Before occupying myself with the Lacorde Statement Digital XLR, my colleague Roland Dietl put a Mutec MC-3 + Smart Clock USB at my disposal during his vacation. He had been already experimenting with the Reclocker and was quite impressed with its effect in his system. A respective test will follow in a few weeks. I presume that I do not anticipate too much when I reveal that in my chain the Mutec inserted between Melco, Auralic Femto, Audioquest Jitterbug and Chord DAVE did have an effect, but no one that could be described as clearly positive: It made the sonic image appear brighter and thus a touch more open. The tonal colours became somewhat paler and the lows felt a little less solid. Although my experiences usually say that in the digital sector the shortest signal path not always is the best, the before described component arrangement overshot the objective quite a bit. That's why I tried the Mutec between the USB output of the Melco and the DAVE – starting with a Sunwire Digisym Reference between the Mutec and the DAVE. There really was no need to listen twice: The Reclocker offered so much openness, so much air around the instruments and so much musical enthusiasm, that one could almost think having a higher-classed converter in play. In this type of configuration I do not want to miss the Mutec any more.

The Digisym has been highly valued for decades, but when substituting it with the Lacorde Statement Digital XLR for taking over the data transfer, the spatiality within the Keith Jarrett Trio’s "Wrong Blues" opened up a little more, while the cymbals sparkled a bit more colourful and the rhythm’s groove got a bit more intense. Here too, the Göbel Lacorde Statement proved to be clearly superior, yet: The sonic advantages of the Ethernet cable did impress me the most in this top-class trio of digital cables.