Tboooe, the spade to RCA or spade/spade is the connector that goes between the Entreq unit and the component you hook it up to. So, you don't merely get the unit: you can use ANY connector, I suppose (look up Roy Gregory's audiobeat review), but they come so you can either put the RCA input into an unused RCA jack on the back of your (recommended) preamplifier. Apparently there's less success when it is placed on amps.
I did indeed try it directly to the NAD, but found a much greater - and easily more obvious result - when hooked up to the Power Plant (maybe due to the CD player and integrated being plugged into its receptacles).
In fact, I've been listening for the past 2 days, and I agree with spiritofmusic: there is a noise floor we don't even hear, because it's low enough to put into the background when you listen to music. However, when the Silver Minimus is placed into the system, even CDs such as the JVC XRCD recording of Bartok/Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta exhibit a continuousness of space that is mesmerizing. It as though all the tiny layers of grain we don't hear, are removed, making the music much more fluid, and joining together all the sections of the orchestra so that even when part of the orchestra isn't moving, you still the space they're sitting in quietly, and when the orchestra hits a sudden stop, or, as on Mercury CDs, they move from cut to cut without pausing the machine, the room materializes in a way that disappears once the Minimus is removed.
What's more striking is that usually, I have to pay very close attention to hear changes in say, a tube trap, or the Stillpoints (which also remove grain and lower the noise floor), which, if moved even fractions of an inch (as you know), from their optimal position, can sound quite ordinary, which is why I suspect one poster said it merely 'tightened the bass.' SO not remotely what the do, but this about the Entreq.
You hear so easily INTO the recording (even with the NAD) that suddenly you're hearing music out of parts you only before heard as a 'blurred sound.'
I'd say that even the Minimus can move a system pretty far forward in terms of removing noise, restoring 'color' to the pastel sounds of music (especially lower-pitched instruments, which can tend to homogenize). For its price, its easier than the Stillpoints (I mean, how can you go wrong? You plug one end into your preamp/line conditioner/Power Pant) and the other end onto a spade connector on the back on the Entreq (that little knob on the back unscrews for a spade connection). And then you turn it on, and supposedly, you must run it in for an hour, but you'll hear the change immediately. It shows up as a purity to the music (unless it's heavy metal, which has its own added grunge), which makes everything flow liquify. It sure makes it easy, with the noise floor this low, to hear the music a lot more easily. If I had to choose between the Stillpoints SS and the Entreq, if I'd heard both units at the exact same time, I'd have gone for the Entreq and THEN the Sillpoints. Because the Entreq removes even more grain from the sonic stage than the Stillpoints. You just hear the music better without the false edges that come from grain.
