Audiophilepure

YELLO celebrated their global breakthrough in 1985 with their fourth longplayer “Stella”, with which Dieter Meier and Boris Blank shot to the top of the Swiss charts – making them the first local band to reach number 1 in the Swiss charts. In Germany, the album reaches 6th place in the charts and is honoured with a gold record. While YELLO had previously been treated as a well-kept insider tip, the entire pop world now focussed on the Zurich duo. With the mega-hit “Oh Yeah”, YELLO left their mark on international pop culture for the first time: after the song, which was not originally planned as a single, entered the international charts, the hype took on a life of its own when “Oh Yeah” was featured on the soundtrack of the cinema blockbusters “Ferris macht blau” (1986) and “Das Geheimnis meines Erfolges” (1987), inspiring a worldwide audience of millions. To this day, the song can be heard at regular intervals in cinema and TV productions such as “The Simpsons” and countless commercials.

A friend, Dan, stopped by and asked to hear some Joni Mitchell. I queued up “Carey” from the 24-bit/192khz download of Blue. Dan is not an audiophile, but seems to have good ears and loves good sound. As we were listening Dan commented, “sounds like Joni did her own backup vocals.” A little later he commented, “I didn’t even realize there were backup vocals on this song.” The Hana power conditioner can take some credit for this. All the Jonis were clearly presented and floating in front of us. It was a relaxed open stage.

So, what about those design goals mentioned earlier? Noise reduction is superb, and the subject I’ve talked the most about. I haven’t mentioned load independence or the prevention of intercomponent signal leakage. All components connected to the Hana conditioner remained isolated from each other, almost as if they each had their own power conditioner. There was also a sense of stability. As to current limiting, I didn’t put this to a hard test but didn’t notice any of the artifacts usually associated with current limiting. Lastly, what about sonic signature? I haven’t mentioned it until now because there was nothing to say. I could detect no artifacts anywhere in the presentation that I could associate with the Hana conditioner. It just took away the noise.