Tweaking Beyond...

The effect of any given tweak on your system will be directly proportional to its level of resolution. What may yield a negligible effect on one system will have a profound effect on another. Elsewhere I have commented on "The Myth of Diminishing Returns": Common wisdom holds that there is a point beyond which continued effort and expenditure begins to yield less and less. I have demonstrated to my entire satisfaction that this is just not the case. In fact, I hold the reverse to be true: As the system becomes more and more resolving, it yields ever-greater gains with ever-smaller upgrades (not to mention the benefits of major ones). And the good news is that those gains are cumulative so that the next tweak builds with greater efficiency upon the last and so on.
 
The Acoustic Revive RR-888 is a case in point. On its own it can contribute important improvements to the behavior of a system. It is now common knowledge that its effects can be improved with a robust linear outboard power supply such as the King Rex unit. It has also been demonstrated that using more than one in a system can further increase the overall effect. How and why it works is a topic for another day, but the key point is that it is a device that does not need to be plugged into the same circuit as the system and nothing from the system plugs into it. People have experimented with placement around their rooms and discovered what works best for them. Since the RR-888 needs to be a minimum of 4.5 feet off of the floor, in our case, the only option is on top of the refrigerator, which is behind the listening position on the right side.
 
We started out with just one unit in place with the King Rex. The improvement was unmistakable. At a certain point I had to find out what a second RR-888 would do, and since I had another King Rex unit available, up they went - again there was a definite uptick in performance. The effect of these two upgrades seemed to be in the realm of greater density of information and an overall increase in clarity. 
 
Months went by, and given that my mind is always presenting me with new and interesting options based on past experience and available materials, I came up with the notion to add weight to the RR-888. If you've ever held one in your hand you know that it is feather light. You might think, "Where's the beef?" if you hadn't experienced what it can do. A given principle in tweaking is that isolation and added weight are generally a good thing. Since the RR-888 has a hump in its top, I thought the way to do this was to cut a sheet of fo.Q SH-22E 2mm thick damping material to size and load the top of it with weights that are used to balance car wheels. Placing this "weighted blanket" on top delivered a significant improvement along the same lines as previously described.
 
Now remember that we are tweaking a device sits on top of the fridge, unconnected to the system on a separate circuit that puts out a very short burst of signal at a frequency of 7.83Hz. You might well ask what I am smoking. (Call me for an answer to that!)
 
Most recently we received an order for some Acoustic Revive HQ-4 Hickory wood cube isolators:​

And again, the wheels begin to turn. Why not use these to further isolate the RR-888? It would be a good opportunity to test them. For good measure I chose to add the fo.Q SB2025 small platforms underneath the King Rex Supply:

​​Here is the entire arrangement:

Unpacked -  A Hidden Garden of Delights

Since I did not do this incrementally, I cannot yet comment on the effect of each individual part, but the effect of this arrangement was staggering. Frankly, when I started, I didn't expect any improvement at all. I mean, how far can you take things, right? Wrong. See "Myth of Diminishing Returns" above.
 
Let me put this in context: The sound was stellar before I began. It was only in retrospect that I was able to realize that the higher frequency impulses had been compressed: What seemed like single-point-in-time events became something else: If you've ever used audio editing software you know that you can zoom in on the waveform. This was similar in that the event seems to have been magnified. What was a point before now had a beginning, a development and an end. You could now witness the full "landscape" of the event. All sense of being impinged upon was gone and replaced with wonderment. It was (and is) akin to discovering a new hidden garden of delights.