Power Cord Harmonix X-DC SM Million Maestro Series
Author: Uwe Kirbach Photography: Rolf Winter

The Missing Link
Clearly there is no limit to thenumber of different opinions to be
had about the influence and importance of power cords. With thedesign and introduction of the X-DC
SM Million Maestro to mark his
Harmonix company’s 20th anniversary, Kazuo Kiuchi has put an end to
most of the debate and yet raisedsome new questions: How expensive should, and how costly must,a power cord really be?

Back in 1981 the guitarist and innovator of electronic soundmanipulation, Manuel Göttsching, stepped into his studio andrecorded a solo session in one single take. A rhythmic and repetitive sequencer pulse, chords on the analog synthesizer along withguitar cascades, sharply pointed beats, and subtle variations inrhythm and sound – all quite removed from that experimentalrock of his earlier years with Ash Ra Tempel and Klaus Schulze. It
was not until 1984 that the recording was released as a one-hourwork on an LP dubbed E2-E4 under the label of his musician
friend Schulze. At that time, no one could imagine just how extraordinary Göttsching’s achievement and prescience were in being –as if merely in passing – so many years ahead of their time in termsof how music would evolve. With this stroke of genius he influenced post-wave bands just as he conquered the dance clubs withthe remix release. The big Detroit techno artists swore by thatalbum, and the trance community drew inspiration from it. As aresult, he was all but worshipped throughout the world, even inJapan. By virtue of his warm and amenable tone, he managed tomake listeners more sensitive and receptive to the flow of the finest
variations – and in a length found for the first time outside themodern classical and minimal music.
In a certain way, the great designer Kiuchi-san reminds me of thatcelebrated guitarist and master of electronics, Göttsching, in that hetoo influenced and made his mark in musical history with a few, yetpivotal, ideas and inspirations. At the beginning, the only real recognition this Japanese mastermind garnered with his Harmonix products was among groups of closely knit fans. Even so, the respect for
his revolutionary concept grew continuously and in retrospect, as
was the case with Göttsching, had an extraordinarily incisive impact. He took a fundamental idea, namely that of tuning and harmonizing resonances, and placed it above those traditional notions
about the way (attenuating and dissipative) that tuning feet andother accessories should be engineered. And yet he is certainly not
one to attempt to impress the market (and his audience) withsuperficial effects: First and foremost, it must always sound harmonized, natural, and richly colored as it unveils subtle details. At anyrate, he has been coming out with one outstanding product after

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Power Cord Harmonix X-DC SM Million Maestro Seriesanother under the Harmonix brand fora good two decades – all sound-enhancing accessories that nearly always resultin significant to dramatic improvements
in your listening experience. Meanwhile,
he also manufactures magnificent
equipment under the Reimyo name, his
most-recent being the KAP-777, a truly
superb solid-state stereo power amplifier. Over the years and across the globe
he continues earning more and morerecognition; only Germany seems toconstantly lag behind somewhat.
Perhaps Germany is too much the landof engineers and traditionally the kindof place where the fruits of ingenuity
must first be understood, before they
can be relished. Be that as it may, Kazuo
Kiuchi has never disclosed how he produces so beneficial an impact in terms ofsound. I suppose elsewhere people are
more pragmatic: whoever can make itsound better is right.
But still ... still I let this new power cordthat Kazuo Kiuchi designed for his 20thanniversary go untested. To me, lastyear’s advertised price of 13,500 euros
seemed just too crazy for a cord of oneand-a-half-meter length. But in hindsight, my decision was wrong. After all,image hifi is the magazine for the state

PDF image-hifi.com 2/2014of the art in high-end audio, so the price tag should not be a disqualifier; instead the sound quality must play the deciding role. Andso, if by using it, a vastly more expensive system sounds much better, then those who are interested can decide for themselves if they’drather focus on the price or the overall outcome. Nevertheless,everything turned out well, especially since the previously overvalued yen is momentarily trading at a much more favorable
exchange rate, and the Harmonix X-DC SM Million Maestro can
now be had for the bargain price of 8,900 euros ... irony aside, that’s
still one-third less than a year ago.
So how does it sound, this capstone of power-cord engineering inwhose research and development Kiuchi-san invested five years?
Well, first I used it to run the Jadis JA80 mono amplifiers. And to doso, I unplugged the Aural Symphonics Magic Gem v2t, which until
then had served me as the most balanced, musical and universal ofpower cords. I was hoping that the Harmonix would be at least atiny bit better, in which case I could find satisfaction by as a minimum being within a comparable range of quality. Now spinning on
the turntable is Amygdala by DJ Koze, which in my mind is thefinest und best-recorded pop and house album of 2013 (Pampa
LP007, 2LP). And indeed, the music does suddenly play at the forefront of a blacker, more tranquil background, thus unfolding withgreater richness and body. In “Magical Boy” the spatial distance between the voice of Dani Siciliano and that of Matthew Dear slightly
to the right and behind it is surprisingly apparent, the saxophone
plays with more room surrounding it so that the space its sound occupies is better marked. The digital piano not only develops moreforce in the lower frequencies, thus allowing you to readily hear that
nothing artificial is being used as a filler, but you can feel a wealth ofpreviously imperceptible detail now firing through your synapses.
This was followed by Dirk von Lowtzow singing „Ich will die Welt

