Naim Powerline

 

It is quite probable that you are not going to like this cable. It is quite probable you are going to dismiss this cable for many reasons.

It does not sound good out of the box.

It is not going to sound that great out from a Naim system.

It is a cable that needs a lot of patience from your part. 

You have to accept from faith that it is a good cable and if it does not sound good it is not its fault.

Generally, it means always, we are up in a hifi situation when we have controlled the bad things by smoothing things out. Highs are too aggressive, we get a smoother cable here and there. But when we are using "smothers" we are loosing some information, spatial, timbric or rithmic and surely we are using filters.

High end systems sound good and uninvolving. We admire them  without caring about them at the same time. Most of the time they don't reproduce the essence of the music. Only a clean sequences of notes and very silent spaces.

So we have a mid high, high end system and we insert this cable in. What we will ear after about 300 ours of burning in? If we listen before this burn in period this cable could sound even worse then a $10 for 1m Belden power cable, that by my standard is a very decent cable.

So after this long burn in period you will ear that the sound stange get more compact. The propulsive energy is concentrated in a smaller scale landscape. The bass is well controlled, go very low but you feel it is sometimes too dry. The mid hig are very open and tense. The highs are neither very extended not very controlled.There is a sensation of things being tense, and soon you will become tired of it. You will go back to your previous cable with aural confort.

OK, once again you wanted to upgrade and things went on the wrong side. You take the cable away and hope to sell to Naim owners. Yes because I don't think it would be easy to sell it to other people.

But what happen if you accept by faith that this cable sounds good and what you are hearing are...

It is going to show all the vibration issues on your hifi. You think it is bright or it is forward only because you didn’t fix the vibration well in your sistem.

This was an impossible task with other higher end power cables. They tend to smooth things out and wash also the timbre out in the meantime and sometimes rithm too. But they are polite. They have a calming effect on your hifi problem. I think is because the Powerline is extremely open in the mid-high region that the vibrations issues of the system will show. The Powerline will show how manipulative and coloured high end power cables generally are to smooth things out and to low the noise floor.

The most notable thing in this cable is its medium frequencies section: it is more open then you thought could be. After you try another cable it will almost inevitably feel shut off in this region or if not shut of or recessed a little foggy.

This cable is raw. It means it leaves your system breath. 

It is very different from other power cables. It is not for fixing or improving things out, is to let things out. So this can be a good or a bad thing.

It will give you some work since it behaves completely differently from other power cables. 

I personally find this work to be worthed. I always found that it is quite easy to calm down a system, but to give life to a system that is on sedation is very difficult. 

With the Powerline your system, after correct use and matching, will either sound bad or good depending on your work, but it will never sound boring. And I hate boring systems.