REVIEW: NORDOST QBASE REFERENCE AC DISTRIBUTION UNIT – THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH

..it sounded like my system had been hot-rodded when I played it with the QBase. Even on an old jazz recording from 1926, like Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers playing “Sidewalk Blues,” I was surprised by how much further my stereo reached into the soundstage thanks to the Q Base.


In a collection of his essays called Living With Music, the novelist Ralph Ellison described how he set about constructing his own stereo system. Ellison, an ardent jazz fan and record collector, was eager to drown out any distracting noise from his neighbors as he worked in his small apartment in Harlem on his masterpiece Invisible Man. He built several preamplifiers and purchased a fine speaker system, a turntable, and a tape recorder. “I was obsessed with the idea of reproducing sound with such fidelity that even when using music as a defense behind which I could write, it would reach the unconscious levels of the mind with the least distortion,” he wrote. “But it didn’t come easily. There were wires and pieces of equipment all over the apartment.”


Sound familiar? Musical reproduction has come a long way since the 1940s, when Ellison initiated his lifelong pursuit of the absolute sound, but the quest for banishing electronic distortion remains a perennial one. One of the most direct ways of addressing it is by tackling it at the source, which is what the Nordost QBase Reference seeks to accomplish. A reference-level AC distribution unit, it seeks to follow the audio equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath—first do no harm. This 10-outlet AC distribution device contains no filters. It employs star-grounding to drain noise and other effluvia that may ride along the power lines. Some of the goodies that it contains include Nordost wiring featuring its micro mono-filament technology, a WBT binding post that can be attached to a separate grounding device, a 20-amp IEC input, adjustable resonance control supports, and a dual PCB design. It also features two buttons in front that control what Nordost calls QSINE and QWAVE units. One button controls the QSINE and QWAVE positioned internally on the left side of the component, and the other controls the QSINE and QWAVE units located on its right side. When no lights are on, neither QSINE nor QWAVE is active. A blue
light on either side indicates that the QWAVE has been activated. A red light on either side indicates that a QSINE has been activated. And a green light denotes that both a QWAVE and QSINE on either side have been activated. The QWAVE is described by Nordost as AC line harmonizer and QSINE as an AC enhancer. Both, as I discovered, play a critical role in improving the sound. Until the arrival of the QBase Reference, I had been using Nordost’s QB8 as well as reviewing a passel of other products that aimed to improve the electricity emanating from the wall, ranging from grounding devices to regenerators. With the insertion of the new QBase Reference, I heard an audible and immediate improvement in clarity, scale, bass extension, and detail. It does not filter the sound; rather, the QBase. Reference lets it emerge in tact. No device has come as close to performing invisibly in my
system as the QBase Reference.

Specifications:
Specs & Pricing
Input socket: IEC C-20
Output sockets: US,
EU, or AUS
Electrical output:
Equivalent to input
Dimensions: 19″ x 8″ x
5.5″
Weight: 25.9 lbs.