Not everything we do here at Audio Therapy involves big, high-end expensive systems! One of my customers recently got in touch with me, he has a Sonos Connect which gets used to play Spotify through his AV amplifier, nothing big or fancy, but he loves it and that is all that counts! The reason for him getting in touch was because he was tempted to upgrade his Sonos to a more expensive/better streamer. The customer doesn’t own any CD’s or own a USB DAC so a Melco was not appropriate.
This customer already owned an Entreq ground box which connects to his AV amplifier and Sonos and it was an incredibly effective addition to his system. So, I threw the customer a bit of curve ball and suggested instead of buying another streamer he should simply buy an Entreq Primer Ethernet Cable. Priced at £260 this includes a Ground Cable and a Primer Ground Boxso nothing else is needed to get up and running. The Sonos Connect was only £280 so the customer raised an initial eyebrow at my suggestion.
As always, I simply just told him to borrow it for a week and give it a try. No obligation in any way. If it does the business great, if not I’ll come and pick it up. I called round to plug it into his router. Before I did we had a listen to 2 or 3 songs with it connected via a standard ethernet cable, then we swapped over to the Primer. As always with Entreq, quick A/B demo’s are difficult due to the way in which the ground box has to settle down. It’s take typically 24 hours for the ground box/cable to effectively remove the pollutants in the signal path.
We started to play the same songs with the Primer connected. Almost immediately you could hear the Sonos all of a sudden sounded bigger, there was much weight to the sound and a more detail and information was present that simply wasn’t there the first time around.
I left the customer to spend the next few days exploring his favourite music on Spotify and I suggested after 3 or 4 days he should take the Primer out and install his own cable again and see what happens. Once the customer did this he was quickly on the phone to ask me to bring a new Primer along when I come to collect my demo cable.
The sound quality coming out of the Sonos was now so good and so mature you’d think you’d have swapped it for something costing 3 or 4 times the price and remember this customer was only using compressed Spotify as his source. Feed it with Tidal Hi-Fi or Qobuz and the performance jump will even greater.
So, if you use Ethernet to listen to music the Primer RJ45 cable should be right at the top of your list of performance upgrades. In the short time I have had this cable every demonstration I have done for someone has resulted in them buying a cable.
Also, if your router and master phone socket are close together you can get a further improvement in performance by putting a Primer cable between the 2 (typically this cable is RJ11 to RJ45), so the connection from the wall socket right through to the streamer is Primer all the way.
The Primer RJ45 Ethernet Cable is £260.00 and available to buy now
