Adding a Pro PSU to the Servant did bring a benefit, in terms of solidity, weight, substance and absolute instrumental stability, a further drop in noise, but at the expense of some sluggishness to the sound. That reflects increased bass weight, which can be fixed with a slight shift in the speakers’ height or placement. But this was more about sonics and presentation than musical integrity and was a far more limited change than that experienced with the Master SuperSwitch. With the Optical Bridge option waiting in the wings, I left the PSU in place (pending relocation), allowing me to run the bridge on the two iFi supplies.
Light fantastic?
The first thing I discovered on hooking up the Optical Bridge is that cabling matters. Introducing another of the basic Ethernet cables supplied by Reiki undid quite a bit of what I’d already achieved, with a lightening of the balance and a flattening of the image. Substituting a Heimdall between the Bridge’s Master unit and the Master SuperSwitch restored things and more. Re-running the comparisons with the Heimdall loom in place clearly demonstrated the increase in immediacy and dynamic response, resolution and precision delivered by the Optical Bridge. A 24/96 file of Vikinger Ólafsson’s Debussy-Rameau album gained a crispness to the placement, dynamic discrimination and attack of the notes, a better sense of their weight and his accenting. The music took on a real sense of temporal discipline and structure in the Rameau pieces, but with an added sense of human agency and input, expressed in the timing, spacing and weighting of the notes through each phrase.
Following the closer to the Server logic referred to earlier, the next step was to shift the Pro PSU from the SuperSwitch Servant to the Optical Master, so that both of the final units in the chain enjoyed the bigger power supplies. This wrought an immediate benefit in terms of grace, poise, subtlety and overall acoustic, banishing the slight ‘loudness’ that still persisted from using the Pro PSU on the SuperSwitch Servant, replacing it with a slightly more distant but more dimensional image with a more natural sense of proportion, balance and inner detail. The sustained decay that is such a feature of this recording was beautifully rich and complex. Pace and musical flow exhibited an uninhibited freedom and as a result, the expressive range in the playing increased markedly, in no small part thanks to the increase in transparency, immediacy and leading-edge definition. Each note strike was clearly defined for place, weight and attack, bringing more drama but also more subtlety and shape to the slower passages.
With a clear structural pecking order emerging, it was time to try optimizing cabling and the network topology, a long and tedious task involving repeated shifts and experiments, so I’ll cut to the chase and describe where I got to…
My dedicated audio network router is galvanically isolated from the main fibre-optic input and household network. It is located around 5m from the Server. I ran 1m of Heimdall out of the router and into the SuperSwitch Servant and then another 5m from there to the Optical Bridge Servant, with both the Reiki units fed from the iFi power supplies. I did try co-locating both Servants at the router and running a 5m single-mode optical cable to the Optical Bridge Master, adjacent to the Server. In theory, that should be better than the Heimdall for the long run, but I found quite the opposite, with the long optical lead introducing a nasty, bright edge to the treble – not a happy match with Hilary’s fiddle! I sat the two Optical Bridge elements on one of the Pro power supplies and then ran 1m of Valhalla 2 to the SuperSwitch Master and 1m of V2 from that to the CAD filter at the network input on the Reference Server.
Ground control…
Next step was grounding. With five units co-located adjacent to the Server, running grounding options was way easier than running all the alternative wiring rigs. The first point is that grounding the Reiki units is definitely effective, dropping the noise floor still further. The second point is that, playing with grounding configurations, grounding each unit (and its matching power supply) separately from the others delivers a huge advantage. Using a QKore6 I was able to have separate grounds for the SuperSwitch Master/Pro pairing, Optical Bridge Master/Pro pairing and the Optical Bridge Servant, all within a single grounding unit, bringing a reach out and touch immediacy and dimensionality to the images, beautifully realised harmonics and instrumental textures, all without any hint of forwardness. For the first time I really got the sense that high-res files were delivering on their promise, musically and in terms of sheer resolution and detail. Finally this was a picture that took the welter of information and integrated it into a single, coherent, musically meaningful whole.
