Not Another NuForce thread......

9rw, yes, I am a Nuforce and Legacy dealer but I'm also an enthusiast. And though the Aerial 10Ts would hold their own against many speakers, the ribbon tweeters and ribbon midranges on the Legacys provide a more complete and refined musical presentation than the Aerial 10Ts and perhaps many other dynamic-driver speakers. Amazing how much more complete horns, vocals, and strings sound. And the 10Ts were never a bad speaker in my opinion.

BTW, you never did expand on your experience about what you heard specifically with the Nuforce amps. In fact, your comment to Ggil almost sounds as though you never auditioned the Nuforce amps. I hope that's not the case.

Nevertheless, based on the system you listed I would like to take a stab at some comments and suggestions as to why I think you may be hearing 'zingy' highs in your own system.

Speaker Cables and Interconnects
I would recommend auditioning other ics and scs. I've never heard the Cardas in my own system but I've heard them in others and I've heard what others have compared them to and based on that information I would not hesitate to audition other ics. Seven years ago, I owned both the AZ Satori (shotgun bi-wire) and Harmonic Technology Pro-9 speaker cables (both engineered by Robert Lee of AZ). In my experience the Harmonic Technology Pro 9s and AZ Satoris were loaded with time-smear as are many cables. But that only became evident when I replaced them with the similarly-priced Audience Au24 speaker cables. Even better cables are the Paul Speltz Anti-cables and Anti-ics, Balanced Power Technology, and Audio Tekne cables. But the Audio Tekne scs and ics are far better than any of these and are almost identical in price. I still am not aware of a better ic or sc. Installing any one of these other cables could easily minimize the so-called zingy highs that you claim to hear while also providing much greater bass definition and a far more musical and pristine presentation.

Line Conditioning
I've heard good things about the Audio Magic lc, but it sounds like you have no line-conditioning for your other components. This is a big and obvious area of concern and could make any revealing component sound weird in the highs. Any component that is not receiving proper line-conditioning is passing much AC noise into the presentation. One of the most obvious side affects of improper or no line conditioning is negative sibilance and the affects can easily be interpreted as zingy highs, fatiguing, etc..

Vibration Management
To the best of my knowledge there's near zero if not zero performance gains in the Target rack and perhaps just a bit more performance with the BDR cones. In either case if either one of these items has no performance value, then the other item will not be able to perform either because they must work together. This area of vibration mgmt may not seem significant at the moment but properly addressing vibrations can bring by far the greatest performance gains you may ever hear. If you've ever been in your car at a stoplight with some kid blasting his subwoofer two cars behind wreaking havoc on your car in the outdoors, you can begin to get an understanding of the absolute havoc caused by vibrations trapped inside your components in a closed-in room. Obviously Robert Harley (editor of The Absolute Sound) is not aware of this fact, otherwise he would never have admitted to auditioning the lightweight Nuforce amps by placing them on the carpet as he claimed in an issue about 9 months ago in TAS where they systematically tried to pooh-pooh all Class D technology in general and essentially retracted their Nuforce amp the Amp of the Year award. Still Harley said that he enjoyed the Nuforce amps. But when Jonathan Valin claimed that all the Class D amps just sounded weird in the highs makes me think perhaps he had his digital amps hanging from a chandelier. At the very least you could audition Star Sound's Audio Points. This may only get you about 5 or 10% gain simply because of the rack you are using. But that's still a pretty good and inexpensive improvement and would help minimize the so-called zingy highs you claim to hear. To realize more benefits, you would have to replace your rack with a performance-oriented one.

In summary, any one of these deficiencies will make any truly revealing component sound fatiguing, 'zingy', hyper-detailed, etc. I can all but guarantee that if you or anybody else (including TAS) claims that weird things are happening in the high frequencies with the Nuforce amps in place, it's simply not the amps. Rather for the first time deficiencies within the system may be exposed because of the extremely revealing Nuforce amps.

Bottom line is a truly revealing component is not so common in high-end audio. And when such a component does come along its revealing beauty for what it does with music also becomes its own worst enemy simply because a truly revealing component must be indiscriminate about what it's revealing. Whether it's musical information, time-smear, AC noise, or trapped resonance energy.

But then again, it's all too common to shoot the messenger.

-IMO

The V2 versions provided me about 30% improvement over the Special Edition amps. Arbitrarily speaking of course.

But 9rw brings up a very good point. A truly revealing componenent absolutely must be indiscriminate about what it reveals, whether it's musical information, time smear from the ics and scs, grunge from improper or no line conditioners, or perhaps improper vibration management and/or a just a crappy cdp.

Sadly, as 9rw shared in his experience, most of us know least one or more just like him with systems that exemplify one or more of these deficiencies that often times lead the less informed to think the zingy highs or fatiguing sound must be due to the Nuforce amp or whatever other revealing and potentially musical component may be under scrutiny.

9rw, in your own words would you care to describe the zingy highs you heard? Also, please list the components in your system including line conditioners and whichever vibration methodology chosen, and associated products you are using.

Surely, amongst those here one or more of us should be help you get your system on right track. That's what I like about this forum.

-IMO

9rw's responses are very impressive. He starts out claiming how poorly these amps sound and yet all of his earlier responses clearly indicate to me that he's never listened to these amps.

Then there's his hyperbolic exaggerations on the frequency of upgrades and now his claims that after numerous upgrades one has now spent $10k on the amps.

What I find most impressive is his claim that time aligned and phase coherent speakers are some type of proper substitution for time-smeared ics and scs, lack of proper line conditioning, and lack of proper vibration control.

Impressive indeed.

-IMO

9rw, let's start at the very beginning of this thread. From the beginning I've already asked you numerous times to provide specific about what you heard with the Nuforce amps and each time you refused to answer. So let's try this once again and hopefully everybody else will take note.

Please state when and where you heard these amplifiers, who loaned the amps to you and please also describe in detail what you heard.

Based on your responses to me (always ignoring the more generic version of that question) and your subsequent responses to others you've given every indication you've never heard these amps. Yet, you seem to have no problem defaming them with your imaginary claims along with your silly hyperbolic exaggerations.

Even if per chance you heard these amps, if you had issues in the highs as you claimed, the first question I would have asked you is what were you using for line conditioners.

But since you admit you care little about the sonic harm induced by time-smear in cables, improper or no line conditioning, and improper or no vibration mgmt because according to you your time-aligned and phase coherent speakers do an excellent job substituting for these otherwise unrelated deficiencies, that question would have been moot.

Certainly one of the more unbright statements I've heard in this forum.

But please don't even bother responding to the bottom half of this post if you won't respond to the first half.

-IMO