Providing the music for the YG Kipod Series 2 speakers driven by an Esoteric amplifier in the Synergistic Research room was a Mach 2 music server feeding USB data to Synergistic's The Music Cable D/A converter ($3599). This has a flying USB input cable on one end and two flying, single-ended analog output cables on the other, and it gets power not from the USB bus but from two mono supplies. The system was wired with Synergistic's new Element cables, which use tungsten conductors, a material chosen, I was told, using blind listening tests.

Despite the absence of any conventional room treatment—instead, the room was littered with Synergistic's little ART "magic bowls"—the sound of Bela Fleck's "Flight of the Cosmic Hippo," with Victor Wooten's deep bass grumblings, was articulate and clean-sounding. Perhaps Synergistic's Ted Denney is just a master at setting up speakers to work with the room acoustics rather than despite them.