These are the areas of the system which get most ignored but seeing as the level of electronics now begins at such a high level for reasonable money, these parts of the system are now more important than ever before, second really only to the Loudspeaker. With the rise in streamed and stored digital music, the home network has also become absolutely crucial and improvements made here often completely transcend the normal £/performance ratios we are used to.

“Ancillaries” then is a bit of a misnomer because these parts of the system are not ‘supplementary’ or ‘supporting’ but as important as any other category of product. Moving to a good loom of cabling, a decent suite of mains cables, or installing a Shunyata mains distribution block or an Entreq grounding box, will often be an even bigger sonic upgrade than moving your Amplifier or DAC one rung up the manufacturer’s ladder. And that even holds true if you are using our cheapest components. Even small network improvements like a better USB or Ethernet cable can also effect bigger sonic improvements than actual box upgrades. Remember that a noisy cable will remain noisy no matter how good your principal boxes are so the treble might always sound truncated and splashy or those guitars a little too metallic and lean until you remove it from the system. Good wires, mains and isolation takes a poor system and usually fixes it, a mediocre system becomes magical and an already good system will go stratospheric.

Quite a few people find it difficult to enjoy this side of the industry and some struggle emotionally to pay good money for what is a series of wires or metal feet, which offer little in the way of pride of ownership or purchase excitement. I can completely empathise with that position but can only implore you to rethink everything that your head and heart is telling you and not neglect or compromise in these areas. An expensive wire is expensive largely because of the time consuming R&D that has gone into it and because there is no shortcut and you cannot get the same sorts of improvements by buying cheaper cables or somehow making your own.

As a dealer I know first hand just how much more you can extract from all these boxes when pushed with the best ancillaries. It is quite staggering. These amplifiers, preamps, DACs, streamers, CD players we all love buying, they are capable of so much more than most people have ever heard.

Speaker cables and the USB cable (or primary digital cable) have a profound effect on a system. The global level of resolve and transparency of the entire system will be completely governed by these two cables and to a slightly lesser extent, the other signal XLR and RCA connections. You might have the best DAC in the world but if you are using a £500 USB cable you probably aren’t even hearing half of what it can do.

Our signal cable range at Lotus is very simple. We focus on just threee main brands. We do not believe in seasoning using cables but rather to open and reveal the system with the lowest noise wires possible. A cable should ideally not be heard. It should be linear, perfectly neutral with the best composure and dimensional stability possible. No frequencies should be manipulated, it should just reveal the system as best as possible at a given pricepoint.

When we began with Tidal Audio back in 2016, so neutral and invisible was its performance that it forced us to re-evaluate all the wires we sell. We trialled over 10 high end cable brands from all different parts of the globe and Tara Labs was the only product line that was not shown up in a Tidal system. That is to say, it possessed the same level of naturalness and linearity to still be imperceptible when employed in an all Tidal setup. The Tara range starts at very reasonable prices but then extends upwards to the highest levels seen in the industry.

The Tara Labs cables keep us particularly busy. Whilst the Master USB offers fantastic performance at its lower cost, the Master USB will represent an upgrade to almost any other product out there in the marketplace. One customer recently trialled one against 10 other rival USB cables including a £6000 offering and posted the results on Whatsbestforum. If the Master is not enough, then the Grand Master EVO takes things substantially higher again. Undoubtedly expensive but these have sold in huge numbers because their effect is hugely dramatic in a good digital front end.

Our most recent cable addition is something a bit different but quite possibly one of the most important and powerful brands to come to Lotus in the last 5 years. Hemingway Audio are from Korea and were introduced to us by Thrax Audio. Hemingway cables are linear and natural, they do not manipulate the tonality or frequency response of a system but what they do to the architechture of the sound is nothing short of incredible. Increased focus, a certain disciplined precision, saturated vividity, increased three dimensionality, exceptional timing, surefootedness and the ripening of instruments to new levels of timbral lucidity. In short, they banish noise in a very singular way and you can hear instantly that there is something taking place here which other cables simply do not do. So powerful is their ability to improve or even fix more modest systems that they will likely rewrite the rules of how much budget you feel should apportion to strands of wire. Like Tara and Tidal, their range extends to the highest performance levels and their products are truly transformational in a good or even a problematic system.

Lastly we have cables from Tidal who offer both the ‘Reference’ and ‘Assoluta’ ranges. The same level of neutrality and naturalness as our other offerings, they are supremely musical and are obviously especially suited to Tidal systems, although we build many Tidal setups with Tara Labs now, slightly less rounded sounding and with many more performance level options.

Now we do sometimes sell other cable brands that can “treat” a system. For example, add warmth, calm a forward system down, imbue it with extra energy, smooth out a system or make it sound a little sharper and more biting, but these cables do not comprise the main suite of offerings and I do not put them on the website. They are used only if necessary. The best systems do not usually need extra “seasoning”.

For our digital signal cables we have a third brand to join Tara Labs and Tidal and that is Shunyata. Their USB and clock cables are world class and do some very powerful things to a system when installed.

Mains cables follow the same principles as signal cabling. Our power cords do not warm or smooth out the sound or give a false sense of extra detail or aggression; they simply add more refinement, more space, depth, transparency and dynamic range. They lower noise across the board. They get you closer to the true sound and potential of your dac or amplifier and hence closer to the music and your artists. Hifi is mains, so these products make a large difference. Customers are often surprised by the magnitude of their influence.

