Hooked up the unit a couple of days ago. Sorry for the delay but this 315 pound unit was a bear and finding a good electrician was paramount.
First of all, my electrician gave me some info about it and these units add protection and safety for my system.
As to the effects on the SQ, they are substantial. The BPT unit works flawlessly with the power coming from the EquiTech unit, and now the amps and powered speaker bass amps are getting balanced power as well, but only the front end is powered by the BPT and EquiTech combo.
First thing I noticed is the presence, most noticeable on voices but with the various instruments as well. While there were always certain recordings where the voice had that in the room quality, that quality now permeates to some extent pretty much all vocals, and it’s very noticeable. Location of the voices is much better defined as well.
Timbre and separation of instruments has dramatically improved. Piano is now very realistic, but this has improved for each and every instrument. Throaty sax notes are very convincing, a weakness previously.
Now for the bass. The change exposed some bloat. You could surmise that the transformer added to the bloat but I suspect the bloat was there, just masked to some degree, so I made a change. The amplifiers are McIntosh MC 60 mono blocks and the low level signal taken off these feeds the Hypex 400W bass amps in the speakers. A tight low level signal is essential. Switched my very musical but slightly soft NOS TungSol 6550s for some new Genelex Gold Lion KT88s. Good firm, well defined bass followed but with the slightest loss in accuracy of timbre, that being a strength of the NOS TungSols. Mind you these GLs were straight out of the box. The liveliness of everything perked up and as the night wore on they settled in. The bass is now the best ever in this system, not dominate but appropriate and very substantial when called upon. Expect them to settle in a bit more, or so I’ve been told.
Found all sorts of nuance and detail in the music I didn’t know had been missing. My wife noticed this and commented it all sounded smoother, her words, this with the Genelex tubes. More resolving but smoother at the same time. Honestly don’t think I could have run the Gold Lions before this change as the noise had my system sounding a bit bright and the GLs don’t subdue this quality like the TungSols. The music is now much more enveloping if that makes any sense.
Honestly the SQ is now like I envisioned when I put this system together. Had no idea the noise from the electricity would get in the way to the extent that it did, but these are high efficiency speakers and from what’s been posted on this and other forums high eff speakers are more susceptible to the effects of line noise. It could be that other medium efficiency speakers would not have this profound improvement.
The bottom line is that elimination the noise adds to a type of improvement that probably can’t be achieved with a component change. I thought long and hard before going this route and the posts and advice on this and other boards led me to do this. Significant improvement.
I've yet to configure the system so that only digital is coming out of the BPT, but now that the 4 gang outlet the BPT is plugged into is balanced from the Equitech, given a few listening sessions the switch of my analog to the other three outlets and away from the BPT should be interesting. There are two grey coded outlets on the back of the BPT for digital so it could be that using these will suffice.
