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.
These speakers replace my TAD Compact Reference speakers still seen in some photos. I fell in love with the TAD sound with the CR1, and this continues now with the R1TX. Same precision and naturalness, with more scale and authority.
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.
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. I upgraded from an N01XDSE, brought more liquidity and I’m able to skip Ethernet and go SFP direct to the network engine.
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.
The PS1 adds even more power separation and isolation to the already excellent power supply architecture of the N1.
I can’t tell you for sure exactly what difference it makes because I didn’t listen to the N1 without the PS1 for long. I can tell you the Esoteric Grandioso digital stack (N1 + G1X + PS1) is nothing short of spectacular.
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.
Congrats on a beautiful system and a beautiful room. Because of your component choices, I first wondered whether you might be in Japan where my daughter lives but then I read you are in Switzerland, which we visited late last year. What a beautiful country! Our trip included stops in Interlaken, Grindelwald, a train ride to Klein Scheidegg, the gondola up to Eigergletscher, a boat tour on Lake Zurich, and the Christmas lights and Christmas village to round out a fantastic visit. I am a fan of large stand mounted speakers with two subs and I can understand why you like those TADs so much. Well done!
