Brilliant Corners

AudioQuest Thunderbird ZERO + BASS Speaker Cable
For years, I've also used the Auditorium 23 speaker cable in its green cloth jacket. After AudioQuest's Stephen Mejias sent me the company's William Tell Silver speaker cable, I spent several weeks comparing. The William Tell clearly sounded fuller and more detailed and extended than the Auditorium 23, but the skinny German cable was better still at drawing my attention to the performance rather than the sound, so it remained in my system.

But when I heard AudioQuest's thicker, more expensive ThunderBird ZERO cable, I had to admit that it trounced the Auditorium 23 not only in terms of sound but also musical communication. It simply did everything better. I've lived happily with it for nearly two years until recently, when Mejias sent me an 18' run of the ThunderBird BASS cable. Unlike the banana-terminated ZERO, the BASS was terminated with spades, allowing me to use a single pair of amplifier speaker terminals to biwire the Klipsch La Scalas.

After removing the metal jumpers between the treble and bass binding posts on the La Scalas and adding the new BASS cables, connected to the bass terminals on the speaker end, I heard only a minor difference. Then I played music through them for another 50 hours then sat down again to compare the ZERO with the ZERO + BASS ThunderBirds.

I began with a first pressing of Etta Jones's Don't Go to Strangers (Prestige 7186), from 1960. One of those singers who's more famous among fellow musicians than the general public, Jones brought unusual amounts of intelligence and hipness to performing standards, and this record is arguably her best. I also love listening to her because, as a college student in the early 1990s, I often went to hear her sing with saxophonist Houston Person at the Blue Note on West 3rd Street. The afternoon shows were sparsely attended, and Jones was already in her 60s, all of which somehow added realness and grit to the minor-key ballads.

I first listened to the album's title track with both cables in place. Then I took out the BASS and listened solely through the ZERO. To my genuine surprise, Jones's voice now hung lower between the speakers, and the outer edges of the soundstage had contracted. More tellingly, the soundstage grew flatter: Skeeter Best's guitar was not as clearly located behind the singer. Some of the reverberation that indicated the instrument's position was lost.

What surprised me more was that removing the BASS cable also removed some of the music's tonal richness and presence. On "Heaven Stood Still," an outrageous punk chanson from an LP of Mink DeVille's brilliant Le Chat Bleu (Capitol E-ST 25390), the swelling strings of Jean-Claude Petit's orchestral arrangement and Willy DeVille's voice, here allowed its full dynamic range, came across with noticeably less body, fullness, and color. On record after record, these changes proved consistent and easily audible. I heard no penalty at all with the double run of ThunderBird, whether connected to the 8Wpc Ampsandsound Mogwai SE or the 125W Ayre AX-5 Twenty.

These cables are also available in a biwire configuration, the ThunderBird ZERO BiWire, which helpfully streamlines the amplifier end to a single pair of connectors and saves a little bit of money. Even so, at $7950 for an 8' pair, the biwire ThunderBirds are expensive. But I find it difficult to imagine anyone disliking the sound or musical avidity of these speaker cables, the best I've heard in my home. Party on, Garth!

Acoustic Revive RR-888 Ultra Low Frequency Pulse Generator
I admire and adore John Atkinson, this magazine's Technical Editor and resident empiricist, but I must admit that I felt a stab of evil pleasure while thinking about his reaction to this device. The RR-888 is the brainchild of Ken Ishiguro of Acoustic Revive, a company in Japan's Gunma Prefecture that manufactures all manner of cables, power conditioners, and audio accessories (footnote 3). According to Joe Cohen of the Lotus Group, the company's US importer, the most popular of these products is the RR-888, a small plastic box with a wall wart power supply which is said to artificially generate the Schumann resonance and alter the sound in your listening room. Which it most certainly does—alter the sound, that is. How and especially what it alters are interesting questions.

