Well, now there’s a better option available. It so happens that The Audio Works (who own the Music Works cable and accessories brand/distribution arm) are CH dealers. As originators of the Acouplex material – an Acrylic/PEEK composite with some seriously interesting dispersive/damping properties – they looked at applying it to the question of further improving the performance of their and their customers’ CH units. Various options were considered, including replacement top-plates (only a viable possibility because the modular construction of the CH products means that they all share the same footprint – all except the M10 boxes, that is). From there it was a short step to a top-plate that would screw into the spike shafts and, from there we reached the ReFract, a brand specific solution that nonetheless, has far wider applications and implications – of which more later.
Rather than a full replacement top-plate, the ReFract is a heavily sculpted panel intended to be sat on top of a CH unit. With an exaggerated, thick-waisted hourglass shape, there are no parallel edges or common dimensions, while the inset sides handily clear the ventilation slots in the top plate of the A1.5, M1.1 and I1 amplifiers. There an M8 threaded hole in the underside of each ‘arm’, to which can be attached the existing Acouplex cones and flat pucks, or a truncated conical ‘foot’ most akin to the screw-in studs you used to find on football and rugby boots. These last items are specifically designed to sit in the open tops of the CH spike shafts, the threaded attachment meaning that you can tweak them to get a perfect, solid fit. Thus located, they are coupled directly to the unit’s ‘mechanical ground plane’/chassis base plate, offer an alternative exit route for spurious energy and mopping it up before it finds its way back into the sensitive circuitry – something it does with astonishing efficiency, if the musical benefits are anything to go by. It’s perhaps most easily thought of as the mechanical equivalent to those parallel ground boxes such as the CAD Ground Controls, Nordost QKores or TriPoints – boxes that have become an essential party of system optimization, helping release system performance and becoming pretty much de rigueur in high-end systems. The impact of the ReFracts is just as musically significant, albeit rather different in its musical effect.
Each ReFract panel costs £825 (including 20% UK sales tax) with the various cones and pucks starting at £40 each. Individually, that makes them cheaper than the parallel electrical grounding boxes, but then the boxes offer the option to ground more than a single unit. I figure that, taking the QKore unit as a point of Reference, the cost of mechanically grounding a complete system with ReFracts is going to be roughly similar.
First seen in Munich this year, the ReFract was always going to cause a stir, not least because of the way it looks. The black, sculpted, hourglass panel sits close enough to the top-plate of the standard grey CH components that it becomes of a piece with the product. Personally, I rather like the way it looks and the visual relief/contrast that it provides to products that are, otherwise, in danger of looking bland. But have their musical impact demonstrated and they’ll grab your attention for all the right reasons. The demonstration is simplicity itself: just remove and then replace the ReFracts while restarting the same track. I sat in on several demonstrations, having heard the effect for myself and never once was the listener left less than astonished. In one case their jaw almost literally hit the floor. Mind you, that was a CH distributor who was probably mentally computing the potential sales!
