A Tale Of Two. . . Anacondas Helix


Tomorrow at lunchtime, if The Muses, The Force, and several other imponderables are still with us, Babybear and I will get together once again to discuss, audition and compare, well you guessed it, power chords of course. More specifically, we will examine the relative merits and impact of the Shunyata Anaconda Helix VX versus its close twin -- the Shunyata Anaconda helix Alpha -- on Babybear's own Teac Esoteric X-01 Limited. I do confess that I am going into the session with a personal hypothesis, or perhaps simply a hunch. In other words, I suspect that at least on the X-01, the noise absorbing pellets in the VX may be unnecessarily dampening some transient response, micro dynamics such as the amplitude of string vibrato, and some low level detail such as is found in the noise of Rosen on bowed strings.
My suspicions were recently heightened by Marc Mickelson's fine article on Python Helix, posted at:
http://www.soundstage.com/revequip/shunyata_python_helix_followup.htm
In his review Mr. Mickelson suggest that "in [his] system VX is right only for digital transports, like the Esoteric P-03, and the Alpha for [single box] CD players."
In our tesst the VX chord will be equipped with a 15 Amp IEC connector, while the Alpha has a 20 Amp IEC connector, which will be converted to 15 Amp format through a Voodoo converter. Stay tuned!
guidocorona

Showing 1 response by fcrowder

Again, somewhat off point, but related. The X0-1 LE has 5 internal fuses, four on the left back, one on the left front. Two friends have each experimented with removing the fuses and then cleaning the fuses and the fuse holders with the three stage Audiotop system. This resulted in an audible improvement. Next they replaced the original fuses with those marketed by Isoclean, which had also been treated with Audiotop. Much larger improvement in this case and well worth doing.