durch deine Augen seh’n“ (I want to see
the world through your eyes) in „Das
Wort.“ So great is the gain in vocal
transparency and fine layering that I had
the impression of being able to hear thesong through the ears of the mixer. And
finally, “Homesick” reveals even more
information about this power cord’s remarkable capabilities: The width of thesoundstage now expands with each of
those surprising sound effects and does
so repeatedly by and by. The pulses ofthe bass burst more powerfully onto thestage, while those blended-in sounds,
not unlike the dull clang of an old cash
register, seem more authentic with their
dry overtone and enhanced physicalpresence, where they previously sounded somewhat synthetic. And time andagain that compellingly quiet backdrop... as if some lint roller had removed all
the restlessness and residue from the recording to allow a more unhampered
and natural sound reproduction.
How is it that a power cord can makesuch a difference in quality? Doesn’t itseem rather illogical when you consider
the many meters of conventional wiringin the walls? No, it isn’t, due to the factthat high-frequency interference diminishes with the square of the distance.

The crucial link is that last segment connected ahead of the device,
if only because of the increasing volume of electromagnetic interference we’ve been witnessing in recent years. Kiuchi-san says that
his objective is the least-possible loss of energy. For one thing, heintends to achieve this by using his tuning methods and tools thatare designed to shift incoming HF interference into an uncriticalrange. Here this takes place within the thick sleeve of wood locatedin the middle of the power cord and at the Wattgate plugs. All of thisis designed to balance the flow of electrons from the beginning tothe end of the cable, explains Kazuo Kiuchi in his typically cryptic
style. And finally, there are a number of tangible and easily understandable remedies he employs: The cable material that he obtains
as a limited, custom-made article from Furukawa, Japan’s giant(“How many miles do you need?”) electric industrial cable company, consists of the purest available oxygen-free copper in as-cast
PCOCC quality. This acronym stands for “Pure Copper by Ohno
Continuous Casting,” or in other words, a single-crystal copper
cable that is continuously cast (instead of being cold-extruded) andthen slow-cooled over time to give it an optimally dense conductive
structure in a process named after its inventor Ohno. It has beenshown that this extremely soft material possesses the kind ofenhanced conductivity that can be accurately measured. Once thisprocess is complete, the cable goes to Combak, the group parent ofKiuchi’s companies, where it is crafted entirely by hand to ensurethat the density of the crystal core is not subjected to the enormous
stress so characteristic of machine processing. According to Kiuchi
it takes altogether more than 80 hours to manually produce one
cord. Much time, effort and expense was also involved in selecting
the insulation materials, as these too are responsible for what is an
exceptionally undisturbed flow of electrons free of interference andelectrostatic influences.

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Power Cord Harmonix X-DC SM Million Maestro Series

In December of 1968 Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the pioneer of musical interpretation using original and historically correct instruments, triumphed with his marvelous recording of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (Telefunken SKH21, 3LP), revered as the first
opera in the history of music – as we keep with the great pioneers
and the finest music. In the prologue, and with the Harmonix Million Maestro, the instruments appear with improved grandness as
they make their strident entrance, the stage has moved closer, andyou acquire a more realistic image of it. Yet even more astoundingis the second, more sedate entrance, which is now much better
structured thanks to the Harmonix cord. The same is true for
Rotraud Hansmann’s vocal delivery as La Musica: The heightened
charm together with the finer expression exemplify in the mostbeautiful way that overwhelming power of music that Monteverdi
put to score. Besides enriched musical sensibility, the improvement
in fine resolution is demonstrated by the now clearly more audible
movements of the mouth at the microphone. The way the voice
emerges with more breadth is part of this, but also, and perhaps
above all, the manner by which the space in front of what is now aquieter backdrop reveals her “breath.” With the X-DC SM Million
Maestro the underlying noise is reduced to such an extent that you
can plainly hear the micro-acoustics of the recording hall that weremasked before. The entrance of Nigel Rogers as the second
shepherd is simply amazing. Whereas beforehand his voice comingfrom the left was somewhat veiled, this Harmonix power cord lets
your sense of hearing absorb and appreciate the entire situation:
His position is rather more isolated and the slight reverbs andresonances in the hall were what caused that earlier veiling effect.
But now, all the rich details unfold before your ears.
In case you prefer not listening to the details – a challenging
undertaking as they grow in abundance and subtlety – thenconsider how Harmonix improves these key aspects of L’Orfeo:
Voices and instruments resound with a more immediate andaccurate texture and physical expression in what is no longer aspace confined at its sides and front, and the fresh coloration of
the p1resentation makes the earlier portrayal seem somehow
grayish, and less graceful and vibrant.
After that I removed the cords from the power amplifiers so that I
could try them out on the preamplifier and the turntable’s power
supply. In direct comparison, the difference to the cables originallyconnected to the power amplifiers was somewhat sobering; after all,even after years these had proven to be the best among a multitudeof tested power cords. Manuel Göttsching’s guitar was not as clear-

