Audiophilepure

Vocals were clean, detailed, and nicely fleshed out; Amy Winehouse’s “Valerie” off the BBC sessions CD was impressively well focused in front me and very clean sounding. The late-singer had all of the grit and force that made her such a powerful singer when she was able to keep her life together.

Aphex Twin, The Boards of Canada, and Kraftwerk were engaging, bouncy, and surprisingly spacious sounding considering the size of the drivers and loudspeaker; Tomorrow’s Harvest isn’t the cleanest sounding album of all-time but it certainly gave the Omnia a work-out.

For the audio consumer, the laws of price and performance are writ in stone. You get what you pay for. Certainly that applies to the three linear power supplies that I auditioned over the last year or two.

Beyond any doubt, eliminating the wall-wart that came with the ethernet network switch is major. The entry-level Sbooster at $399 got me started. For a couple of hundred more, you might consider the Fidelizer Nikola Signature at $695, an all-around respectable device that will move performance up to mid-fi level. The improvement is sizable; the Nikola Signature is a good value.

However, if your destination is the Hi-End, there’s still a hill to climb. To introduce intangibles like atmosphere and timbral finesse, along with tangibles like deep resolution and transparency out to the corners, you might consider the Nordost QSOURCE. It’s at a different price point, but I don’t think you’ll be able to get the top-tier performance it delivered for less. Frankly, the level of refinement the QSOURCE LPS brought exceeded my expectations; my quest for a Hi-End LPS ends here.

The Keith Monks Prodigy leaves LPs looking and sounding very clean. Cleaning time per LP is somewhere between 8 to 10 minutes. Although a bit slower in operation, the Prodigy delivers excellent results that are fully comparable in every way to Keith Monks’s full-size RCMs. For those willing to pay more, Keith Monks also offers the discOvery Redux model (£2,995) which provides faster, quieter operation, and more automation. However, the Prodigy costs a more wallet-friendly £795 and looks more domestically appealing; it does a great job at a great price and comes highly recommended!