[jimtranr]

Background: In early June, the Shunyata Delta XC power cord I’d acquired a few weeks earlier to feed the bedroom audio system’s Delta D6 power distributor shed what must have been its last vestige of “settling” at about 140 playback hours and stripped away another by-no-means-thin layer of veil between the listener and the digital-file-fed musical program emanating from the system’s stand-mounted two-way speakers.

A week-and-a-half later, I managed to snag a near-mint 20-year-old Audio Research LS16 line stage (the 6922-based original iteration) to replace the system’s solid-state, captive-corded c-j Sonographe preamp. Even with the detachable generic AC cord supplied with the new arrival, the change effected another audible improvement that rendered the music less electronic-sounding. After listening for a few days to this “stock” configuration, I borrowed a Shunyata Venom NR v10 from my living-room audio-video system and mated it to the LS16. The result was a noticeable improvement in every area that gets audiophiles all hot and bothered, transporting the listener even more palpably into whatever tonal, textural, dynamic, and spatial soundscape recording producers, engineers, and artists opt to convey with a given release. The improvement was significant enough to make me wonder whether a next-level power cord upgrade could achieve more than a nominally incremental bump in system performance, given my hardware’s age (the power amp is also 20 years old, the DAC seven), its batting-order niche in the respective manufacturers’ product lineups, and the limitations, despite extensive acoustic treatment, of the furnished-as-a-bedroom 11’x13’x7’8” listening space.

Based on my experience with the Delta XC, I’d already begun reloading my discretionary penny jar for the purchase of a Delta NR v2 power cord prior to acquiring the LS16. The v2 was intended originally to replace the Delta NR v1 feeding the system’s USB DAC. But the arrival of a detachable-cord line stage, its performance with the Venom NR v10, and curiosity about how much more—if anything--I could squeeze out of it with a new, next-level-up power cord reoriented my game plan. The LS16 would get the new Delta NR, the v1 would remain with the DAC, and the Venom would return to its rightful slot in the living-room system. Since the power amp is captive-corded, it couldn’t share in any new-power-cord fun and games except as the downstream beneficiary of a less-noise-polluted signal fed to its inputs.

Initial Listening Impression: After letting the Delta NR v2 burn calories ingested on a rich diet of densely-scored ripped and downloaded orchestral, choral, operatic, and film-music fare for about 25 hours, I sat down for my first “serious” listen, knowing that at such an early stage of cable settling any performance assessment would be preliminary at best. Preliminary, yes, but it yielded a significant conclusion early on: The noise floor had plummeted well below the already-impressive “basement” level established with the Venom NR v10 feeding AC to the LS16.

If you’ve followed any of my power-cord or -distributor threads in this forum over the last year-and-a-half, you know that they constitute a litany of, in part, the progressive expansion of a given recording’s perceived performing space, of the air that fills it, and of the palpability of both that space and the voices and instruments that populate it. I’ve used expressions such as “being there”, “reach in and touch someone”, and “speakers disappearing” to characterize the successive improvements I’ve heard with each new Shunyata power cable upgrade, with the recent installation of the D6-feeding Delta XC providing the most significant bump upward in three-dimensional touchy-feely audio performance.

Enter the Delta NR v2 (at only around 25 hours, remember), and it’s a whole new perceptual ballgame replete with unmasked spatial and ambient cues that breathe significantly more “being-there” and room-boundary-disregarding life into the recordings I’ve listened to thus far. Nothing subtle, and sure as heck nothing "simply incremental" about it. I’ve never felt as engaged with (or “drawn into”, if you prefer) the recordings in my collection—and that’s by a wide margin.

I intend to share follow-up posts with details about specific recordings and the usual audio-performance parameters we junkies salivate over once the Delta NR v2 has had more time to settle in. In the meantime, color my first impression mind-blown.