Bottom Line for those averse to TMI (this is a looooong essay):
The vast majority of upgrades I’ve installed in my audio systems over the years have effected incremental improvements in perceived performance. Not this one. Replacing my DAC’s stock power cord with the Wireworld Electra 7 was transformative to the point of mind-blowing. Right out of the box.
The Listening Environment:
While the bedroom system here is technically “secondary” (and requires me to flop on the bed as my listening chair), it's gotten the lion’s share of playing time lately, owing to the presence of a flat screen in the main system’s living space and my spouse’s consuming interest in such compelling spellbinders as “The Property Brothers”, QVC’s at-all-hours culinary hardware offerings, and the cloying “Bachelor” and “Bachelorette” soap operas play-acting at “reality”.
Given its frequency of use, and despite its limitations due to unavoidable furniture placement and foot-traffic patterns that preclude optimum speaker positioning (as evidenced in the diagram), I decided to see if I could bump the system’s perceptible performance up a notch by substituting a Wireworld Electra 7 for the stock power cord feeding AC to my Uptone Audio ReGen’d TEAC UD-501 DAC.
My sole program source is a laptop-connected external USB drive that stores CD rips and high-resolution (24/88 through DSD128 and DXD) downloads. My primary listening fare consists of classical, jazz, and film scores, with occasional toe-dips into vocal standards, Broadway musicals, opera, and choral music. The system itself is detailed in my signature block below.
The Audition (with a Contextual Detour):
I began my audition of the Electra 7 right out of the box Ivan sent via UPS—in other words, with no burn-in and no settling time. For the first selection I picked a DSD128 reissue of one of RCA Living Stereo’s true sonic gems, Morton Gould’s reading of his own ballet score, “Fall River Legend”. I loaded the score into JRiver, clicked the play icon, and plopped down on the bed.
It took maybe 10 seconds into the first track to realize just how far down I’d lowballed my expectations with “up a notch”. What I heard was not the proverbial lifting of a veil typical of most upgrades I’ve installed, but rather a wholesale blowing down of the bedroom’s front wall.
Hyperbole? Well, let’s take a second to explore what we mean by “soundstage”. It’s typically expressed by its boundaries, specifically how far they extend laterally and fore-and-aft. If we make a system change that expands those boundaries…whoopee. If greater image focus and specificity accompany that expansion to the point of appearing holographic, so much the better. And if we detect better frequency extension and a more detailed presentation in the bargain, we’ve really hit the jackpot. Well, perhaps. Then again, maybe it’s just a “close” that doesn’t quite approximate horseshoes or hand grenades.
If you’ve ever peered into a loaded ViewMaster, you’ve been rewarded with a three-dimensional image that’s sharply defined throughout. Or if you’ve ever put on the special glasses required to watch a 3-D movie and gotten your eye poked with a written-into-the-script arrow or a spear, you’ve experienced a semblance of tactile reality. In both instances, the images are holographic. But do you feel the space within them, that sensation of palpable “air” that actually puts you in the picture?
With the Electra 7 in place, the most immediately noticeable effect with “Fall River Legend” was the massive infusion of human-breathable air into the performing space (Manhattan Center), which not only expanded the soundstage boundaries but gave the whole presentation you-are-there life. Gould’s orchestra became a reach-in-and-touch-someone three-dimensional entity to the farthest reaches of the now-expanded stage. With that, its output became tonally richer and far more nuanced than I’d ever heard in this system. Brass evinced “body” expressed in capital-S sonority; strings, resinous bite and liquidity; winds—well, I’ve never heard a reproduced bassoon so “gutsy”; percussion, tight, to-the-nines decay-resonant, and shirt-flapping impactful. No subtlety, no “incremental” here. This was out-and-out transformative.
But was it a one-off?
To test that, I next put on a different composition conductor, ensemble, recording venue, label, and recording team—Aaron Copland’s “Danzon Cubano performed by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in Philharmonic (later Avery Fisher) Hall on Sony (originally Columbia), SBM’d 16/44. It was easy to detect the change in venue, but the end result was the same in terms of soundstage expansion, image sharpness, instrumental body, tonal definition, transient quickness, and, above all, that same sense of almost-touchable air filling the performing space.
That close-to-your-are-there phenomenon repeated itself with opera (Alexander Borodin’s “Prince Igor”, Sony, 16/44, with much improved layering of the male and female vocal choirs in the “Polovtsian Dance with Choir”), Broadway (Leonard Bernstein’s final iteration of “Candide”, DG, 16/44, ditto on the layering) and filmscores (Robert Farnon’s “Captain Horatio Hornblower”, Reference Recordings, 16/44; Jerome Moross’ “The Jayhawkers”, Milan, 16/44; and Richard Rodgers’ “Victory at Sea”, RCA, 16/44).
For solo vocal in a more intimate studio recording venue, I put on Jane Monheit’s “There’s a Small Hotel” from her “Home” album (16/44). There was no artificial space enhancement here, but Monheit’s image was sharper and her tonal inflections better defined to the point where she could have been in the room (and I’d have been in a lot of trouble—I live in a shared space, remember).
How about a soloist singing to an audience in a larger venue? For that I selected Sarah Vaughan’s outing with Michael Tilson Thomas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in “Gershwin Live”, recorded live in the Chandler Pavilion (CBS, 16/44). Sarah’s subtle vocal nuances (not least in the lowest registers) were far more clearly in evidence and she was more differentiated from the now-better-delineated orchestra behind her than I’d heard pre-Electra 7.
My Take:
Feeding the TEAC DAC with the Electra 7 is easily the most significant upgrade to the bedroom system since I converted what are supposed to be sleeping quarters into a mini-Stonehenge of four-foot tall GIK megaliths. That round of room treatment transformed the problematic room into a considerably more listenable space. The Electra 7 has gone beyond that, transforming the listening experience itself to the point where quality-engineered recordings all but put this listener in the performers’ laps. Too bad my Sonographe amp is captive-corded, or I’d slap an Electra 7 on it in a heartbeat.