The Audio Angel’s Third Visit (Part 4)

The Audio Angel came to Studio J again, his third visit. His first job was to add a dedicated outlet with dual filter capacitors designed specifically for the sudden power surge requirements of themonitor speakers and another additional outlet. After that, he pulled out a couple of heavy capacitors that he was going to add to the power line of the audio interface. Adding capacitors to thepower line also decreases noise.

This transformed our simple AC adaptor into a combination of a red anodized power cable, the AC adaptor unit and a heavy capacitor, all wrapped in the secret white material. We listened to playback and the mid-range sounded much warmer but a little dark. “Let’s try this.” He said as he pulled out some more white material and wrapped it around the power connector that plugged into the audio interface. Let there be light! The sound completely changed, mid-range warmth with this beautifully silky high end clarity.

Next up was the speakers. We removed the back panel and he placed more white material on the electronics, replaced the steel screws with stainless steel ond and twisted the cable that ran speakers before closing them back up.

We took this opportunity to align the speakers at 30° left and right of center. The Angel brought this very cool laser speaker alignment tool with a little mirror that sticks on the speaker face for perfect alignment.

The combination of the speaker modifications and positioning had a profound effect on the stereo separation. Positioning of instruments across the stereo field was smoother and more accurate. The warmth that the capacitor added seemed to be more pronounced.

He then went back to the Konnect 24D, opened it up and replaced a bunch of steel screws with stainless stell ones.

His final task was to open up the outlets and light switches in the kitchen, of all places, replace the screws, the steel plates with polymer ones and to add filter capacitors to the outlets themselves. Apparently, it is best to do this with every outlet and switch in the house but he only had time to finish the kitchen. We watched a DVD the following day and the picture was much clearer. Almost as if we had switched from DVD to BlueRay. Go Audio-Visual Angel!

Since the Angel’s last visit I have mixed and recorded and listened to numerous songs and narrations. In general, everything sounds great. It is an invigorating listening experience. Beyond just sounding good, the clarity and accuracy of the sound makes it easy to hear even very small changes in EQ and compression and other effects. In fact, over-compressed sounds are readily apparent. We had a project at the end of the year to clean up some dialog, remove noise, balance levels and sweeten the sound of the artists voice. Being able to hear everything made it easy to clean up the track and make our client very happy. Thanks again Audio Angel!

The Audio Angel sent me a Happy New Year email and he said he is planning the next improvements. I can’t wait!