Audience: Focused On The Final Few Feet

When most folks think about power conditioning for the first time, it tends to be early-ish in their audiophile experience — the kind of time when it stretches the imagination and requires perhaps a little suspension of disbelief to see incoming AC power as filled with the kind of wickedness and depravity that more veteran audiophiles claim.

Well, I think everyone — audiophile or otherwise — has seen the lights dim at the onset of a big electrical device power cycle before. Think about turning on a vacuum cleaner, or a power saw, or AC system.

It’s not far fetched to see local power as just a system of connected devices and power supplies on a shared circuit, with much interaction. And it’s not very hard to imagine that much of the interaction creates negative power conditions as it relates to the HiFi stereo system. 

Compared to every other type of electricity in the house, music is a massively chaotic signal. It’s wildly complex, with huge differences in amplitude and frequency across its waveform over time.

A power amplifier’s job is to increase every individual frequency by exactly the same amount across that crazy signal, changing as absolutely little as possible and representing those drastic amplitude changes in the correct ratios of dynamic expression that existed in the original music.

You can think of music as the fabergé egg of electricity, and I suppose if we want to take this metaphor too far, you can picture a power conditioner and power cabling as the elaborate, ornate base which supports the beautiful creation. 

OK sure, filtering noise and rejecting EMI and RFI are more substantial features than simply holding the system in place. But a serious HiFi system without an approach to minimize AC power line noise and interference sure feels like a fancy egg without a leg to stand on.

Which brings us to American cable maker Audience, a new brand parter of The Music Room and a company which lives and breathes those all-important last few feet from the wall to your gear.

With products that touch every millimeter of that journey, Audience goes even further than most cable makers and offers a fully certified in-wall cable that replaces the standard Romex garbage that laces the circuits of nearly every house.

They’ve applied their R&D process to the outlet, offering all of the sonically significant mechanical and material upgrades possible there. 

They also acknowledge the sliver of resolution to be gleaned from lifting cables (as the final tweak for the last few percentage points), offering a line of colorful cable lifters / stands. But for those not quite ready in the audiophile journey to jump on that wagon, they also recommend the lifters simply for the good practice of cable organization and routing to reach a more zen and family friendly system appearance.

As we get to know Audience’s innovative products better, we’ll be bringing you reviews and comparisons to help better educate you on this power-infatuated audio company and what they can bring to your power’s last few feet.

And lest you think power is all Audience does, it certainly isn't. Their ClairAudient speakers have made waves in the audiophile community, and their innovative speaker and interconnect cables are well reviewed and state-of-the-art.

Look out on TMR’s YouTube channel in the coming weeks for a review and shootout with Audience's Adept Response AR-6 conditioner, and help us welcome TMR's newest brand partner to the fold.