What every audiophile should know: 3 Steps to Great Sound

If you have followed the Nordost blog, seen a Nordost ad or are familiar with any of our other written materials, this phrase (or a similar iteration of this phrase) should ring a bell: Discover the full potential of your sound system.  But what does that really mean?

Many times people will buy expensive components and loudspeakers, and then upgrade those same components and loudspeakers, all without truly experiencing the full effects of their purchases. There are 3 major factors needed to achieve the intended performance levels of your hifi equipment.  Unfortunately, until these 3 areas are addressed you will never reach your systems full potential, nor will you be able to accurately identify what needs to be improved.

 

 

1)      AC Power

The AC current that comes into your wall makes a huge impact on the performance of a hifi system. This is the energy that feeds each of your components and has a big hand in the integrity of the music produced. Although trying to control the quality of current that has been running through miles of wire before reaching your listening room may seem fruitless, there are a number of elements you can control to “clean up” your AC line and give your devices the chance to run properly.

 

 

 

 2)      System Supports

For years, the popular train of thought was that components and loudspeakers had to be “isolated” from the damaging effects of the outside world. However, this just doesn’t hold true. All devices that either pass or create energy vibrate. Unnecessary vibration is detrimental to sound quality. Therefore it would stand to reason that in order to achieve better sound, one must dispel this extraneous energy.

Supports that provide a mechanical ground path for energy dispersion are a must. Supports are useful for virtually every element in your sound system: components, loudspeakers, power conditioners, distribution blocks and even cables. Remember, the larger the component, the more power involved; the more power involved, the bigger the problem.

 

 

3)      Cabling

People spend a lot of time and resources finding and buying the best components for their systems. But all of the work that those devices do can be lost in even the smallest runs of substandard cabling. Cables are a necessary evil in the hifi world. Without them there would be no sound, but it is impossible to find a cable that adds to the quality of music passed through it.  Even the best cable manufacturers have to try to do the least amount of damage possible to the delicate signals their products transfer from one device to another. When they succeed, the difference is staggering.

 

 

These three often overlooked aspects of hifi make up what Nordost likes to call the “foundation of great sound”. For more information, including tips on improving your AC supply, equipment supports, and of course cabling, refer to Nordost’s “Foundation Theory: Beginners Guide to Building a Better System” here:








Why Should You Be Using Flat Speaker Cables? – 5 Clear Reasons

Since Nordost introduced their first cable, the Flatline gold in 1992, there has been one question in particular that has been asked constantly: Why use flat speaker cable? Well, we have been able to breakdown this answer into 5 clear and concise reasons…

Odin Speaker

1.  Minimizes Strand Interaction

Most loudspeaker cable designs simply bunch conductors together, causing strand interaction. Each conductor produces a magnetic field, which attracts the energy carried from each surrounding conductor, causing information to jump from conductor to conductor. This not only slows transmission speeds, it increases capacitance, and causes a loss of vital information along the way. When conductors are separated, as they are in a flat cable design, the harmful effects of strand interaction are minimized, capacitance is lowered, and transmission speeds are maximized.

Valhalla 2 Speaker

2.  Optimizes Mechanical Resonances

Every material has its own specific optimal resonance, or speed at which it vibrates. This is the same for the conductors that make up your speaker cable. If the conductors are too close together (or worse…touching), they have a damping effect on one another, negatively impacting their mechanical resonances. With flat speaker cables, more attention can be paid to the layout and spacing of each individual conductor, giving the material enough room to ensure that they are able to take advantage of their natural resonances. Additionally, when the conductors are not intertwined and wound up in each other, they can be cut at specific mechanically tuned lengths that reduce internal microphony and high frequency impedance resonance.

Heimdall 2 Speaker

3.  Decreases Skin Effect

Self-inductance of cables creates a phenomenon where high frequency signals travel to the surface of a conductor, rather than the center.  This raises the resistance of cables at those affected frequencies, making it harder to transmit high frequencies than low ones. This problem is known as “skin effect”. Although it may seem to follow reason that constructing speaker cables with stranded conductors would solve this problem, when stranded conductors are bundled together, touching one another, the bundle acts as one conductor and so the skin effect remains unchanged. In a flat speaker cable design, conductors are side-by-side (and in Nordost’s case they are even separated by extruded FEP insulation) instead of sandwiched together. Since the conductors are not touching and acting as one, high frequency resistance due to skin effect is minimized.

