Med extremt hög grad hållfasthet, styvhet och lätthet har kolfiber etablerat sig som ett favoritmaterial för tillverkare världen över.

Whereas the Pyramid Cones under the DAC make a subtle, but meaningful difference, under my speakers they are simply fantastic. The general character of the system has remained the same; it’s the increased clarity that is astounding. Bass lines are much more solid and well defined. The upper bass hump that has plagued me for so long (and that I attributed solely to room problems) is now mostly gone (except for the room problem). The midrange has turned beautifully clear. I hadn’t realized what I was missing and I didn’t realize that my B&Ws were capable of this level of performance. I guess it was in them all this time just waiting to get out. I thought the imaging was good already, I hadn’t expected even more depth, more palpability, and even more definition. To cite an example right this moment, as I type this my favorite Sarah McClachlan disk is playing (The Freedom Sessions). Certain tracks on this nearly live-to-disk release were previously bass-heavy and somewhat wooly. I just chalked that up to the recording. These same tracks still possess deep bass, but now it’s wonderfully tight bass with strong definition. And there is a wealth of low level detail that had been previously masked. I’m simply stunned over the improvement.

The day I received it, I substituted it for the platform on my wall-mounted Archidee turntable stand. When I sat back down to listen to the same disc I had been listening to before the change, my wife yelled from another room, “What did you do to the system?” Yes, it was that radical. As I’d heard before, there was a marked increase in perceived silence. Blacker black, if you will. The low-level cues that define the air surrounding instruments or that illuminate the spaces in which the recordings were made became much more prominent.

But what my wife heard—all the way down the hall and in another room—was the way that the performers suddenly inhabited my room. Audiophiles frequently speak of their systems as a window that looks onto the original performance, but I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable with this analogy. If that’s what our system is, then what is it that we accomplish when we make improvements: apply Windex? The Shelf kicked that analogy’s glass—we moved a lot closer to the musicians or, if you prefer, brought ’em home with us.