|
|
You are reading the older HTML site
Positive Feedback ISSUE 75
smcaudio "Colossal" Nexus AC Power Conditioner - A Preliminary Observation of a Preliminary Product as reviewed by Jim Merod
This is a review (of sorts) of the prototype unit... more to come. If It Soars or Swoops, Catch It "The" legendary Steve McCormack who changed high-end audio decades ago with his counter-intuitive Tip Toes devices that were not available for copyright protection, which cost their creator incalculable moolah... the same bloke who established the Mod Squad in Encinitas, California right around the time that Ronald Reagan wanted to establish an improbable "nuclear shield" across the contiguous United States—which was, in fact, an aggressive intention masked by its putative defensive objective (a reality not lost on the collective Ruskie commandant)—this very character, McCormack, who's enjoyed more professional and private lives than any long-lived feline should expect, whose high powered, texturally-delicate DNA amplifiers arguably offer more sonic accuracy and seductive musicality per dollar than any discernible rival; whose remarkable VRE-1C line stage preamp has been touted to exist among the most revealing and dynamically sensuous, ultra-resolving audio components ever... alas, that charmingly eccentric genius (who it seems we cannot abandon, regardless of rumors regarding Nicola Tesla's ubiquitous ghost) has again parachuted into view from his loft among mythical predecessors such as Ptolemy, Rabelais, Leonardo, Ben Franklin and Alan Blumlein. I've never met this guy, except in a nightmare where, inside the distress of life's concocted tragedies, someone resembling Steve McCormack comes to the rescue of a naive recording engineer with enthusiastic innocence needing a dollop of audiophile sophistication. Since, of course, dreams and nightmares are covert codes of Freud's invaginated cerebral inebriations—fin de sičcle Vienna, his home town, truly history's most stunning intellectual crossroad where, lost in its ghetto of Borgesian democratic contempt, Heraclitus was reported once drunk with Confucius while Plato's pharmakon subverted Socrates immediately before Aristotle sent humanity's future on its misguided track of failed rationality—it is the case that the travails of one small Recording Dorko (enamored of Casablanca) pale in the blinding light of the next Super Nova. But, then, this imagined Vienna displaces Athens, Paris, London, Rome and Freud's actual Vienna altogether. Proceeding forward, I raise a hand unharmed against my inner grain, like Ferdinand Celine, where what is, is always "not," while what's NOT truly "is." Honesty here must prevail. I therefore swear upon my mother's father's gain and loss, his eternally pugnacious success. My middle figure (not that lonely upraised digit) carries his noble terminus, Barrett. So cleaved to my Cherokee-Irish heritage on one side (ask not the other): I, too, am an animal conglomerate—like Ishmael, a lucky lost voyager. Enter Queequig. No Country for Old Guys The above notwithstanding, as Dante is my witness, the facts at stake are encountered here as chaste as a pilgrim's missionary habits. The other night, as gentle and clueless as Vergil, Maestro McCormack swaggered through BluePort's La Costa gates just as (much earlier) Homer's colossal hero navigated Gates of Ivory and Gates of Horn. The maestro brought knowledge to bear where little or none resides. To which, about which (for which), the humble Guru was thanked with respectable libation. After the knot of his host's self-created perdition was undone (doubtless an instance of Ortega's incommensurable ensimismamiento), we settled into cheerful emoluments: borolo, schnitzel, tabouli and tilapia. Simple pleasures succeed where expensive pretense leaves one's credit card underwater. Our evening entered the realm of legend and mystique where Babe Ruth called his shot in Wrigley Field and where ET pedals ferociously forever. The Plot Thickens The Lord of Audio Doom, hereby my witness—absolving us all from the authority of annual surveys of "most wanted" components whose fine print declares this or that speaker pair in Class B or C to be inadvertently flawed with plump midrange information and possibly lean bass along with (gulp) somewhat underwhelming dynamics, even though it's an honest-to-Jehovah bargain at a price only a decimal less than a new Kia automobile—the following sonic observations are objective in their subjective transcendence: a/ the party of the first part agrees with a hip subset of the other party: to wit, most so called HIGH-FI (or, "high-end") sound systems, frequently expensive and over-the-top, often water their footprints with yellow liquid because insurmountable items of audio majesty yoked into line for their equally insurmountable "wow" value fall short despite {note: because of} a genuine absence of reference to, and knowledge of, the complex seduction of acoustic music delivered in the naked reality of ambient environments; b/ the all purpose Yiddish term, ZAMAGAZUNT, is the "transcendent" authority cited above; c/ like the useful rubric "suck" and/or "sucks"—(cited everywhere, including James Joyce and Graucho Marx)—the above-cited Yiddish admonition stands in for far more blasphemous desecrations that, ultimately, serve angelic functions: e. g., no extreme contempt rendered in blunt or poetic language; no imaginative freedom with untrammeled verbal filth; no power to defend one's sacred spirit from sequester; no bad words (Petrarchean complaint; Faulknearean lament; no fey Buddy Rich-inspired blistering invective; no Shakespearean rhetorical acrostic {see John Milton for corroboration} has ever succeeded in undoing the damage of sustained acoustic suck out; d/ a final digression: disappointment, disgust and disavowal, seldom listed in scholastic lexicons after the Grand Cognitive Burgeoning launched by Samuel Johnson's elaborately cloaked misanthropy, augmented by Jonathan Swift's farcical truth-telling and inverted by Coleridge's higher verbal consciousness, seldom earn adequate privilege to indicate the joy and simple possibility of focused aesthetic appreciation; e/ therefore, global audio illiteracy...