First described by physicist Winfried Otto Schumann in 1952, the Schumann resonance is a series of electromagnetic waves in the earth's atmosphere. Its fundamental is 7.83Hz, a frequency also present in the human brain's electrical activity. Though a deep online dive into this phenomenon will take you to some fairly creepy junctures (can the Schumann resonance be used to contact angels?), it has been the subject of legitimate peer-reviewed studies, some of which suggest that exposure to the frequency can positively affect sleep and lower blood pressure.

More germane to this discussion is how this frequency might affect music appreciation in the home. The single-page manual instructs placing the RR-888 (which retails for $695) as high off the floor as possible and at least 3' away from audio equipment. All that's left to do is to turn it on and, according to the manual, enjoy the enhanced presence, broader dynamic and frequency range, and newfound "scrupulous delicate feeling."

Having received two RR-888s from Cohen, I placed them on top of a 7'-tall bookshelf approximately halfway between my loft's floor and ceiling. I left them off and played "Madness" from an LP of Miles Davis's Nefertiti (Columbia CS 9594). Then I turned on one of the Japanese boxes and sat down to listen again, not knowing what to expect.

From the first note, I noticed that my attention locked in on Davis's and Wayne Shorter's unison playing. I was able to follow the various melodic and rhythmic lines more easily, and the music made more sense. A few moments later, I realized that the band's tart, angular sound had become sweeter. It was as though the dissonant and otherwise disagreeable sounds on the recording were somehow pushed down below the threshold of perception. I sat listening to the track, a little startled by the inspired simplicity and the effortless beauty of the performances. Was this the "scrupulous delicate feeling" mentioned in the manual?

That's not all I noticed. Though I didn't know why, I could swear I felt more relaxed. And there was one more thing: I felt an unfamiliar physical tension, which reminded me a little of the sensation of an airplane's cabin becoming pressurized. It felt slightly uncomfortable and was impossible to tune out completely but proved quite tolerable.

After the track ended, I turned on the second RR-888 and listened again. I didn't hear any additional musical benefits, but now the discomfort grew to the point where it had become unpleasant, the pressure in my head resembling something between a sinus headache and a case of vertigo. At the end of the track, I felt relieved to turn the units off.

I recreated this experiment for two musician friends, who came over on successive nights. To not influence their reactions, I didn't tell them about the presence of the generators until after we listened, and I turned the units on and off while they were in another room. The first friend asked me to play Michelangelo Sonnets Op. 22 from Ian Bostridge's Britten Songs (Qobuz stream; EMI Classics 433430 2). With one of the units on, he remarked that Bostridge's tenor sounded warmer and rounder, the piano made more melodic sense, and the entire recording sounded clearer and more beautiful. With both generators on, he reported no further benefits but also noticed no ill effects.

The following night, the second friend experienced similar sonic and musical enhancements with one RR-888 in operation, but also confessed to feeling slightly altered, a sensation he described as "three-quarters pleasant." Sitting beside him, I felt something akin to being slightly stoned, though I had not consumed any mind-altering substances. With both units on, the friend said that he felt that the music had taken on an unpleasant edge, and he found himself feeling tense and anxious.

Having read up on other experiences with the RR-888 across the interwebs, it appears that some users experience headache or vertigo-like symptoms with the device, particularly when more than one is operating, while others do not. Do with that what you will. What I can say with some confidence is that this device does seem to deliver significant positive sonic and musical effects, though it appears to do this by affecting the listener at least as much as their hi-fi. While I find this little device fascinating, its effects on my body rule out prolonged use. As always, your experience may vary—and the mysteries of the Schumann resonance continue to tantalize. Does it affect the hi-fi at all? Can you use it to contact angels? I leave it to more intrepid souls to find out.

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Footnote 3: Acoustic Revive, 3016-1 Tsunatorimachi, Isesaki, Gunma 372-0812, Japan. Web: acousticrevive.jp/. US importer: The Lotus Group. Tel: (415) 897-8884. Email: joe@lotusgroupusa.com.