ENTREQ’S NEW PRODUCTS

Things are booming at Entreq and as a company they are developing and learning at a fast rate. In my first year take up and traction for this Sweedish brand has been immense and the responses to Entreq demos have been quite amazing. Out of all my brands you may be surprised to know that its been keeping me busier than almost anything else.

Entreq passive grounding, whether at the simple level of a single minimus or at a more invested level, has proved a massive hit with customers. One of the reasons for this I think is that when you think about it, it is virtually without competitor and there is nothing else quite like it in the marketplace which will bring about the same improvements to a good system. That said, sales of their interconnects and mains products have proved almost as popular and I have had many customers trading in huge quantities of old gear in order to move to the supremely natural and non-Hifi sound of Entreq.

It has been slightly remiss of me not to have updated this blog earlier because a few of these new items I am going to tell you about have been around for some months now. Apologies for that but its been a busy year and I will try and stay on top of Entreq news a bit better in future. So here I am going to present to you no less than 6 new products. Entreq started the year by bringing us the Receivus, an ingenious low cost form of noise lowering which acts in physical space rather than connected up. Next up, they developed a whole new level of grounding boxes to move us all on from where the Atlantis Tellus left off. Finally, we see their first foray into the world of hifi racks and their own factory cable burner offered commercially for the first

Launched this week in the UK, the modular Athena rack is Entreq’s very latest product. The rack conveniently comes in single and double widths and can be ordered by the shelf with different height legs available, so in short, very easy to spec up so that it perfectly houses your system. Also, very easy to add further shelves should you ever expand or go up in box count.

Don’t imagine that its just a simple rigid wooden construction offering little else. The Athena has been very carefully developed and like all Entreq goodies, goes about things in a totally different way to everything else. Here is some of the official blurb for you:

There are 3 levels of isolation on offer or 3 grades of rack if you like with a sliding pricetag as you go from level 1 to 2 then 3. Lowering the noise floor through noise reduction is the end goal in each case.

Level 1 is a 3 layer constrained design and very cost effective. The layers are fixed with an RF inhibitor and are skinned with bi-lamintaes of oak. Level 2 is an 8 layer shelf which can also be grounded via a ground point and so the entire shelf acts as a noise free zone, removing EMI, RFI and magnetic pulse radiation (from transformers). Level 3 is as 2. but with no less than 11 constrained layers of wood. The support feet on all racks are constructed in a similar layered way and minimal metal is used throughout the design so as to reduce metal interference and field effects. Again here is the offical literature on the various design aspects:

All in all, it looks at though a lot of thought has gone into Athena and I am very much looking forward to test drive when UK stock start shipping. Prices for the level 1 single width rack start at £500 for the base level with feet and then £460 for each further self with 4 legs. Standard leg heights are 15cm, 20cm, 25cm and 35cm although custom leg lengths can also be ordered too.

When Entreq developed the Atlantis supercharging add-ons for the Tellus and Minimus, they discovered some newfangled ideas and potentials. As it was not feasible to properly implement them into the existing ground boxes, they developed a new line of extreme performance grounding devices and the first of these to tell you about is the Olympus Minimus.

With an all new mineral mix, a reduction in metal particulates, the addition of some new metals such as Magneisum and a solid silver binding post, the Olympus Minimus represents a new level on performance from a small form factor ground box which eclipses that experienced with the Silver Minimus in conjunction with an Atlantis Minimus.

The Olympus Minimus is primary designed to ground Pre-amps and Dac’s, but it can also do a very good job with the grounding of Entreq cables and also the Cleanus line. It is also ideal for grounding the negative speaker terminals of your amplifier, more on that later. The most significant difference in performance, compared to the Silver Minimus, is more texture and air in the lower frequency as well as more detail and better over all flow in the music.

The single biggest development at Entreq this year has been the discovery of huge benefits when the negative speaker terminal of each channel on your amplifier is grounded to an Entreq box. Before anyone rushes out to try this I must stipulate very clearly that this can ONLY BE PERFORMED with two distinct and completely separate grounding boxes. You must never connect your speaker outputs to a common third party and in addition, you must not ground the negative speaker terminals and then other hifi components (e.g. peramp, dac etc.) to the same grounding box. If in any doubt, contact myself or Entreq for advice.

