[jimtranr]

Late yesterday afternoon, my wife sat down for her first serious audition of the bedroom audio system with the Delta XC installed as the power conduit between the wall outlet and the Delta D6 power distributor. Normally, such sessions last between 45 minutes and an hour, with content consisting largely of opera, massed choral, and Broadway vocals-with-orchestra. Yesterday’s session lasted four hours, and if I hadn’t realized at that point that I was two hours late in feeding the cat, it likely would have lasted a lot longer. (I didn’t want my eyes clawed out. By the cat, not my wife.)

The Delta XC had logged about 120 hours of playback burn-in by the time we started yesterday’s session. By then, system output sounded even better than it had at 80 hours. Foundational bass was even heftier and more detailed-growly, making me wonder if the Studio 20 v5 7” woofers hadn’t been holding out on me all this time. Midrange and top end likewise exhibited more detail as well as a tinge of liquidity I hadn’t noticed earlier.

My wife’s comments were spontaneous and unprompted. A couple of them:

“There’s less noise in the background.” Interesting observation, given that the Delta XC is not NR-filtered.

“She doesn’t screech anymore.” The reference is to June Anderson belting out “Make Our Garden Grow” in the finale to Leonard Bernstein’s Candide (Bernstein conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, Deutsche Grammophone CD rip). She really lets fly—as does the accompanying chorus--in that finale, and I’d always thought the screech my wife referred to was an artifact of dodgy miking. Or, alternately, a not-quite-up-to-it amp hemorrhaging its guts. Not so in either case, it turns out. Anderson’s sustained top-of-her-lungs stretch—and the chorus’s—must be sucking current out of the wall like Dracula on a midnight bender. And the XC must be delivering every drop of it without a hiccup to the power distributor—the result being that the amp doesn’t have to plead for extra help under an extreme load but has it there right at hand and can do its job without stressing out its silicon.

“The voices now sound more disciplined—a very difficult thing to do.” (My wife has performed in choral groups.) The very same “Make Our Garden Grow”, except that it’s performed this time by Dallas’ Turtle Creek Chorale (Testament, Reference Recordings CD rip). The voices sound more disciplined because it’s easier to make them out as individual entities, layered front-to-back, with the XC providing the AC feed.

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away my wife’s uncle built pipe organs. And that’s what she wanted to hear next. So on went Charles Munch leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with Berj Zamkochian at the organ, in the final movement of Camille Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 3, aptly subtitled “Organ” (RCA SACD rip). At something approaching a “realistic” level. Whoa! There’s a lot of sustained low-end energy (and not a little all the way up the frequency ladder in slam-bang dynamic transients) embedded in this track, enough to make me fear for the life of my c-j Sonographe SA250 at the selected listening level. No sweat. The amp never lost its composure, the broad, airy, and tall Symphony Hall soundstage never collapsed or lost its instrumental layering, and my wife was struck not only with the power of the organ (the Studio 20s had in fact been holding out on me) but with the sheer beauty of the filigree-delicate piano passages that weave in and out of this movement.

“Can we hear it again? The whole symphony this time?”

I think that—and her arched-eyebrow surprise when she realized that June Anderson’s is not a screechy voice-- nutshell-summarizes my wife’s reaction to the Delta XC-fed system.

My own take on the Delta XC after 120 hours? The Sonographe doesn’t have to work so damned hard anymore. It now acts like it has more usable headroom, and as a consequence the system’s output sounds more relaxed and natural even when the kitchen sink et al. is thrown at it.