Art Dudley has posted reviews of Shunyata Black Mamba CX Power Snake AC cords ($595 each), a Hydra V-Ray eight-outlet power distributor ($4995), and a specially terminated Black Mamba HC power cables ($750) in his latest Listening column at Stereophile. Some of his observations:
"Winterlong" and "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," from Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Live at the Fillmore (LP, Reprise/Classic 44429-1), had a better, larger sense of scale. Instruments sounded more explosively dramatic, and voices were similarly punchier: There was more holler in the singing (I mean that in a good way). Cecille Ousset and Rudolf Barshai's fine recording of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto 3 (LP, EMI ASD 1077851) gained in similar ways, with an added sense of purpose: Musical lines sounded surer and more meaningful. I like that sort of thing…
Then, also in keeping with Shunyata's recommendations, I added to the system their Hydra V-Ray power distributor…Yet on first listen, the gains gained by the Black Mambas were gone, and then some. The imaginary stage seemed wider, but the center fill was absent. The color, too—the area the crayon was supposed to fill in—was gone, leaving only outlines, albeit sonically sharp ones. In the Prokofiev concerto, the fifths in the bass strings and timpani that announce the piano's entrance were robbed of substance and momentum. The Neil Young album sounded scooped-out in the way of so much modern sound: plenty of bass and treble, not enough flesh and blood in between. I was sufficiently disappointed with the sound of the V-Rayed system that I wondered if either the Shunyata power distributor had had insufficient running in, or if the listener had had too much—for that day, at least…
Then I noticed: With the Shunyata AC distributor, digital music files (mostly AIFF with a scattering of WAVs, streamed from iTunes on a recent iMac) fared even worse than LPs…
In every case, with every record I tried, my turntables sounded markedly better—more drive, more momentum, more realistic textures—when their AC was conditioned by the Shunyata…
Second, I tried something out of the ordinary (for me, at least): I powered my iMac with the Shunyata Hydra V-Ray, to see if it could make even a slight difference in the sound of music files streamed from therein…not only was there an audible improvement with my computer plugged into the Hydra V-Ray, that difference was just as significant as the one wreaked on my Thorenses, and quite possibly more so. Singers had more body, instruments more substance and texture—oddly enough, the very qualities the Shunyata power distributor seemed to withhold from my electronics.
You can read the full review here. It begins at the bottom of the first page.
