That expressive range, so apparent in ABM’s playing, in the dynamic contrasts between solo instrument and orchestra and within the orchestra itself is, if anything even more apparent with popular music. Play Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’, with its carefully structured, repetitive opening motif and quiet, intimate vocals and once again the standard supply imposes a steady-state ‘loudness’ and mechanical consistency. It robs the playing of the articulation and emphasis so important to establishing the forward momentum of the track, it kills the up-shift in pace and density and it flattens the dynamic contrast and its expressive impact. Rhythmically, the standard supply is stilted and processed, removing the natural sense of human agency from the recording. But the linear supply doesn’t just bring the guitar part back to life, bring vigour to the band and energy and pace to the performance; it absolutely transforms the vocal. It’s tonally more natural, more substantial and dimensional, with a chest behind the mouth and lips forming the words. Diction, articulation, intelligibility and nuance are all significantly improved, while the lower noise floor (so obvious from the enhanced acoustic information on the classical file) brings locational precision and detail to the performance: you can hear Chapman drop her voice and lean into the microphone in a natural search for greater intimacy; you can hear the attack and release in the chorus. The pace picks up and the underlying desperation encapsulated in the lyric reaches out to grip you – just the way it should.
It would be easy to simply state that the linear supply improves rhythm and dynamic range, drops the noise floor and reveals more detail. The problem with that is that it undersells the scale of the musical impact the Mini ARC6 DC4 has on the performance of the Nucleus and as a result, the system. It elevates the performance as a whole from something that’s little better than aural wallpaper to a meaningful, communicative and engaging artistic event: no small thing given the investment involved in the system as a whole. This is the difference between using the system for background music or sitting down and actually listening to it.
I could labour the musical point with a string of musical performances, each brought back from the colourless, two-dimensional limbo of noisy network replay, but the conclusions are obvious. Whether it’s the layered textures, breathy sax and slabs of bass that constitute Khmer, or the complex, staccato, interlocking phrase and evolutions of Art Pepper’s ‘Make A List’, the repetitive patterns of The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds or the snap, crackle and pop of Shawn Colvin’s ‘Shotgun Down The Avalanche’, the Mini ARC6 DC4 brings order out of chaos, shape and structure to the music, graduated energy and human agency to the performance. It makes the music make sense, it makes it engage your attention, it makes it – music! It is difficult to overstate the significance of this linear power supply in the overall scheme of things. Give even a basic system a coherent source and the results can surprise, entertain and delight. Put that source in a better system and you’ll get an even bigger return. Put it in the system I was using here – CH Precision C1.2, L1 and A1.5 driving Living Voice OBX-RW4s – and the cost becomes not just a no-brainer: it becomes essential expenditure.