This Amazing Nexus Audio-Enhancement Unit Steve McCormack's Nexus blew the mind of the above mentioned witness who bears traces of Mehlvillian east coast skepticism and Wyoming-bred defiance. The elusive Guru (through the gates, skillfully dodging a fierce German Shepherd) deceived my expectations. Surely, after decades of being a sounding board or first "test" listener for dozens of audio products (from cables to amps; from speakers to noise reduction units; microphones to mic pre's and ambience expansion units, et. al.) a man with the class and endurable gravitas of Steve McCormack would NOT arrive at the gated compound of a more or less innocent confrere without signaling in advance that he was about to drop an audio version of J. Robert Oppenheimer's end-of-the-world surprise upon my peaceful bliss. Yet, he did, with his soon to appear (prototype version) of his Nexus. I'm old. I get it. This sublime joke's on us all. Since the massive musical-agnosticism of our declining cultural and ecological reality creates only sadness (and, frankly, bullshit) for our increasingly problematic lives, sonic mis-steps and bad jokes resonate with the inaudible clatter of Richard Feynman's irretrievable collegial trickery: physicist without equal, but Joker first and always. I appreciate that this semi-legendary Guru on the west coast has played this welcome trick on us all. If you have the courage to check it out, you'll discover what I'm encumbered to report here. Let's admit what's at stake with this brutally over-achieving unit, wrought upon my unsuspecting ignorance, by a local Global Persona who inserts himself without warning into my sleepy outback (barely avoiding disaster) and staggering my humble mind. For the purpose of this self-assignment I'm overlooking the bruise of near disaster, since I like this new invention because it makes music more songful, more "musical," more uplifting and more healing in these protracted troubled times. And yet: I'll find a moment to reciprocate the imagined violation of covert codes that should restrain any and all visitors to "announce themselves in advance at the gate" while, also, pressing thumbprints tightly to the electric ID pad blinking in vivid pink. Stay tuned.
Unit Itemized in Lieu of Front Row Tickets for Tony Bennett Until you find an enhancement unit to expand (deepen, define) a good or superior high-end sound system more profoundly than the mysterious brilliance of Steve McCormack's Nexus, good luck trying to locate, and indulge, the immensely refined power and audio glory that his extraordinary audio creation offers: 1. a significantly larger, more vivid and palpable recorded soundstage; 2. enhanced sonic details: micro, macro, textural, harmonic; 3. vastly greater relaxed musical pleasure; 4. increased subtlety and lyric delicacy; 5. dead-on timbral accuracy (e.g. Miles Davis's nasal trumpet mute 'nailed' up close; Mahler on dynamic vintage steroids); 6. large-as-life ambient vivacity with delineated instrumental and vocal presence; 7. a powerfully seductive tug on one's emotional core; 8. recordings (well known, well loved) made fresh and more truthfully rendered. This may or not be the first of two reviews. Question: Why should I revisit what I've heard, what I now KNOW, about an exemplary audio unit? Answer: because I have a suspicion this prototype unit will be further refined—and I do not want to be the last to find that out. As I write this, I'm not certain what the eventual price of the unit will be. I'm sure it cannot come onto the market as an over-generous low-budget Sonic Blockbuster because the parts used to craft such aesthetic elegance must be at the top of the electro-technical pyramid. We are not living in generous times... but I regard the Nexus as a unit that I would (will) welcome to my audio universe if I'm ever that fortunate. The Nexus provides magical audio and musical augmentation to each and every sound system I've ever owned or heard at length. When I think of the price that many pay to upgrade a single unit of a well-designed system—and recognize, after my time with this unit, how magnificently each and all elements in the total sonic chain are enhanced by its enigmatic genius—I imagine that its price will reflect both that achievement and the state of our contemporary audio universe. Although a cheapskate myself, I know that the price of musical transcendence cannot easily be calculated nor accurately comprehended without evaluating how rare such profound experiences truly are. Jim Merod
SMc Audio
Hi Fi One |
