Had the opportunity to spend a week with the new version of this conditioner, RLS-1. Very impressive! I let it warm up for about 4 hours and went in for a listen. It was so good that I played every disc I could think of until it was unreasonably late. I thought to myself, I am THERE! The last link in my quest for audio Nirvana. (I know better than this.) The next day I listened again and not so good. Just as others have said, by day 3-4 it was back to that the level of that first day. It's cruel for components to tease you this way, then pull the rug out from under you like that. To be more specific, with my previous conditioner, the timbre's were very nice, but images overlapped each other, and there was little soundstage depth. When I removed the conditioner, the soundstaging was much better, but the timbre's were less natural, and there was a bit of bass bloat. The RLS-1 brought the beautiful timbre back but allowed much better localization of images as well a cleaning up the bass (as it was with the previous conditioner). Overall, I am very satisfied with this piece. One of the best reality checks, was when a relative over for the holidays, who has heard the system fairly regularly, said "that sounds like live music, like they are right there". I am currently experimenting with the sub in the RLS-1 versus the Running Springs. The sub has always sounded better with a conditioner versus without. Initially, the transport and the preamp were the only things plugged into the RLS-1.
