׀ WORLD PREMIERE ׀

⌈ LOCUS AUDIO is a newly-established Polish cable manufacturer, existing since January 2021. It was founded by GRZEGORZ KOWALUK and ARTUR SABISZ and is based in Wejherowo, where the cables are hand-assembled. We test the AC power cord named HOME. ⌋

IT ALL BEGAN WITH AN EMAIL:

My name is Grzegorz Kowaluk and I am a co-owner of the Locus Audio company. Together with my business partner Artur Sabisz we have been passionate about music for many years, and more precisely about its faithful reproduction.

We often read your reviews and opinions on audio topics and we know how much appreciated they are in the audio world. It would be a great honor for us if you could find the time to evaluate or review one of our products. As a young, unknown company, we are looking for support that would help us make a mark on the market of domestic audio manufacturers. […]

never refuse such requests, for every Polish producer, no matter big or small, the door of HIGH FIDELITY is open. Soon after the email exchange, the Locus Audio HOME power cable arrived at my home. However, before we move on to its evaluation, let me give the floor to Mr. Grzegorz once again.

A few simple words…

GRZEGORZ KOWALUK
Co-owner, designer

I AM ONE OF THOUSAND MELOMANS for whom music is of utmost importance (emphasis - ed.). A coincident turned me also into an audiophile. A dozen or so years ago, my older brother lent me speaker cables, saying, "these sound really good in my system - check them out, maybe I am wrong about them." And so it started. The cables made me feel as if someone had taken a heavy blanket off my speakers. Everything became more expressive, more dynamic, there was more of everything, there was this famous "wow!" effect.

⸜ The Locus Audio owners, GRZEGORZ KOWALUK and ARTUR SABISZ

Then I became seriously interested in the influence of cables on the sound of my system. I started to borrow signal, speaker and power cables for auditions. It quickly turned out that those that convey the information best are beyond my financial reach.

At that time I met Artur, an electronics engineer - a colleague whose knowledge about the current flow, impedance, capacitance and EMI, RFI etc. is impressive. By joining forces together, we started working on cable designs that would meet our expectations. In recent years, we have spent a lot of time and energy on designing and building cables from scratch that would be neutral in their presentation.

The results varied, they were sometimes better, sometimes worse, but we didn't give up. Ultimately, after several years of experiments, trying various materials and geometries, we succeeded. Many hours of tests in various audio systems confirmed that the production method we’d developed provided an excellent results in musical reproduction. Encouraged by the effects, we started lending cables to our audiophile friends to verify our assessment. The feedback was positive, so we decided to start making them professionally. And so, at the beginning of 2021, we founded our Locus Audio manufacture.

Our cables are assembled by hand at all stages of production, and we use only the highest quality materials and components for their production, because only these can ensure the highest quality of the finished product. Vintage aesthetics and the use of natural materials with which the cables are finished, go hand in hand with the quality of the sound delivered by finished products.

We wanted to combine elements of the system, which will result in a greater pleasure of listening to music and a experience of sound as a spectacle. This is what we strive for and we do not want it to be just a wish, which, we hope, will be confirmed in your audio systems. GK

▌ HOME

ON THE LOCUS AUDIO WEBSITE you will find not only products from this company, but also plugs and cables from other companies. It seems that you can order any combination of both and the company will professionally terminate them.

The most important tab, however, concerns their own products. Among them we can find analog interconnects, both RCA and XLR, phono interconnects, speaker and AC power cables, which is an almost complete, as not including video cables, range. The first product that we test, and this is a premiere review, is the more expensive of the two AC power cables available, the Home model. It is intended, as we read in the company materials, "to power audio components, sources and amplifiers". In a word - it can be used with almost any component.

⸜ MAKE Home is one of the nicer looking power cables I know. My perception is partially distorted by a long exposure to the HARMONIX X-DC350M2R IMPROVED-VERSION |PL|, which I have been using for testing for nine years. And it is distorted because the Japanese cable was one of the first professional products to use a braid made of a soft yellow cotton weave with a characteristic black interlacing. I do not know how old you are, but I still remember irons with this type of cable, which we called - no surprise here - "iron" ones.

The color of the Home’s braid has a more subdued color, because although there is yellow here, it is much darker, in addition countered by the gray and black "matrix" on the whole. It looks very nice and aesthetic and stands out from the crowd of black or gray meshes. I have nothing against the latter, but I like a good change. The sleeve is completed with wooden elements made of modified oak wood, connecting the IEC and Shuko plugs with the cable.

Inside Home, we find a combination of OCC and OFC copper conductors with a total cross-section of 10 mm2. The cable is terminated with SCHUCO and IEC plugs with gold-plated copper contacts.

