mobanmarketShunyata Research is the brainchild of Caelin Gabriel, whose résumé includes stints at NSA, in military R&D, and in the computer industry, first digging weak signals out of noise then developing very high-speed network devices. He is also a lifelong audiophile.
Shunyata’s roots are in the scientific understanding and engineering base Gabriel has developed during his career. I’ve long been impressed by those scientific underpinnings—which extend not only in audio but also to other fields including medical devices—and by how open the company is in talking about its technologies.
Just as I was starting to think about new power systems and cables, I got advice from a friend whose ears I trust and who knows my system and what’s important to me. When I asked him to share his thoughts, he didn’t hesitate: He told me to check out Shunyata. That seemed like a fine idea.
System and setup
The AC power serving my audio room is by all accounts quite good. AC is supplied to the room by a dedicated load center (breaker box) connected directly to a Pacific Gas and Electric input box. The load center feeds two dedicated 30A circuits; each connects to a quad box equipped with hospital-grade outlets.
After discussing my system with Shunyata’s Grant Samuelson, he concluded that the best match would be an Everest 8000 Power Distributor ($8000), a Sigma v2 XC ($3250) power cord to connect it to the wall, and Alpha v2 NR power cords ($2000) between the Everest and my front-end components. My VTL amps would plug directly into the second circuit with Shunyata’s Alpha v2 NR power cords.
The theory
Shunyata is known for having an extensive base of science and technology underpinning their products, including patents for some of their foundational technologies dating back to the 1990s. I’m the type of nerd who finds correcting textbooks entertaining: This was going to be fun.
Descriptions of Shunyata’s technologies and their implementation are available on the company’s website; instead of going through every aspect of those technologies, I’ll refer the reader there (footnote 1) and mention only a couple of key ones here, which merit a few paragraphs because of their importance in Gabriel’s design goals, and which describe areas where his approach may vary from conventional wisdom.
One of these is his assertion that the majority of the noise problem in AC circuits in audio systems is generated by the components themselves; only a small portion is a gift from the power company. “The difference is that people usually go along with the norm. In this case, that’s viewing a component’s power cord as the end of a long chain that delivers AC to the component. That’s not right. It’s a complete circuit. The component connects two legs of the AC, the hot and the neutral.” Noise goes both ways: From the AC into the component and from the component into the AC. Both lines and the ground have to be addressed to eliminate component-generated noise.
The Everest addresses component-to-component interference—Shunyata has taken a trademark on the initialism, CCI—in a couple of ways. The first is to partition the outputs into isolation zones. The Everest has six: one each for four individual receptacles and one each for two duplex outlets. The next is to bleed off noise on the powerlines, which is done primarily by the “CCI Filter. “It’s a potted module, so I couldn’t take it apart, but it’s described by Shunyata as “filter modules that consist of proprietary multi-stage filters that reduce power-supply–generated noise without the use of heavy transformers, coils, or large capacitors.”
The other area where Shunyata follows a path less traveled arises from Gabriel’s belief that one of the major factors limiting an audio system’s performance, if not the major factor, is whether a component’s power supply can draw enough instantaneous current from the incoming AC to keep up with the component’s needs during musical transients (especially in power amplifiers, the more powerful, the worse). In Shunyata lingo, this is called Dynamic Transient Current Delivery, or DTCD. Shunyata worked with a recently retired Tektronix engineer to develop a test system that measures DTCD; their results appear to show clear differences among power cords, AC plugs, and receptacles.
But how much does it matter?
I’m convinced that the science is real enough, and the engineering makes sense. But how significant is it in the real world? Do those technologies add up to real, tangible improvements in a high-quality audio system? The rubber hits the road when the derriere hits the listening seat.
After installing the Everest and the Shunyata cords, I started by casually listening to a batch of randomly selected albums, just to get a feel for how the performance of my system had changed. Casual listening was more than enough to hear the difference: My system sounded significantly better.
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COMPANY INFO
Shunyata Research
26273 Twelve Trees Ln.
Poulsbo, WA 98370
(360) 598-9935
shunyata.com
ARTICLE CONTENTS
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Page 2
Specifications
Associated Equipment
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