dCS Puccini Clock


I had yesterday the oportunity to hear for first time the Puccini clock.

I must admit that I was a little sceptical. The system consisted of:

Howland preamp HP-200 SE
Howland amp RADIA SE
Avalon Indra
Transparent power cleaner / station ?
I can't tell which cables

Well the effect is quite amazing and you can easily recognize it in a blind hearing. If I have to describe it I would say, you become aware of the hall / the space in which the recording has been done. The difference is very noticeable when you switch the clock off, suddenly the music sounds dryer, shorter and the space all around the whole music desapears.

I heard:
Luiz Bonfa plays and sing Bossa Nova (Verve)
Bruckner 4th by Jaap van Zweden (bad SACD & interpretation)
Bruckner 4th by Günter Wand (the last recording)
Ports of Call by Eiji Oue (Ref. Rec. bravo Prof. Johnson you are a great sound engeneer!)

One of these days I will take it home and have a test on my system ... and will make some blind hearing with my wife ;-)

I will report then about the experience.
clavil
You can use whatever clock you want, as long it supports 44.1k rate. You can get a Puccini U-Clock, the older dCS Verona, one of the Esoteric offerings or even one of the studio clocks available, like the Apogee BigBen (~$1000 from ebay).

Effectivnes of using external clocks with single box CD players has always been questionable. I remember coments posted by another user on this forum a while back - he connected uber-expensive Esoteric Rubidium (Rb) clock to his Esoteric X-1 single box unit and also did not notice much of a difference.
Elberoth,

any tentative with MIT shotgun or oracle?

All,

If you buy the clock directly in England it will cost almost half of 6'000$

and by the way the Puccini is also down in price to some 12'000$

all of that because the £ is sharply down in last months
Clavil - I do not belive different digital cable would make much of a difference. The price I gave you does include $2000 Shunyata Anaconda Helix VX power cord.

I belive the Puccini U-Clock itself is around $4000. I'm not from the US anyway, so this is just rough estimate.
here some british dealer with another opinion

quote: A new clock cable needn't cost a fortune, we get very good results with the MIT AVt1 at £130. However, the differences made by the better cables need to be heard to be believed. The MIT Shotgun digital cable at £599 is a significant improvement on the AVt1, and Oracles (starting at £1,500) are absolutely stunning.

This may be a difficult concept to accept, but no one so far who has heard what these cables do in this context have been anything other than bowled over. END