As the Canadian distributor for CPT power cords we have been enjoying the companies products since the first day we hooked them up but we did want to see if we could take them to a whole new level. We played with various tweaks and did find one stand out product that worked extremely well with the CPT products. Most people on these forums have heard of Akiko, a small Dutch company that makes some excellent tuning products. There is an old saying "I like the company so much that I bought it", truth is I didn't buy the company but I liked the Akiko products so much that we decided to distribute Akiko throughout North America.
We have tried all CPT products over the past month and from our test results the two stand out Akiko products that worked extremely well in conjunction with the CPT products were the Akiko Corelli and the E-Tuning Gold MK2 stick.
Last month we installed the E-tuning stick directly onto the CPT 300 power cord which has been in our reference system for over six months. We started by putting the E-tuning stick before the transformer and the results were good with noticeable improvement in several areas but when we put the E-tuning stick after the transformer on the CPT 300, improvements were even more substantial. Next thing we did was try two E-tuning sticks on the same CPT 300 power cord, one before the transformer and one after the transformer. This combination resulted in significant gains. The noise floor dropped, imaging was more focused, bass response was tighter and there was more decay of the instruments. Next thing we did was plug the Akiko Corelli directly into our CPT 1200 which the CPT 300 is also plugged into. My reference system has always been very good but when we plugged the Corelli into the CPT 1200 it was if we had combined a high end digital system with a high end analogue system. The whole system became virtually holographic with decay and air that I have never heard before in any of my set-ups. I could almost feel the air around the performer and truthfully throughout my whole listening room. At first there was so much air that it was eerie even though it was a new experience for me. A lot like being at a live venue but eventually it became my new favorite thing for my current system. Connecting the Corelli to the 1200 made every song sound like a new one with greater presence, feeling of emotion, passion and harmonics to each and every song. Other aspects of the CPT/ Corelli combo was much better separation from left to right, isolated depth and precise placement. I now have five distinct separate locations. Singers are clearly 2-3 feet apart from each other with the CPT/Corelli combo in place. When I remove the Corelli piece, the singers lost the separation and in fact sometimes they were not even separated at all. The singers vocally are now clearly 5-6' high and the guitars are about 3' high how they should be. When I listened to the same songs previously before the CPT/Akiko combo, I could not distinguish between the height of each singer and whether they were beside or in front of each other singing...
I could go on but I will put it this way; I have done many other expensive upgrades over the years but for $2600 total funds, I have never heard what I am experiencing with the Akiko upgrades and the CPT combined together. To put this in prospective. We have tested over 60 different conditioning systems from $24,000 down and the combination of CPT and Akiko is the best conditioning system I have heard in my system to date.......