So to recap, grounding the amplifier speaker output involves connecting one grounding box to the negative left channel of your speaker output at the amplifier, using an Ertha spade to spade and then doing the same for the right channel using a completely separate grounding box. The diagram below says it all. The only thing to add is obviously you connect your speakers too in the normal way and if you are using spades on your cables then you simply have the entreq spade Ertha situated first against the amp binding post and then you sit your speaker cable terminal on top of it then screw it all up tight.

I have quite a number of customers now running this setup and they have all reported that the gains reaped were at least as big as the gains from grounding their whole system in the regular way via the negative channels on inputs and outputs. What we are doing here is effectively draining away pollutants before they reach the speakers and breaking that infinte cycle of amp to speaker to amp.

In response to this exciting discovery, Entreq recently developed a whole new grounding box to specifically address speaker output grounding. Enter stage left the 32kg heavyweight Poseidon which is effectively three Olympus Minimus (as above) organised into one neat enclosure. At the rear you have three separate solid silver output posts which are completely independent of one another. This makes it ideal for grounding the speaker outputs and then having one spare post to ground one or two other principal components in the regular way such as your Preamp or DAC.

The Poseidon is a very powerful unit and offers great flexibility. It was also conceived for those people who want high performance but without facing the budget of the Olympus Tellus or its less amenable weight and physical size. It’s also somewhat of a bargain representing three Olympus Minimus but at an asking price of less than what only two would cost. More on the Poseidon shortly as I will be doing a whole piece on it.

With an all new mineral mix, a reduction in metal particulates, the addition of some new metals such as Magneisum and solid silver binding posts, the Olympus line of grounding boxes represent a new level of performance previously unattainable with the Silver tellus with Atlantis. The Olympus Tellus is a 46kg giant, 40x50x20cm in size and a no compromise design for the very highest possible grounding performance. At the rear it sports no less than 6 solid silver posts and a single isolated solid copper post for connection to the protective ground in your mains supply.

The Olympus Tellus offers the same overall sonic signature as the Olympus MinimUs. Deep and massive low frequencies while still retaining the air and texture in the wider spectrum. The separate outlet, allowing direct connection to a wall socket will also give you a whole new experience … an even darker background and access to even more subtle nuance and details within the music.

I for one am masisvely excited about the prospect of a demo unit here at Lotus. The Olympus Tellus is surely befitting of the very best systems out there. As I type, the very first Uk demos have just taken place and I am told that the result of one of these in your system is something really quite startling.

The Optimus is Entreq’s latest product. Originally designed to help burn-in and optimisation at the factory, it is fitted with almost every signal connector that you might require. Even Ertha Ground cables and usb are catered for.

Its effectiveness is assured for the Entreq range of cable as well as any other brand of cables that require, from brand new, a relatively quick burn process that brings the them up to optimal performance in the shortest time possible. Used in position 2 then 3 the OptimUs also offers a recondition/refresh service that is very effective, even when used with established and well run in cables.

Optimus offers three different options/positions for best performance:

1. Square wave – Sending a square wave with a 9-11 Volt Amplitude through the cable. For analogue cables this should be limited to a maximum of 20-30 minutes. For Digital and our Eartha cables we recommend 10-12 hours.

2. Noise – White noise from 1 Hz up to 40 Khz +-3 db . Above 40 Khz slowly falling but with significant effect up into the 1 Mhz range. We recommend 48-72 hours in this mode. For new cables this mode should be used immediately after the Square wave cycle. Step two can also be used frequently for the recondition or refresh of current cables in the system.

3. Sinus wave – Sinus wave with a minimum 9 Volt amplitude, this then gently softens down to silence over a 30 second period.

The Receivus in truth has been out for a while and at a relatively low cost has been going great guns with my Entreq customers. In short, Receivus is Entreq’s way of dealing with noise that is radiated physically around equipment. The flat wooden conductor acts like an antenna and tethered to a ground box, is designed to sit on top of your chassis of your amp, dac, transport, power supply etc. Receivus will absorb stray energy such as RFI and EMI resulting in a lower noise floor in the system and very similar performance gains as found with the regualr signal grounding. More fine detail, a bigger wider sound, greater stability in the soundfield and blacker backgrounds throughout. I had one customer for example recently install three of these onto his devialet mono amps and DAC and he felt the benefits he discovered were as large in magnitude as the step change when installing an Atlantis’d Silver tellus.