Auric Illuminator, Optrix, others

My only experiments here have been with the Bedini Clarifier and the AudioPrism Blacklight. I will not comment about the Bedini right now because I have not used it in a while. But your comments match very closely with my experience with the AudioPrism Blacklight. The Blacklight changes the sound alright. The beneficial effect is to increase warmth, but at the cost of slowing and obscuring leading edge or transient detail. So I no longer use the Clarifier. My philosophy concerning using tweaks to voice a system is first of all avoiding components that mean the final voicing has to fix too many colourations in the first place. Then use tweaks which enhance the performance of the components rather than attempt to ameliorate their faults, since the later is not really possible, you can only mask them. Finally there are the tweaks which do the final voicing in terms of the character of the sound. And here you want to use things that act as close to pure filters as possible, as opposed to things that have an impact on the sound by adding time-based distortions (some technologist will tell me that these are the same thing - no doubt - but I mean smearing). So if I want to warm up the sound of a system I reject products like the Blacklight because the warmth comes at an unacceptable price. There are other ways of getting that warmth without loss of immediacy and impact, or PRAT, or dynamics, or transient speed, or however else you choose to describe it. But sometimes the final tweaks cannot achieve this, and the cause is usually your choice of components, and tweaks cannot fix this problem.

Yes Megasam. I think that getting a revealing system and then using the CD tweak to make it less revealing (or smoother, or warmer) when the source demands is probably the ideal way to go.