Our power cables come from Tara Labs, Shunyata and Tidal. Tidal mains has a particular voicing which perfectly suits Tidal electronics, we have not tried anything else which mates better. Shunyata mains is a large enveloping sound, generous in soundstage with a few well judged percentage points of warmth and dynamic razamatazz. Tara mains is as you might expect, utterly balanced, even-handed and invisible, not to mention ultra transparent and resolving. Hemingway UK mains cords will comes soon and will be slightly different again … we can’t wait !

We also specialise in the Shunyata distribution blocks. These are highly advanced filtering units that improve the sound significantly. Again, the magnitude of improvement they bring to a good system is usually quite startling for most customers. The Everest, Hydra and latest Typhon are incredbly powerful and popular upgrades.

How your equipment is supported is fundamental to how it sounds. If you ever want to find out first hand, simply lay it all out on a hard wood floor one day, it will sound distorted, rough and bright with so much vibration transmitted through each chassis. Or put it all straight to the carpet and see how soft, smeared and undynamic it soon becomes.

All equipment inherits the sound of the surface it is sitting on to some degree or other. Also equipment does not like vibration, either structure borne or from pressure waves in the air. There is also micro vibration inherent in electronics that begins in the electronics themselves.

There are two ways of combating vibration, resonances and mechanical noise. The first is by installing sophisticated noise control feet underneath the boxes and units whether they be an amplifier, record deck or mains conditioner. Hifistay, Stillpoints and Tungsten Groove footers all use very advanced technologies which lower mechanical noise in equipment, isolate it from structural and airborne vibration and thereby increase sound quality uniformly across all parameters. All three brands give a slightly different result from one another so can be combined to wield a very powerful degree of fine control over the final sound. They all have their own preferences and synergies with different brands of electronics and speakers too.

The second method is through sophisticated furniture. You need a rack to house a system and we sell an exhaustive range from Neo to Hifistay, Bassocontinuo, Falkenohr and Stillpoints. They all have varying levels of technology inside them to combat noise and vibration, some with inbuilt footers. By the time you get to the top level racks from Falkenohr, Bassocontinuo, HifiStay and Stillpoints you can expect a very big jump in sound quality.

Speakers always have their own support system provided by the manufacturer. Usually a series a spikes in the cabinet or stand. Some manufacturers also make more sophisticated isolation feet to include with their speakers. Hifistay Stella 3 way Swing and Stillpoints Ultra 5 under speakers though will always improve their performance dramatically, more so than any alternative product we have ever encountered. The loudspeaker has the propensity to colour the sound more than any other component and is subject to the most mechanical vibration so Hifistay and Stillpoints employed here are actually even more powerful than when used under electronics, turntables and mains blocks. If the budget is there then installing good footers under speakers at Lotus is a formality. Better control, precision, dynamics and transparency, especially in the lower frequencies.

Entreq from Sweden brought equipment grounding to the masses. At first, much of the industry was sceptical of its validity but all along the early adopting dealers knew that it was one of the easiest and most powerful demos you could do for a customer. Five years on and there are now a plethora of companies who realised that Per Olef and his team were onto something really important, and who now manufacture rival grounding products albeit with a fraction of the knowledge base and 15 year experience of the team at Entreq.

Grounding involves connecting spare signal sockets (RCA, XLR, USB, RJ45) into a passive grounding box that contains an array of metals and minerals and acts as a drain point for stray pollutants and noise inherent in all equipment. The result is a remarkable cleaning of the system with greater clarity, depth, texture, dynamics and overall transparency.  A system that has been “Entreq’d” is layered and dimensional, tangibly alive with a sense that instruments and performers have been precipitated into the very air in the listening room.

Quite simply, until you have grounded your equipment, you have not fully unleashed its full potential. It is cumulative with all other system enhancements, even a dedicated mains ground spike so you can only realise this upgrade by grounding and until you do, the system will be running some distance below it’s maximum true ability.

Most of our systems are plugged into the home network these days. Our streamers and servers are attached to the network to be controlled from our Ipads and if we are not playing files directly from a network attached hard drive, we are using streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz, pulling music from the deep recesses of the web.

The problem is the home network is a large and very complex source of noise. There are many noise factors with USB and ethernet cables, phase noise from consumer grade network clocks, noise from cheap router/dataswitch power supplies and even clock phase noise maybe as far back as the distant servers run by the music streaming companies. A few years ago it was assumed that these pathways would have no effect on sound quality but truth is that the contribution is really quite profound.

The home network has such a large effect on sound quality that it should be viewed as another discrete component of the Hifi system, no different from say a preamplifier, a set of speaker cables or a phono stage. It should be considered and thought about, optimised and upgraded in step with the rest of the system. Here at Lotus we offer audiophile grade switches from Melco and Entreq and Taiko, Audiophile routers from Waversa, high quality linear power supplies from Plixir and audiophile grade ethernet cables from Hemingway and Shunyata. Customers routinely report sonic upgrades that completely blitz all the normal £/performance ratios that we are used to with more traditional pieces of equipment.