This is my carefully matched Japanese HiFi system, with flagship TAD, Accuphase and Esoteric components. Cables all either Zonotone, SAEC or Esoteric, continuing the Japanese theme. Treated room.
The system doubles down as two channel sound for home theatre, but its main purpose is stereo listening.
TAD’s Compact Reference speakers that I fell in love with the first day I heard them, and haven’t found anything that sounds better to my taste.
Audiophilia is full of flowery and exaggerated descriptions, but Japanese companies are largely immune to this and TAD is particularly matter of fact. When they say “ astonishingly transparent, direct, and precise” it is literally that, without being analytical. The only downside is how unforgiving they can be with poor recordings, as are most speakers with a studio monitoring heritage. TAD originally started out Pioneer’s pro-audio division.
2x Accuphase flagship 50th Anniversary Class A monoblocs. The ultimate expression of the Accuphase house sound - silky smooth, leaning on the warm side, with the power and high damping factor to drive any speaker. A perfect match for the TADs.
In Japan it’s well known that nobody Class A better than Accuphase and nobody does digital better than Esoteric. I’m not a vinyl guy but I value the organic feel of analogue sources. This DAC is the best of both worlds - convenience of digital with analogue playback quality.
My Esoteric N01XDSE network DAC already has an award winning clock (the basis for the SE designation) so I didn’t expect the addition of a high precision 10MHz clock to make a huge difference. It was meant to be icing on the cake. In reality it was a significant jump in “naturalness”, there’s no other way to describe it. Everything sounded a little more “real”. A most delightful icing on the cake indeed.
Accuphase’s implementation of room correction technology, similar to Trinnov or Dirac. Works very well without any unwanted effects of timing and impulse correction. It had a bigger impact before my room was well treated and calibrated. Now I rarely use this device, less is more.
2x Accuphase PS-1250 power conditioners, that clean and generates and perfect sine wave using waveform shaping technology that doesn’t affect dynamics. In my experience, clean power is an essential part of maximizing system performance.
For the same reason, I run a dedicated line from the distribution panel (Doepke Audio RCCB) to the system using high gauge solid copper cable (Oyaide FS EE 2.6 v2) to minimize noise from other circuits in the home.
This is one of those rare cases where the product name sort of makes sense. Mad, Extreme, Video Processing that can cause Envy :-D
In my system, the most important feature is MotionAI. I’m very sensitive to motion judder and this is the best motion interpolation available, as far as I know. Sure all the other features are great, the tone mapping and everything else MadVR can do. But MotionAI is the killer feature, at least for me.
High quality HDMI audio extractor and reclocker that I use instead of an AVR. Lipsync can be an issue without an AVR, so I also use an AES EBU matrix mixer (MiniDSP DDRC88BM) to sync everything up nice.
That is a handsome bit of kit! You say what a few of the pieces do under the components sections, but I have no idea about the others. If you have a few minutes, I'd be curious about which piece does what.
Anyway, that is a nice room with what I suspect are first class components.