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ly delineated on the second side of E2E4 (ID 20004, LP), almost as if the VTAof the tonearm was misaligned – in thiscase a little too high since it soundedslightly brighter, and perhaps also because the dynamic force from the bass
regions seemed not as great.
So far, no power cord has ever fit nearly as well on the Kondo KSL-M77
preamp as Kondo’s own, which is why I
didn’t expect miracles from the Harmonix cord even after its remarkable
performance on the Jadis amplifiers.
However, Christa Ludwig and Fritz
Wunderlich taught me a thing or two
with their noticeably clearer and more
sharply outlined voices, and which –despite the fact that they had sounded
wonderful before – had seemingly shed
all traces of recording artificiality. Be
that as it may, in her Lied von der Erde(Song of the Earth) under Otto Klemperer (EMI 1C 065-00065, LP) theemphasis on „die Gläser leeren“ (emptythe glasses) is now more commanding
and naturally full-bodied, while thesubsequent and more serene passage in„Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde“ (TheDrinking Song of the Sorrow of Earth)sounds more straightforward and absolutely divine. The louder sequences that
follow now become really loud, whereas
prior to this the system tended to curtailthis rise in volume – something I always
considered a phenomenon of the recording process. But no, with the X-DC
SM Million Maestro all the stress isgone and the preamp now enjoys free
reign. One thing, however, overshadows
all the joy and delight from the gain indetails, coloration of the instruments,
and dynamic performance: Now you
can really immerse yourself in the mu-

Fine tuning: Metallic capsules and other structures are said to be concealed beneath the wooden sleevesic and let your mind and soul be swept
away by the sheer beauty and power of
its sound. Oh yes, and then there’s thatexquisitely cultivated sound of thestrings ... when it comes to very difficultmusical material, this power cord’s impact on the Kondo KSL M-77 is what I
would call pretty near dramatic!
And finally, I connected the second
cord to the Nottingham Deco’s power
supply. In my new selection of artistic
mastery by Burial, Rival Dealer(Hyperdub HDB080, EP), the beats are
more pronounced, the dynamic penetration is a bit more jarring, and thewell-attuned samples seem more sharply edged – all of which promotes yourdesire to discover and hear more of thesound, although I would not speak ofany vital significance in terms of timbre– unlike the improvements in Lied vonder Erde. Things are now moving up anotch in dynamics, the bodies of soundare focused and released more effectively, and altogether more subtle in coloration and richer in overtones, while thestrings and wind instruments have better separation and resonate more naturally. In addition to the improvement inbeautiful sound, noises again appeared
within the recording venue from an un-derlying disquiet that was not noticeable before. Everything seems
to come together to more smoothly and energetically power theturntable. Although the Nottingham Deco was slightly superior incoloration to the Brinkmann LaGrange with its “RöNT” tube
power supply – the latter having a somewhat tighter and muscular
air about it – the Deco now surpasses it in every respect thanks to
the masterfully tuned Harmonix power cord.
What Kazuo Kiuchi’s X-DC SM Million Maestro power cord accomplishes is practically unbeliveable. Acting like a detector, it seeks
out and eliminates minor stress vulnerabilities in the components,
and renders a more expansive soundfield, improved color, a quieter
backdrop, finer details and greater dynamic autonomy – wherever
the cord is used and more fervently than you’d think possible. It
worked throughout the test system like a genuine missing link in a
twofold sense of the term: First, it is the bond that was lacking tocoalesce all of the musical information into one consummate andmagical whole. And second, because it is the one connection you’ll
really miss should you ever have to remove it from your system.

xxxx
Power CordHarmonix X-DC Studio Master Million Maestro Series
Unique features: Wooden sleeve with HF tuning, pure copper wire made by Ohno
continuous casting, handcrafted production Lengths: 1.5 meters, 2.0 meters Prices: 8900 euros, 10900 euros
Contact: Sieveking Sound GmbH & Co KG, Plantage 20, 28215 Bremen, Germany,Telephone +49/421/378 49 84, www.sieveking-sound.dexxxx

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