Mr. Tom Vu at Triangle Art has been keeping himself quite busy since introducing his first product a few years ago. I met Tom at the 2013 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest a few months back and was mighty impressed with the sound he was getting in his room, most of which were components of his own design. In fact, in the three years since I took delivery of the first iteration of the Triangle Art Reference turntable he has managed to expand his offerings to include a full line of turntables. The top-of-the-line Reference turntable has also gone through several key refinements. In fact, the offerings from Tom’s company, Triangle Art, now include a wide range of products of his own design such as the Osiris tonearm (available in 9 and 12” wands), ISIS cables, Zeus MC phono cartridge, and as well as the RA power conditioners. I have been fortunate enough to secure a few of these items for review. The first of these is the RA Power Conditioner.
The RA power conditioner is available in three configurations, 4 outlet (RA-4, $2,500), six outlet (RA-6, $3,000), and an 8 outlet (RA-8, $3,500). The RA-6 is the subject of this review.
Installation
The RA-6 arrived in short order following the 2013 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, as expected. This certainly is not your normal run of the mill power conditioner. As can be seen by the photo, the RA-6 is roughly the size of a car battery, though not quite as heavy.. It is clad in, what is now expected of Triangle Art, highly polished CNC machined aluminum alloy; 20 pounds of it. The IEC as well as the outlets are all top flight Furutech units. The RA-6 is no slouch internally either. Internal wiring is all deep-cryo’d POCC solid core copper and capacitors are the highly regarded Audience units. As I said, Triangle Art definitely did not cut any corners when it comes to audiophillic parts.
Since this was the demo unit from RMAF, I was assured that it was fully broken in (more on this, further into the essay).
The Triangle Art RA-6 came at a time when I was also fortunate to have in my possession the recently introduced T-Rex power cord from the folks at Enklein. At the time it was however just one cable. This actually laid the foundation for how I was going to determine the efficacy of the Triangle Art RA-6. In house, I have 6 different power cables, each of which has very distinct sonic signature.
I therefore established the method for evaluation. In the first phase of evaluation, I would connect a single component via the RA-6 using the same power cord at both inlet and outlet. The component I chose for the test was the one that seems to be most affected by power cords, the Conrad Johnson UDP1 Deluxe. Its favored power cord is the newly introduced Enklein T-Rex. I put together a playlist of CD’s that would cover as much ground as possible in terms of performance. This playlist included:
Bruce Springsteen “The Ghost of Tom Joad”
Katie Melua Piece by Piece
Steve Howe Not Necessarily Acoustic
Nirvana “UNPLUGGED in New York”
Nils Lofgren “Acoustic Live”
Pat Metheny w/ Christian McBride & Antonio Sanchez “Tokyo Day Trip Live”
Kevin Gilbert “Thud” 4-song Bonus CD featuring Kashmir
Toy Matinee “Toy Matinee”
Gentle Giant “In a Glass House”
Kronos Quartet “Pieces of Africa”
Some of these selections I happen to have in both analog and digital formats, so I utilized the same music in later portions of this evaluation.
For added assurance of break-in, I ran my trusty break-in CD track through the set-up for a period of two weeks. Looking forward to eventually adding another component to the Triangle Art RA-6, I decided to run another two components, another CD player and the Pass Labs XP20 linestage with the same break-in track at the same time. This also allowed me time to break-in a couple of new powercords (review forthcoming) that had just arrived as well as run in two additional power outlets on the RA-6.
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