I previously posted initial comments, all favourable, about the Pace Car in my secondary setup here in chez Tom. The setup is in a small room and comprises a Lyngdorf amp fed by an Accuphase power conditioner. Source is an iPod plugged into a Wadia iTransport, itself feeding a Pace Car which passes the digital signal into the Lyngdorf. Power supplies of the amp and power conditioner are internally bypassed with scads of teflon capacitors. The Accuphase sits on an HRS M3 isolation base. The amp and Pace Car sit on an M3 on the Accuphase, so are doubly protected from structure-borne vibration.
My initial comments were positive: the Pace Car is one hot performer.
Those comments suffered removal during Audio Circle's ISP problems a little bit ago. Now I'm back to further report. In the time between those initial comments and now, I purchased a Paul Hynes SR1 12VDC power supply. This supply boasts a <1 nanosecond rise time, a settling time of < 10 nanoseconds, wideband noise of 2 nanovolts root Hz, PSSR of 110dB from DC to 200KHz, and an output impedance of 0.001 ohm. Those are the best PSU specs I've seen.
With the Hynes supply powering the Pace Car, the Pace Car's effect on this setup is nothing short of remarkable. I've not heard such a pure rendering of digital audio. To my ear, the most difficult element in music reproduction, the first casualty of noise, including jitter, is low-level detail. Well, get this. My speakers are Acoustic Energy AE1 IIIs. These little bandits have a steel plate on which the drivers are mounted, and have but a tiny 4" metal woofer. The size of the woofer, and its metal construction, allow less of the garbled back-wave to reemerge into and muck up the listening environment, and the steel-backed wave-launchpad is, well, probably second best to marble. Which is to say these are highly resolving speakers.
Here's the upshot of the above. I have modified one of the crossovers of one of the speakers by bypassing its capacitors (on both the woofer and tweeter legs) with my super-holographic porous teflon/fluorinert capacitors. For those wondering, if teflon capacitors at 2.1 dielectric constant resolve better than polypropylene at 2.2 k, imagine my fluorinert 1.85 k jobs. Imagine the difference between Nordost low-k cables and your typical plonk. But magnify this difference, because capacitors are the worse offenders, so severe are their distortions.
Anyway, with one speaker so bypassed, I could distinctly hear low-level detail like digital reverb and room decay cutting out in the unbypassed speaker, where in the bypassed speaker those artifacts would continue 2-3 seconds before being swamped by the next drum beat, bass pluck, or whatever. I had to pick my jaw up from off the floor. I mean, the source is an iPod. You gotta be kidding me.
That, my friends, is a testament to the Pace Car's resolving power.
Tom
