Nordost QBASE Reference QB10

So, here in a nutshell is my take on what you are going to hear. The first thing to point out is that this is a suck it and see situation. You listen, you adjust you listen again. There’s no right answer here and reaching the conclusion that you prefer the unit running flat is entirely possible. But flat is where you should start. In my experience, the QW introduces a sense of more, more focussed energy in the instruments, more body and a more defined chest behind vocals. Along with that comes a sense of dynamic ease and increased definition of dynamic range. Note shape and subtle changes in level across a note or between notes within a phrase are more explicit. QS introduces added air and transparency, reducing grain and glare. That sounds entirely positive, but be warned: on first listen it can leave the sound seeming flat and homogenous, having stripped out a lot of the edge that’s so often associated with RFI interference. As a rule of thumb, the benefits of QS are far more dependent on the units plugged in. If you are running a bunch of Network components on that bank of sockets QS will definitely be a good thing. Depending on how carefully you’ve worked on the AC feed to your listening room and how polluted an RFI environment you inhabit, its application to analogue components is more situationally dependent. I generally Find myself with the analogue half of the QB10 using QW and the digital side using either QW or QW and QS – but that’s in a very low RFI environment (rock walls 2’ thick will do that for you) and with dedicated AC feeds. The good news here is that the QB10 allows you to investigate and adapt its performance according to each situation.

“Reference” in the widest possible sense…

On the one hand the QB10 is simply a way of getting AC as quickly, cleanly and directly from input to multiple outputs as possible. On the other, it is a sophisticated and highly adaptable tool to help optimise AC distribution and grounding topology within your system. That it is essentially passive, with no in-line filtering or massive isolation transformers might cause more than a few raised eye-brows, especially given its cost. Listen and expect those eyebrows to be hoist higher still. On paper and, according to high-school science classes, there should be no way this thing can do what it so demonstrably does. But hey, we know a lot less about this stuff than we think we do and I’ll take hard-won, hands-on experience over ‘scientific’ nay-sayers every time.

Talking of experience, if you actually play with cable systems (and yes, your cables are a system within your system) you soon learn that the most important cable you have is the one connected to the wall. The QB10 sits directly between that cable and your system so, given that, when you listen to your system you are, in a very real sense, listening to the AC that’s coming out of your wall, perhaps it should come as no surprise that you can hear what the QB10 does so clearly – or that it makes such an important musical contribution to system performance. The QB10 extends and amplifies the importance of that first cable and the AC feed as a whole.