As promised here are some more comments on the Entropic RCA digital after a good week of burn-in and extensive listening. I have published the same comments in the User Reviews section on the LessLoss homepage.
Review of the new LessLoss C-MARC RCA Entropic Process digital cable
A year and a half ago I upgraded to a “plain” C-Marc RCA digital, happily finding that it, in terms of musicality and naturalness, considerately bettered the Sound Quality of my upgraded and reclocked USB chain from streamer to DAC with the respectable Curious Enhanced cable. The improvement of SQ was mainly in terms of more naturalness, musicality, and ease of flow in the performance - all well-known LessLoss virtues. The C-MARC gave me countless hours of wonderfully involving listening to all kinds of different music styles for a year and a half and to a much cheaper price than the USB spaghetti chain. Meanwhile I had heard hints of an upgrade with the Entropic Process and had been dying to buy one ever since.
Ten days ago, I finally received the upgraded C-Marc Digital RCA Entropic Process cable by my UPS bicycle carrier (this is Copenhagen, after all!).
The new LL RCAs have beautifully crafted wooden plugs on both ends, and, after having put LessLoss Bindbreaker footers under all my equipment with stunning results last summer, I was anticipating some of their virtues to sort of carry over, hopefully removing micro vibrations normally present in metal plugs of even the finest interconnects.
Spoiler alert: I was not disappointed but overwhelmed by the new baby.
Inserting the new cable fresh out of the bag between my dCS Network Bridge and my Steinway&Sons SL-1, everything in the sound landscape changed immediately for the better - and the change was all but small. Of course, everything bettered over burn-in time but more on that later:
- Greater and more well-defined room - behind speakers, in front of speakers, outside speakers, image height increased to a more believable size, and the sense of air around performers turned much more prominent.
- Much improved resolution of micro detail gave richer textures and greater “transport” of emotions from artists to listener.
- Explosive macro detail with greater ease.
- Overall, the speed of transients on both macro- and microlevel increased which improved the difficult task of combining the ability of your setup to play with the lightness of a fawn when demanded, and conversely being just as heavy-handed and lead filled on music with such demands whether classical, electro or heavy metal. Not a small task in my book, but oh, so nice.
Regarding burn-in, you can find a lot on that subject in some of the technical writings on the LessLoss homepage, but let me sum up my, and three other well versed audiophile friends’ listening experience with this particular cable. As one of them purchased his own copy simultaneously but did not use it for the first week, we had the rare opportunity to repeat the listening session of the burn-in yesterday. This time not in my Steinway&Sons setup, but in a friend’s very different stereo. In my setup there was as stated an immediate big improvement. A
slight rawness disappeared mostly after the first twenty minutes, and four hours into the listening session it was hard to find any drawbacks. Still, over the next days the sound kept improving, but there was never any really bad sound during break-in as happens so often with non-entropic cables. Even through my friend’s alternative setup it was, to our ears, extremely easy to hear a replica of what had happened in my music room a week earlier, so we left a very happy friend who was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the magnitude of correction which he had never quite expected upgrading from the regular C-MARC. Two hours into the session he declared that he was now ready to order Entropic speaker cables from LessLoss as well to replace his much more expensive Chord cables.
The sound, or maybe better the non-sound, of the Entropic Process whether applied to speaker cables, firewalls, power cables or as now interconnects is so consistent that, once you know it and have lived with it, you can recognize it immediately by its ease of flow, musicality, dynamics, and
natural sound.
It is imperative for me to state that, in no way are the non-entropic products from LL bad or flawed. On the contrary, they are top products who will serve extremely well in well assembled setups of very high class as well as in more modest setups.
The
knack is, however, the Entropic Process seems to add
so much
out of this World to the equation that I’d advice all of you to step into that universe the sooner the better. The real craziness is that it probably doesn’t add very much but remove stuff
- That just might be why wizard Louis Motek chose the name Less Loss (meaning more gain?).
- At least, that’s what it sounds like to my ears. A true Zen experience.
To not make this longer than necessary I have not added every little detail here, so feel free to ask anything that might be of further interest.
Kind regards from Copenhagen
