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Rainy day Phantom tweaking
#1
One for the subjectivists...


With the weather miserable here in Oxford and Matt from Chord here to keep me company we had a play around with some alternatives to the canary-yellow mains cable supplied with the Phantom. Idle curiosity turned into quite a lengthy listening session and now I think I'll be putting the Devialet cables back in their boxes. While not everyone agrees that mains cables do (or are even capable of) making a difference, I'm personally convinced that they do make an audible difference. Many of you had had to put up with my unique brand of enthusiasm over USB cables (and hopefully some of you will jump to my defense soon) and this afternoon was just as much of an eye-opener to me as the first time I heard a difference between USBs.

Matt had originally come over to show off the new Chord Music cables (which are stunning and a clear jump up from the Sarum) and after a long listen and a cup of tea, conversation turned to the "eye-catching" choice of cable that Devialet provide with the Phantom. We reset the Silver Phantoms upstairs and in order to keep the changes quick and relatively simple we went down to a Solo Phantom in the middle of the room and blasted out a bit of Florence and the Machine's Lungs album. As ever the Phantom impressed for a loudspeaker so small. We set upon a reference listening volume of 60 on the spark app and started playing with cables. As a starting point we decided to see if there was a noticeable change with the relatively modest C-power range. This was a tricky one - initially I felt that Florence's voice seemed a little more natural and the clapping a little better defined. After swapping back and forth several times I settled on the C-power, being a slight improvement over the stock cable - but ultimately I was a little disappointed that the difference was not Night and Day.

Next up was the Powerchord and this was where things got more interesting. While visually the Powerchord is just as striking as the stock cable, sonically its in a different league. This time Florence opened up into the room and the clapping had more bite and resolution. Upon swapping back (which we did several times) the Phantom seemed a bit dull; to use a Hifi-shop Cliche it felt "sat on". I was surprised at how dramatic the change was (I think Matt was too!) and I have some longer ones on the way to use with our Phantoms for demo soon. I spent a fair old bit of time enjoying this set-up before we came to the subject of how the Phantom was connected to the network ...

I know some of you will not be willing to suspend you disbelief for the next bit...

Plugging an Indigo Ethernet cable into the Phantom tightened and focused Florence even more with the clapping having even more snap and the vocals seeming less forced somehow. While I think it's unlikely that many will use an Indigo with a Phantom I will certainly be experimenting with the C-stream range at the next available opportunity. I was amazed at the difference these cables made to the Phantom's performance and while it's not in Devialet's philosophy to accept that cables make a difference I will certainly be recommending anything other than that canary-yellow nightmare to anyone willing to believe...


Regards


Alasdair
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#2
Thanks Alasdair, interesting and encouraging results!

Were you using any sort of power conditioner or filter?

And what was the configuration you were using to test the Ethernet cable?

Cheers
Sam





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#3
Apologies for the late delay, my wife makes sure that I don't "Hi-Fi" on my days off...


To answer your question, each of our demo rooms has its own ring but we were not using any filtering or regenerative mains products. I was a bit shocked by the difference, its been a while since I have tried other mains leads on the Devialets. I went through a phase of trying to find something that sounded better than the stock cable for the expert amplifiers and ended up using the PS Audio cables as they were the best sounding cables that allowed me to still use the back cover on the amplifier.

The ethernet set-up was Dialog>TP link switch>Phantom. The Dialog was still on a freebie ethernet cable, I suspect even more benefits could be eeked out if we swapped that link over too.

Regards


Alasdair
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#4
So did you have the phantoms connected via Ethernet? Forgive me if this is a silly question, but does that improve things above having the dialog/phantom on just a wifi network?


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