To cut a long story short: It undeniably sounds a lot better when the studio's playback electronics get their power from the Niagara 5000 and the Audioquest cables. Three of the people present had expected this result, Christoph Stickel, on the other hand, seemed almost a little shocked: He went to great lengths with his equipment to bestow the recordings more space and air, to make them more transparent and give them at the same time more punch, and now he had to perceive that in most cases he had achieved more than he had previously been able to hear via his playback system. He then listened to more well familiar projects than he did before switching to Garth Powell's designs, and was pleasantly surprised by the changes in each of the familiar tracks thanks to the now clean mains power. So the first milestone has been achieved: In the CS Mastering studio, the owner can now realize even more precisely what he is doing with his equipment.

The second part of our test comprised listening to and documenting the influence of an optimised power supply on the mastering equipment: Christoph Stickel had recently mastered the Sebastian Müller Band's second album and had, of course, made notes on the settings of the equipment used - the purely analogue, dynamic mastering equaliser LISA by Tomo Audiolabs, SPL's tube compressor IRON and Maselec Precision Stereo Equalizer MEA-2. In a first step, he carefully adjusted all settings as in the mastering at that time and created new files from the source material with the proven sonic enhancements. Then the equalisers and the compressor were changed over to mains power supply by a second Niagara 5000 and Audioquest cables instead of using the DIY store cabling, and further files were produced with unchanged settings. Now, you surely would like to know whether and, if so, how the clean power is noticeable in terms of sound? Well, I won't tell you. You'll have to hear it for yourself. Thankfully, Sebastian Müller has allowed us to make one track and the excerpt from a second one available for free download in two versions each: In the first version, the mastering tools receive their power via simple standard wiring; in the second version, Niagara and Co. ensure that the mains power is largely free of high-frequency noise and interference.