Greetings Mikeam. I will be happy to review setup and precautions taken for the benefit of the thread and maybe we missed something, who knows, one never knows everything? We would prefer not to get drawn into a discourse "the best sounding cables". Regarding the setup and precautions, I will address the system with the majority of the problems. First I will give you the system as it stands today and later revisit the components and accessories in and out of the system. Today's system = Transport = Theta Jade about 1 yr old, DAC = dCS Elgar 1 mo old w/ dCS Purcell 4 mo old, Preamp = Z - Systems RDP - 1 5 mo old, Poweramp = Krell 350Mc monoblocks 5 mo old, Speakers = JMLab Utopia 5 mo old. FIM Gold cables are used as speaker cables, AES/EBU connections between the Jade, RDP-1, Purcell, and Dual AES/EBU to the Elgar. FIM Gold power cords to all components into Ensemble power conditioning units (each unit has only one plug so there are many units). Racks are Billy Bags sand filled and shelving is 3/4 cracked glass for component racks and the two amp stands, all have Bags spiked feet. Unfortunately the space is all hardwood flooring and not a ground level room. Vibration and isolation have been Major Problems in this space and we are still trying to tame the room acoustics (on order 16 studio traps from ASC). Granted the system overpowers this room, I won't share dimensions, as most of us would not put this in this room. Rest assured the current space for the system is not the final destination. Remember equipment first, then build the room around the equipment, one of our company mantras. Sorry, I had to get one "sales" pitch in. Over the months other dacs were used, the Theta Gen Va, and dCS Delius. Richard Gray's power conditioners were in for awhile. Powersnakes King Cobras, Transparent Reference speaker cables and Reference AES/EBU cables and Reference Balanced interconnects have also been in previously. Initially as Tweeters blew we thought it was a speaker problem or someone just turning the the system up too far. After a couple of replacements and lengthy discussions with JMLabs and Krell we moved up the line to the front end. We delelted pieces, changed cables, and did anything we could to solve the problem within the component chain. The system was still blowing tweeters, grand total of five to date. As you may guess the Utopia tweeters are no inexpensive piece and the Gen Va new power supply is going to cost us also. On his own the client purchased some isolation devices, the name escapes me as I am typing, but let's call them "jigglers". They are a ball bearing between two steel discs. The problem with the system is it was sending an ear piercing screech through it after playing music for a short time. The screech would instantly fry the tweeters. By this time we knew JMLab was not that careless to make five bad tweeters. Here's a good laugh for you guys, here is what Krell said (paraphased) " our monoblocks have no limiting or filtering devices in them to keep ultra high frequency noise away from the speakers. In other words the Krells just take any signal and amplify the H@#l out of it, they were not surprised if the signal reached the amps there is nothing there to stop it. And what was funny is Krell was so proud of that fact. Incidentially, we also checked for the famous oscillation problem with the Krells. All this background for the long awaited conclusion to this story. As the front end components would sit on these "jigglers" in our room with vibration problems the end of the power cords would just slightly slip almost impreceptibly out of the component. Hence my comment on poor quality. With these cords being so stiff the component ends have virtually no grabbing power and very easily slip out of the plug either on their own, from stiffness, or from the slighest vibrations. Yet the plugs do not come out far enough to disconnect power from the component and shut it off. Upon quick visual inspection most would not notice the slightloosening of the plug. The result of this partial connection is these huge voltage anomalies and current swings throwing the system into all kinds of wierd stuff. BTW, when components were on these jigglers the power cords pulled the components off center and in the direction the power cord wanted to bend or twist. This information cost us dearly, maybe this forum could have saved some of these steps for diagnosing the problem. I learned my lesson to plead to the forum earlier. Bottom line, yes we should not have allowed the client to insert these jigglers into the system, and maybe we should have spent days and weeks getting these cables to settle into their final form. But the POOR quality of the ends on the power cords with no gripping power resulted in these losses. We feel the manufacturer should have been more attentive to this area given the stiffness of the cords. The poor quality is also targeted at how the ends are sloppily finished on all the cables power cords, interconnects and speaker cables, they look like they were hacked on or forced on the end of the cables not like other high end cable manufacturers. Incidentially the initial blow outs were happening in the absence of the client. It was his desire to "burn-in" the equipment and would leave it on for hours after he had gone to work playing burn in discs. So in all fairness it took a little while for us to get a grip on what was blowing the tweeters in the first place. Any way you slice it, from our perspective as a consultant/installer it is not reasonable for us to spend weeks bending these things into place or stand there forever and hold them in each component. Hence our recommendation, is even if there are the "best" sounding there are too many drawbacks and risks with them especially for the uniniated, we decline dealership and discourage there use for the reasons above.
