For two weeks now, I have been listening to a Sean Jacobs ARC6 DC4 power supply hooked up to my Chord DAVE. It replaced a Sean Jacobs DC3, so I had already modified my DAVE to remove the stock SMPS. I bought the ARC6 used; a new one with the proper connections to a DAVE will cost you $10,000 USD.
Admittedly, that is a lot of money for a power supply, especially one that powers a DAVE, which can be bought on the used market for somewhere around $8000 USD if current listings are to be believed. Nevertheless, if you own a Chord DAVE and if you have the funds, I am hard pressed to think of another change for the same money that will improve your sound this much.
I’ll try to be succinct. The first words to enter my mind, approximately ten seconds into my first listen, were space and bass. That was followed quickly by vibrant. Then “resolution monster.” You don’t strain to hear these changes. They practically hit you in the face. Maybe it’s a cliché, but the ARC6 makes every single track sound new and better. Every single one. I’ll just quickly summarize my listening notes: deep black silence, easily heard improvements to bass in both quality and quantity (actually measurable), vivid colors, tonal density and richness, serious magnification including a lot of newly intelligible vocals, beautiful and true timbres, and powerful, controlled micro- and macro-dynamic swings.
Now I have not heard other replacement power supplies for the DAVE, so I can’t compare solutions from Farad or others. What I can do is give you a sense of the magnitude of the change I am hearing with other changes to my system. I certainly can’t think of any other power supply that has made anywhere near this impact, including Farad Super3s, Uptone LPS 1 and 1.2, and Uptone JS-2. None of these powered my Chord DAVE, but none had nearly the impact on the devices they did power. Paul Hynes made me a one-off custom power supply for my phono stage, but its impact is also dwarfed by the ARC6. Probably the closest is the Sean Jacobs DC3, but going from DC3 to ARC6 (I skipped the plain vanilla DC4) is quite clearly a larger leap than DAVE solo to DAVE plus DC3 (not that the DC3 is chopped liver – it is a huge and worthy upgrade for a fraction of the price, if you can find one).
In terms of overall system upgrades, perhaps the closest and most apt comparison is to the Taiko Extreme, which, not coincidentally, employs a heroic power supply. The Extreme and the ARC6 bring some of the same things to the table: increased tonal density and vibrancy, dynamics, bass quality and quantity. The overall magnitude of change in my system has been roughly similar. The Shunyata Everest, combined with a nice selection of Shunyata Sigma and Alpha power cords, was another great upgrade that transformed my system and did so across both digital and analog. But the sonic impact was not as great.
If I were advising someone on what to buy and when to buy it, I would prioritize an ARC6-DAVE combo over an Extreme or similarly priced server. This is especially the case if you already have a DAVE, but even if you don’t, a used DAVE plus ARC6 is going to cost you maybe 65% of what an Extreme will cost you (and that’s with a Euro that has declined a lot relative to the US dollar in recent months). All of this assumes that you already are using something better than an off-the-shelf computer as a music server.
Apart from the Extreme, I can’t think of any other change to my system that has been this dramatic, save for speakers. But I put speakers into a separate category, one that is highly personal.
Actually, if you own a Chord DAVE, I can think of one change that will give you greater bang for your buck: PGGB (see remastero.com). For a comparatively minimal investment, and assuming you can dedicate an appropriately powerful computer to remaster albums in your library, PGGB provides an incredible sonic lift. The combination of an ARC6-DAVE and music that has been PGGB’d is sublime. I have a nice vinyl setup (TW Acustic Raven, Raven tonearm, Miyajima cart, and Crayon phono stage) and PGGB albums sound better than all but a vanishingly small percentage of the same music on vinyl (and that was true before the ARC6 upgrade; the chasm has only grown since then).