Currently listening to a nice IRL example of the Everything Matters principle. For some random reason this evening I thought I'd dust off my long shelved iFi Zen Stream and give it a whirl with a few power and noise filtering measures I've cobbled together in the 18 months since then. I retired the Zen not long after getting it as it was edgy, thin and flat compared to my then new DAC's internal streamer, even when powered by an IFI Power X and sent via a Gustard U18 DDC.
Well ya know what, the below tweaks completely transformed the Zen Stream's sound into an unrecognisably lush, expansive and engaging sound:
- power from a 12v LIFEPO4 battery filtered via an IFI DC iPurifier (each alone is great, together superb)
- iFi LAN iSilencer on end of a Furutech LAN-8 NCF ethernet cable from a heavily tweaked LHY SW-8 switch in turn fed by FMCs and another switch
- USB audio out dual filtered - USB isolator
https://a.aliexpress.com/_mrwT3yq powered by a 5V iFi Power X, feeding a Holo Titanis USB reclocker/Regenerator, Gothic Audio SemperFi pure silver cable to DAC USB in (same cable as from Zen to U18 previously)
- 2 X signal grounding cables to a ground box, the Zen's USB input and the unused s/pdif coax output
- vibration damped stting on an A5 sheet of fo.Q SH-22K with a tiny quantity of Rochelle Salt poweder in a zip bag on top (the Zen was super sensitive to the RS, too much and it thinned the sound unduly). These last two took its resolution up several notches into a different class.
(To be fair that's more than twice the cost of the Zen again on these tweaks, but boy does it sound good now. Will have to AB it against the R26's internal HQP renderer.)
I reckon it could alternatively be called the Princess and the Pea principle, as even with the multiple layers and types of filtering between the LHY switch and the R26 the sound lost a decent chunk of its lushness, flow and scale when I removed the top layer of the damping materials I have on that switch's OCXO. As to why the heck the precision of an upstream oscillator sending a packet based asynchronous stream matters one jot to a downstream streamer & DAC, God knows, but matter it does. Very much indeed.