⸜ PLUGS Locus Audio cable features nice-looking plugs, reminiscent of the products of the American company WattGate. However, the name leGO is visible on the body. We are talking about the Taiwanese plug manufacturer leGO Dreamworks, established in 2000. It uses the best available components, including 99.99% pure OFC copper, purchased in Japan, which the manufacturer describes as "prime grade red copper".

It is also known that these are plugs with the symbols 8085BK & CT, in which the conductive elements are manually polished to obtain better conduction. The contacts are made of 24-carat gold-plated pure tellurium copper supplied by the Japanese company Furukawa. The copper "spirit" is emphasized by stickers with the name of the company and model on them - these bands are copper-colored. Metal elements were subjected to cryogenic treatment (-240° C for 20 hours). The chassis is made of a special PVC alloy produced in Japan by General.

Both IEC and Shuko have red dots on them to indicate "hot" wire. It is therefore necessary to determine, with the help of a tester, polarity of a socket we put the plug in, to make sure it’s connected correctly.

⸜ BOX The product is delivered in a box often used by „beginners”, that is a wooden one. Unlike in most cases though, it is lined with a nice, quilted material that "takes" our attention off the wood.

Home is a very nice, carefully crafted cable in a good packaging.

▌ SOUND

⸤ HOW WE LISTENED The AC Locus Audio HOME power cable was tested in the HIGH FIDELITY reference system. It powered the Ayon Audio CD-35 HF Edition SACD player and was compared to the Siltech Triple Crown cable (15,900 EUR / 2m), which was an absolute reference. In addition, its sound (by saying "sound" I mean the changes it brought to the sound) I compared with other cables, for example GigaWatt PERFORMANCE PowerSync Plus (test HERE |PL|), although not directly.

Both cables were connected to the Acoustic Revive RPT-4EU Absolute power strip, and the latter, through the 2.5-meter Acrolink Mexcel 7N-PC9500 cable, to a dedicated Furutech NFC socket in the wall, to which a separate power line is connected with its own separate fuse. The listening session was an A / B and A / B comparison with A and B known. The auditioned fragments of the tracks were 1 to 2 minutes long. As the Ayon is a tube device, the comparison was not immediate - the pauses lasted about 30 seconds.

Recordings used for the test | a selection

⸜ BOTTLENECK JOHN, All Around Man, Opus3 CD 23001, SACD/CD (2013).
⸜ DOMINIC MILLER & NEIL STACEY, New Dawn, Naim naimcd066, CD (2002).
⸜ SANTANA, Supernatural, Arista | BMG ‎07822 19080 2, CD (1999).
⸜ THE WEEKND, After Hours, XO | Republic Records/Tidal, MQA 24/44,1 (2020).
⸜ PATRICIA BARBER, Companion, Premonition Records/Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab UDSACD 2023, SACD/CD (1999/2003).

MANUFACTURERS OFTEN TELL ME that comparing their products to those that are part of the HIGH FIDELITY reference system is not fair. The fact is that these differences are often tenfold or even greater. Almost always, let me add, these are they people who "do not like" something in a given test. My answer then is that ONLY such a comparison makes sense. The point is in seeing/hearing an audio product in its fullness, in an absolute scale, and not only how it compares to other products of its type available on the market. This too, but only as a derivative of the overall rating. This methodology is refined by me and gives good results.

It is also the case that inexpensive products in such a comparison often do not perform as well as their designers would have liked. It's not that they are much worse than the reference products, because I don't expect anything else from them, but that their problems come to light, which in any other case could be ignored, or downplay. But there are also products that, although clearly worse, do not have such problems. One of them is the tested AC Home power cord.

The thing is that, on the one hand, it does not offer such a rich tonality as the Siltech Triple Crown, to which it was compared, does not present the sound in such a tangible and energetic way, and does not so incredibly easy convey information (of course, we are talking about signal modifications). And yet the switching from Siltech to Locus Audio did not change the basic structure of the presentation, it did not distort it.

Take, for example, JOHN BOTTLENECK's album titled All Around Man. Recorded in analog domain by the Swedish label Opus3 and released on SACD, it has excellent dynamics and timbre. Both were legible and clear after switching to the Home cable. Same as the great sound volume. Both the vocals and the guitar were of good size, and even slightly enlarged, which is a feature of this recording, they also had good saturation.

| Our albums

⸜ BOTTLENECK JOHN All Around Man

Opus3 CD 23001
Super Audio CD/Compact Disc (2013)

BOTTLENECK JOHN IS THE STAGE PSEUDONIM of Swedish blues guitarist JOHAN ELIASSON. Released in 2013, the All Around Man brings both songs in which the musician plays alone and others in which he is supported by other artists. The leading instrument on it is a guitar, or rather guitars - Eliasson is a fan and collector of their variations with a resonator. As we read on the publisher's website, "At the heart of my music is the authentic sound of guitars with resonators, I just love mechanically amplified sound."

