposition.

Food for thought...

*- note: ^- indicates a negative exponent

Thanks, Serge. As I write this, the D6 has "settled" in the bedroom system for about 140 hours, with approximately 80 of those in active (and repetitive) playback mode. I expect to post my listening assessment before too long (at minimum, the Cal-Illini Redbox Bowl game will have to come first).

You may have noted that on this forum back in October I flirted with the possibility of buying a used Triton v1. After receiving very helpful feedback then and in response to subsequent inquiries, I concluded that the Delta D6 was a no-brainer, given the cash outlay involved. Stephen's just-posted db computations and value assessment would appear to bear that decision out. So--and without giving the whole game away--do my preliminary listening impressions. While I don't have a Triton v1 to compare with (my benchmark is a Hydra 8 v2 now shunted to the living-room A/V system--with excellent results, BTW), I can say that the D6 already exceeds my expectations at the 80-hour active-playback mark.

Assessment after >270 hours of "settling time"...
 

I’m glad I waited 12 days after the arrival of the Hydra Delta D6 power distributor to post my assessment of its impact on what I hear in my primary “serious” listening site, my bedroom audio system. Impressed as I was at the rendering of recording-venue space (whether “real” or mix-enhanced) during my first listen almost immediately after replacing the system’s Hydra 8 v2 with the D6, I wasn’t prepared for just how much the latter would deliver listening-wise after more than 270 hours of settling time that included more than 140 of actual musical playback of mostly complex orchestral or choral fare on “repeat” during waking hours. During non-playback hours (I’m an inveterate audiophile, but I do have to sleep every now and then) the D6 continued to feed, at however low a level, my always-”on” idling c-j Sonographe amp.

The D6’s input and output power cords remain the same as those that had fed and were fed by the Hydra 8 v2:

Input:

Shunyata Delta NR from a PS Audio Power Port wall duplex outlet

Output:

Shunyata Venom 14 Digital to the source laptop’s power brick
Shunyata Delta NR to the TEAC DAC
Stock captive (unfortunately) AC cord to the Sonographe amp
Stock SMPS feeding the Seagate 4TB external hard drive

Note that the external hard drive serves strictly as musical program storage—I’ve configured JRiver MC25 to load files selected for listening into the laptop’s RAM for playback. And the line-stage volume control is “passive”, requiring no power cord. I elected to go with the optional SSF-38 stainless steel feet after my experience using Stillpoints Ultra Minis under both my original-version Hydra and the Hydra 8 v2 demonstrated that quality isolation footers make a positive audible difference in the power distributor's performance.

Shunyata’s literature does not specify the model number of the Hubbell triple-wipe-contact-system outlets (possibly 5362s?) installed on the Delta D6, but they clamp down on power cord plug prongs with a grip that a vise would kill for, ensuring a no-slop-tolerance connection. Inserting the plugs required a bit of “push” to seat them fully, but once inserted they don’t go up, down, sideways, or anywhere in between--cradles or no cradles, no matter the plug housing size. So contact loss isn’t an issue.

Spot listening during the settling period identified two “breakout” points where an already-spacious-and-detailed presentation pushed out wall boundaries, “sanitized” intra-soundstage air, and in the grunge-removal process revealed previously-unheard tonal and dynamic nuance. The first occurred at about 100 playback hours. Had it stayed at that level, I’d have been well satisfied with the unsubtly audible improvement. Then last night, while I listened to an SACD rip of Earl Wild’s teamup with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops on George Gershwin’s Concerto in F on RCA, the walls blew out again—and took some “bad” air I hadn’t detected before out with them.

The upshot: Better-focused images, expanded lateral, front-to-rear, and vertical soundstage with improved delineation of instrumental attack, sustain, and decay and ambient cues evident in the further-decontaminated venue air, more distinct layering of instrumental and vocal choirs, sharper “sock-in-the-gut” transients across the frequency spectrum, and “whoa there” dynamic leaps from softest soft to loudest loud (demonstrated dramatically in Yan Pascal Tortelier’s reading with The Philarmonia in the “En corpus de Sevilla” movement of Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia suite [Chandos, 16/44 rip]). With all of this comes a more “liquid” mid and top end, a more three-dimensionally palpable rendering of voice (the Freni/Ludwig duet “Scuoti qulla fronda di ciliegio” from Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly [Herbert von Karajan and Vienna Philharmonic, London 24/96 download] is exquisitely reach-in-and-touch-someone), and a freer-of-the-Studio-20s rendering of the scale of both performance and venue in recordings that aren’t hard-panned to remain glued to my Paradigms.

I’d thought that the Hydra 8 v2-Delta NR pairing had pretty well erased the virtual physical boundaries separating me from a given performance’s mike feed. Good as that combination is (and the 8 v2’s staying, albeit now in the living room system, for that reason), that assessment wasn’t even close. The D6 knocks its socks (and mine) off by a several-orders-of-magnitude margin. Truth is, I’m still stunned by some of what I’m hearing from my modest system with the SSF-38-mounted D6 playing power-distribution traffic cop—no, make that “enforcer”.