Leif Speaker

4.  Reduces Physical Surface Contact

Cables are negatively impacted by the electric static stored in floors. When there is interaction between a cable and the surface that it rests upon, the capacitance of the cables rises. However, when you use a flat construction, speaker cables have the ability to stand vertically when placed in your home sound system. When placed vertically, there is minimal physical surface contact between the floor and the cable itself, which offers a significant improvement over a round cable design.

Blue Heaven Speaker

5.  Convenience

Although this reason may not seem important due to a lack of scientific jargon, sometimes convenience makes the difference you need. Flat cables are more flexible and, surprise surprise, flatter than round cables. This makes for more installer friendly options, especially if you are running your cables in-wall or under your carpet.

Three Ways to Address Vibration Control

resonance control blog

Vibration is both a blessing and a curse in the high-end audio world. While vibration is the main reason we can enjoy this hobby of ours (it is, after all, through vibrations that we can hear!), it is also one of the most notorious culprits of sound degradation. Adverse effects of vibration on an audio system include confusion of imagery, timing errors and musical distortion. There are three increasingly popular methods of dealing with harmful vibrations: isolation, coupling, and resonance control. 

Isolation devices are de-coupling devices, meaning that their objective is to separate (or isolate) the component from its surface. When employing a de-coupling device, one must assume that all of the harmful vibrations are coming from the outside. These products absorb external energy before it can get into the product.

Coupling devices, on the other hand, merge the component to the surface it rests on. If you are using a coupling device, you adhere to the belief that the most powerful and damaging vibrations that occur are generated from the components themselves, which vibrate as they operate.

Resonance control addresses both the internal and external vibration at the same time. Resonance control devices act as a mechanical diode—allowing a one-way escape route for the extraneous energy produced from electronics. The construction of resonance control devices, like Nordost’s Sort Kone and Sort Füt, simultaneously prevents any external vibrations from traveling back into the component being protected.

Once the vibrations are eliminated from your audio components (amps, DACs, CD players, loudspeakers, etc), a whole new layer of tonal and textural details will be unveiled to you, as well as a transformed soundstage.  


For more information on vibration control, including purchase-free tips on how to reduce harmful vibrations from your own home system, see our NEW download: The Importance of Vibration Control.


#nofilter… to your cables

#nofilter

Some cable manufacturers outfit their products with boxes containing filters intended to prevent high frequency oscillation and tailor sound: not Nordost. Although the frequency range of human hearing is 20 to 20,000 Hz, we are still aware of frequencies at far higher and lower extremes. By filtering-out these peripheral signals you are affecting what you hear- impacting the vivid, tonal balance that comes from the true performance. In lieu of altering and coloring sound through filters, Nordost opts for a high-speed, phase-coherent, low-loss approach to cable design, allowing for a perfect reproduction of sound.

What is the most important cable in your set up?

The most important cable in your sound system is the power cord. At the risk of stripping away any magic from your tunes, the music enjoyed from your hi-fi system is little more than AC power, transformed by components to reproduce a melody. The quality of this reproduction is directly determined by the caliber of power cord which is facilitating this transfer of raw Picture 724electricity to the equipment. By simply upgrading the AC cable in your set up, the audible difference is remarkable. Unlike other cables, a power cord does not transmit a signal: It conducts AC power. The success of this cable is gauged by its capacity to deliver a sturdy, instantaneous current as well as its ability to reduce the effects of electromagnetic interference (EMI) and radio frequencies (RF) coming from outside sources. A poorly constructed AC cord will actually attract EMI and RF, or noise, to your current, affectively polluting the raw material feeding your system and raising the source impedance of the AC supply. An optimally built power cord, on the other hand, is designed to be less prone to, and reduce, any EMI and RF influences resulting in a faster rise time in the 50/60 Hz cycle. For the Nordost solution, see our website to learn more about our power cords ranging from our Leif to Supreme Reference ranges.