The album, which I would like to recommend to you is exceptionally well recorded, and at the same time musically interesting. It was published by a Swedish specialist, Opus3, known for its excellent releases. The material was recorded on analog tape and then copied to DSD domain - the album in question is a hybrid SACD / CD disc. The material for it was recorded in November and December 2012 using the AKG C-24 tube microphones, the original RCA-44A microphone from 1934 (Sinatra sang to it) and mixed on the Sony MX-P61 analog mixer.

The sound is excellent. On the one hand, it is very resolving, but on the other hand, it has a large volume and is well-weighted. Just listen to the first track on the album, Lonesome Valley, and you'll know what I’m talking about. We have a clear, vibrant treble, dense vocals, and even a strong bass - the musician plays here on a 12-string guitar with a resonator. When I reviewed this release in 2013, I gave it a score of 9-10 / 10 for sound quality. I still agree with this assessment. ♦

www.OPUS3RECORDS.com

WHAT CHANGED WITH THE TESTED CABLE, compared to the reference one, was the density of sound. It was much smaller with it than with the reference cable, and the presentation was not so incredibly "realistic". But you know, it is absolutely normal, and it would be foolish to say it is a fault of the HOME. It just has to be this way when we compare a cable for just over PLN 2,000 with that for PLN 60,000, right? On the other hand, if we compared the Locus Audio cable with any other cable for the money and more expensive ones, the sound would still be very "realistic", it would even exceed what one might expect.

On the other hand, with another, equally excellent album, released by Naim, DOMINIC MILLER and NEIL STACEY’s New Dawn, I heard something that I noticed already with the Opus3 disc, namely the low bass extension. Yes, it is a cable that can deliver strong, dense, dynamic impulses at the very bottom of the band. The Siltech does it more effortlessly and with more energy, which makes it seem faster. Also the Nordost or Gigawatt cables from the price range up to PLN 5,000 will sound faster, more "forward". So Home is not as neutral as its creators would like it to be.

But I don't think it matters. After all, a cable for just over PLN 2,000 will work in a specific environment. It will power devices for, say, from 4,000 to 10,000 PLN. And, almost always, these lack some richness, there is a shortage of "connective tissue". Locus Audio will give them "self-confidence" and boost the mid-bass and low midrange improving the overall tonal balance.

It will not close in the sound, because it was already audible with the Bottleneck that it can reproduce very clean, clear treble. The cymbals have a good attack and very good sustain. They sound open, but what fills in a given sound is more important with this cable. Thanks to this, they do not sound dry, but they deliver a real, strong, dense sound. However, it is important to know that it is not this range that is most important in this cable, but the aforementioned midrange and bass.

Which was confirmed by listening to the THE WEEKND’s After Hours. The bass was really strong and dense with it. Maybe it didn't have clear edges, but neither did it drag on or be extended. Simply clarity, in other words: selectivity, is at a good level in this cable, but they are not a priority. At least when it comes to bass.

However, it is also a very resolving cable. Even such highly compressed recordings as Smooth from SANTANA's Supernatural will have a "groove", will be pushed forward with it. A lot is "happening" here. This is because the Polish cable has something about it that means that we get a complete picture, a presentation on many levels. Maybe without as much information as with expensive cables, but complete and understandable.

It is also worth adding that this ordering of the presentation also translates into stereo imaging, i.e. how the system shows sounds in space. And it shows them surprisingly well. If, as with the New Dawn album, the sound is close to us, Home will show it like that. If, on the other hand, the performer is placed a bit further away, like on the PATRICIA BARBER album entitled Companion, it will not be brought closer to us, nor will it blend in with the background. And finally, if it is a "wall of sound" with elements coming out from the sides, as in Santana's Do You Like the Way opening sequence, then the Polish cable will show it in such, proper way. Because it is an excellent cable when it comes to stereo imaging.

▌ SUMMARY

SUMMARY OF THIS TEST comes easily to me because everything a good AC power cord should do whatever the price, the Home cable does. It is saturated, tonally rich, has a clear, sufficiently open treble and a boosted midrange and bass. It gives large phantom images, but does not enlarge them excessively. It does not control the lowest bass as well as cables with a higher set tonal balance, but it just has to be like that.

The Locus Audio Home offers a very good performance, extremely nice finish and it will bring warmth, richness and bass foundation to the system, without forgetting about the clarity of the sound. It is well-balanced, well-organized and will also convey these elements to the recordings. Quite simply - a good cable for little money. Isn’t it the best possible recommendation? ■