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FABIO RICCOBALDI'S AUDIO SYSTEM

Description:

 

I’ve always thought that the average audiophile was a music enthusiast, a big experimenter, guided by the belief that everything is improvable, perfectible even. Unfortunately, as time passed, I found myself in a Hi-fi paradox. Spreading my passion to the forums and then trying it first-hand made me realize how objectively difficult is a path that is often simplified with a little more than a splendid disposition really.  There are still debates regarding the million-dollar cables and how much benefit they can really produce. They say everything and its opposite. The only great thing is that every once in a while, experimenting is free and it sometimes reveals surprises.

 

If I told you that every one of your components (high-end cables included) probably doesn’t perform (acoustically speaking) beyond 50% of what it’s capable of, you would get angry and think it’s impossible or unacceptable. Today we have greater electrical disturbances with respect to the past, and infinitely more disturbances in the air that constantly and slowly affect not just sound systems but also our health. Overdone from an inevitable progress. Our passion should push us to pose some questions, call upon a search for something else rather than a desire to point the finger on principle when the usual change of components variations are proposed (maybe at twice the cost). Hi-fi at a certain level is expensive: there are no shortcuts or easy ways out. Besides, one often risks not getting a result even after spending thousands of euros. The question is why? Why, having a thousands-of-euros system, everything sounds at times bad and only rarely “incredibly” good? Psycho acoustics? I think not.

 

The Stones and Jiva lacquer are specifically arranged that they have an effect on electric magnetic fields in a completely different way than any other product, from toroidals to printed circuits, from the device’s ground wire to the cables themselves. The purpose of the treatment is to purify the electric line, improve the circuitry’s feedback allowing it to function optimally. Generally, the Stones, just like the lacquer, have a settling-in period that is about 24 to 48 hours but the effects of the change are perceived after just half an hour. From my experience with all the Sublima products I’ve tried (practically all of them), it is an obvious improvement and it is evident in the clearness and naturalness of the sound. Sometimes as soon as they’re put in place, they have an effect of pronounced softness and wadding on the sound. It’s a temporary phase. Leave them there for a day so that they stabilize and then listen again. You’ll be surprised. An effective treatment isn’t cheap but it can be done a little at a time, in small steps. Plus, there’s a money-back guarantee, ensuring that if customers aren’t satisfied, they can get a refund. A guarantee of a product that works extremely well and that has certainly convinced me.

 

My system is oriented towards digital. Hardware technician by trade and gamer geek in my free time, when I started my audiophile path, I was at least certain that digital had less problems and variables to take into consideration. Evidently, I was wrong. I had already successfully experimented with adequate external and internal wiring with various filters, circuit boards, power sources, transforming the sound from a banal binary code to an undoubtedly truer sound. Following the optimum results obtained on the system and DAC, I then decided to massively treat the computer I use for audio/video reproduction with surprising results, to say the least. After benefitting from a MSB IV (with various upgrades to the quad USB, clock, etc), my digital unit didn’t seem to be missing anything. Maybe there was an irritable need to fix the high range, but it always seemed to be at least a complete sound. Still after the treatment, some things that weren’t there before literally appeared. Not things that could be heard in the background - those things were still there but with more details. I’m talking about the instruments, choir, vocals, and ambient information that had simply and dramatically been absent until that moment. And I can assure you that I have certainly never held back on my electrical product line and wiring.

 

Coming from an audio context, the use of the Jiva lacquer in an IT setting has created small variations on specific tensions and behaviours, such as a bigger responsiveness on the BIOS but also a small incompatibility on the Southbridge typically compared to some CDs in a solid state and then accentuated from a Jcat sata awg multicolored wiring. A form of greater precision that accentuates anomalies? Hard to say - to detect the unit Sata from BIOS and to boot the machine like I wanted to, I had to test different motherboards with a controller and different solid CDs. In the end, the game was worth it, re-establishing a digital signal that was certainly more detailed, organic, and credible. I believe that processing digital is a necessary choice to a certain degree since it is a mixture of a great deal of variables much more deficient than a CD or analog system. Both hardware and software modifications create differences, sometimes minimally but “unfortunately” they do exist. Working on this is sometimes very complex and fragile. The Stones and Jiva lacquer are easy to implement and in my opinion make sense in every set up. And today more than ever.

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