Why so long? Blame the nanny state! Building regs in the UK insist that sockets are placed a minimum height off of the floor and as the PowerARAY Pro is inserted into the socket next to the one your system runs off, a shorter lead risks leaving it dangling. If you don’t need a whole metre of cable and you want a neater solution, you can always order the PowerARAY with a shorter cable, but I’m not sure how much (if anything) that will save on the price. I’m hoping to visit Chord within the next month or so, so I’ll take the opportunity to compare the three versions, but for the moment, I’m just going to describe the performance of the unit equipped with the Chord Music cable.
And while we’re on the subject of induced noise, the PowerARAY Pro sits on three, small, round feet. It sounds better if those feet are loosened off. It sounds even better if you provide some added isolation or a small HRS damping plate on top. In fact, I’d say that’s attention to physical support is essential to get the best out of the product. Other than that, it really is plug-n-play.
The REAL deal…
If I was jolted by the price of the PowerARAY Pro, I was shocked by its performance. With a healthy regard for the sonic and musical benefits of the standard PowerARAY, I guess I was just expecting more of the same from the Pro. What I got was something entirely different. Okay, so it does give you more of the benefits that come with the standard PowerARAY, but what makes the Pro special is what it does with them. Plug it in and you’ll hear a pretty much instant (and impressive) increase in dynamics, focus, transparency, dimensionality and instrumental or vocal texture. You are going to hear a blacker background behind and between the instruments too, with lower levels of grain and less bleaching or compression of colours. And all that will improve still further over time. Give the PowerARAY Pro a good half an hour and things will really start to sing. What happens is that all those ‘extras’ start to combine and complement each other, coming together into a more complete, coherent and understandable whole. The sound takes on a fundamental sense of natural order. The space between instruments becomes clearer and better defined: but more importantly, it becomes a key part in the explicit relationship between those instruments and their players. The greater sense of dimensionality, body and texture tells you more about the instruments, the materials they’re made of, the way in which they are being played, the harmonics emanating from the instruments themselves. And voices? The natural scale and character, diction and accent, the shape of the mouth and the body behind it all fall naturally into place. These are not small changes and they certainly aren’t subtle. They add up to a fundamental increase in understanding, a shorter distance between you, the performers and their performance; a step past the system and closer to the original event. And that quality develops the longer the poweARAY Pro sits in the system. Meaning that the real, acid test is when you take it out: be prepared for a shock, as the sound fall back to a mechanical, two-dimensional and awkward facsile of itself. Put what the PowerARAY actually does into the value equation and suddenly it doesn’t seem so expensive…
