Equipment Report

Nordost QKore
Grounding System
Silence is Golden
Jacob Heilbrunn

Ever since I caught the audio bug, I’ve been intriguedby products that purport to cleanse, rehabilitate, regenerate—you name it—the electricity that powers your stereo. A few years ago, after extensively
grounding my house electrical system and adding an Equitech
isolation transformer and dedicated 20-amp lines for my stereo, I thought I’d gone about as far as you could to eliminate
noise and hash riding on the power lines. It now turns out that
I was quite wrong. Nordost’s Michael Taylor visited this somewhat skeptical reviewer, and the conversion process went rather quickly. Facts, as Thomas Gradgrind likes to say in Dickens’
Hard Times, are what boys and girls need. And in this instance,
the cold hard fact is that the introduction of the Nordost
QKore parallel grounding device into my stereo system jolted
me out of a comfortable sense of complacency, replacing itwith a sense of wonderment at just how much subliminal noise
I had taken for granted. In a variety of small but significant

ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM MAY/JUNE 2018

ways, the QKore endowed
my stereo with a sense ofrealism that almost defied
credulity. Put bluntly, it is themost potent power productthat I have experienced.
Most power products havepluses and minuses. Some
produce a greater sense ofdynamics but suppress detail, or do the reverse. Others
will produce their own noise
through internal transformer hum. This is not the casewith the QKore, partly, I
think, because it is a passive
product. Depending on how
far you want to go, you canbuy QKore 1, QKore 3, orQKore 6. As the numberssuggest, they allow you toground increasing numbersof components. You pluga QKore wire, which is amonofilament that can beterminated with spade, male
XLR/female XLR, BNC, banana, USB A, USB B, RJ45,
or RCA into an unused inputThis truly is aunit that helps tobanish any senseof electronic hazeor grain from thesound.

on your equipment, then run
the wire into your QKore.
This is supposed to provide
the path of least resistanceto ground for micro-potentials (voltages) that muck up
your sound. The QKore boxitself contains, among otherthings, what Nordost terms
a low-voltage attractor platethat includes a passive electrical circuit. I can testify
that the QKore boxes madezero noise.
In my system, I employed
two QKore 6s for the front
end and one QKore 3 for mymonoblock amps. The way
the devices operate is that

Equipment Report Nordost QKore Grounding System

you can ground the QKore 6 to a Nordost QBase 8 power strip.
(This is the most effective way to run the QKore system.)
In my system, I plugged the QKore in first to my dCS VivaldiSACD/CD playback system, which consists of four separate
boxes. There was an immediate drop in the noise floor. I heard
an expansion both laterally and vertically in the scale of thesoundstage. As I continued to plug in more front-end components, I continued to hear a variety of benefits.
How do those benefits translate sonically? Take Javier
Perianes’ riveting new recording of Schubert piano sonatasfor Harmonia Mundi. The piano, particularly in the left hand,became much more powerful and audible, particularly in quiet
passages. It might sound like a contradiction in terms to saythat it became more powerful in the quiet passages, but what
occurred is that notes in the bass region, even when struck gently, had a roundness and resonance and richness that was previously not apparent. This is another way of saying that timbral
accuracy, both in the bass and treble regions, was improved. In
allowing the music to sound more audibly in pianissimo passages,
the QKore opened up the entire dynamic range. The fortissimo
passages now sound more dramatic than they did before; powerhouse block chords struck on a grand piano didn’t fracture
but remained centered, exploding with ferocity.
Another ancillary benefit that the QKore conferred was tohelp increase the perceived density of the center image. Thiswas particularly noticeable on orchestral recordings, where it
helped to attenuate the sense of left and right speakers artificially playing in stereo as opposed to producing a coherent wallof sound. It’s not overstating matters, for example, to say that
the QKore helped disentangle the reproduction of the chamberorchestra accompanying the lithe and nimble trumpeter Alison
Balsom on her 2010 EMI Classics CD of Italian concertos. Itwas as though the various sections of the orchestras were nolonger smudged together but could be heard clearly in their individual spaces. My surmise is that this is because of the greater
fidelity of the micro-details that make up an individual note.
The bowing of the violins and cellos was more solid, vivid,

Specs & Pricing
Price: QKore 1, $2499;
QKore 3, $3499; Qkore
6, $4999; QKore wires,$360 for one meterand $150 per each
additional meter; QBase
8 Mk.2 power strip,$1599.
NORDOSTCORPORATION
93 Bartzak Drive
Holliston, MA 01746(508) 893-0100
nordost.com

and precise with the QKore.
The lower noise floor delivered by the QKore meansthat notes also trailed off
into space, lingering for what
seems like an eon, before disappearing entirely. This truly
is a unit that helps to banish
any sense of electronic hazeor grain from the sound.
Even bass was improvedby the QKore. Bass, let’s faceit, is probably the most difficult sonic region to produce
faithfully. One of the mosttreacherous aspects, I think,is pitch stability in the nether

areas. It’s easy to hear whena loudspeaker begins to compress or wobble on lower-octave notes. On some of myfavorite Maurice André recordings on Erato of trumpet and organ, for instance,
you simply hear greater air
around the deep organ notes
and more focused pitches.
On Leonard Cohen’s final
album You Want It Darker,
the depth and refulgence andsonority of the bass adds immense dimensionality to theproceedings.
But in the end it is theadded refinement that theQKore provides that is mostaddictive. The more I listen,
the more riveting I find theability of a good stereo tocapture the nuances of themusic. Sure, the blockbuster stuff can be thrilling andwill definitely impress yourchums. But the elegance,
the poignancy, the fragility of a musical line is whatconveys the emotion at theheart of music. This is what
the Nordost QKore does sowell. I can’t help thinking thatto achieve the most from any
high-end stereo Nordost
QKore is an essential product to consider.

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