January 8, 2015

  • PAC IDOS 2, Part 5

    Th UC Santa Cruz campus is located on a hill. When you enter at the base, it is primarily ranch land.
    East Field
    But as you get higher in elevation, you'll encounter more and more trees. The photo above is a grove of trees lying above the East Field athletic buildings, but below Cowell College. I went to UCSC's Crown College, which was then the northern most. It was in the denser part of the forest.

    Back home in San Francisco, I had known since the late-80s, that AC coming from the wall could be full of hash and distortion. The first powerline conditioner I became aware of was the half-deep, component-sized Adcom ACE-515. At my parents' place, we never had any problems with the building's AC. Ah, but then in Fall '89, I went off to UCSC's Crown College. In the dorms, I learned first hand, what "bad AC" was. When you turned a switch on or off, your electronics could "pop." The bad AC wreaked havoc on televisions, clocks, radios, CD players, or computers (for those rich enough to buy one). Those rich computer geeks thus had to invest in "surge protectors."

    As you well know, by 1991, the powerline conditioner I really wanted was the $150 PAC IDOS. But for $30 more, most people bought the component-sized Adcom ACE-515. With the ACE-515 available, no one bought PAC's 9-outlet IDOS 2, which was then $200.
    IMG_1500
    Back in 1991, if you had told the Stereotypical Audiophiles that a powerline conditioner needed to be burned-in, they would have laughed their asses off. Obviously, the bigoted SAs have become and now are the butt of many jokes. You can coax much better performance from the IDOS 2, if you place it on a burn-in device, such as the audiodharma Cable Cooker. This IDOS 2 has been in use for maybe 20 years. So after 20 years, it finally goes on the Cable Cooker, and guess what? It performs even and much better. Grain is lowered, the upper midrange is not as hard, and the soundstage expands.

    Normally, I'd recommend that you give each receptacle 24 hours of Cook time. But with 9 outlets, the IDOS 2 as a whole would then be over-Cooked. That is okay; just put the IDOS 2 into your system, and within 7 to 10 days, it'll settle.
    IMG_1334
    PAC have recommended not using "audiophile" after-market powercords. They want the crappy OEM powercords to funnel RFI, EMI, and other hash through the IDOS 2, and out the ground pin of its AC cord. PAC argue that by filtering distortions, "audiophile" powercords defeat the mechanism of the IDOS 2 funneling that distortion to ground. But perhaps another reason why PAC caution against after-market powercords is that the IDOS 2's outlets are oriented and spaced so that they cannot accommodate adjacent fat-barrel AC plugs (sounds kinky, but isn't). Indeed, when using fat-barrel AC plugs, I have to use every other receptacle on the IDOS 2. Thus, I end up using only 5 of the IDOS 2's 9 outlets.