SMOOTHLAN REGENERATOR FROM STACK AUDIO

Presented in a dinky box, this digital filter, says Paul Rigby, might just revolutionise your digital HiFi chain

And yes, the Smoothlan Regenerator is small at just 105 x 80 x 23mm. Nicely packaged, it arrives with a 5V, external power supply designed to produce clean, stable power with multi-stage filtering. At the rear, the power socket sits in the centre, flanked by Ethernet input and output sockets.

To install the box – available in black or silver – you connect an Ethernet cable from your router or Wi-Fi extender to the Regenerator’s input socket. Another Ethernet cable is plugged into the output socket. That runs to your server or streamer device. 

Long cable runs between the Regenerator and the streamer or server are frowned upon, incidentally. 

On the front are three lights: the light on the far left tells you that the input is active, the one in the middle tells you that power is on. On the right? That says  that the streamer is connected.

And that’s it, basically. Well in terms of set up.

Inside there is triple active jitter attenuation, an isolated master clock and multi-stage passive filtering plus dual-layer filtering at both the input and output stages. Cross-talk and RF interference is prevented by placing all electronics inside individual enclosures. Possibly, the entire design ethos and attitude is summed up by the 34 little screws attached underneath the chassis to make sure the chassis is closed tightly and that micro-vibration is removed. 

SOUND QUALITY

To test this little box, I drafted in my Melco N50 Digital Music Library and fired up my Twonky server via my MacBook while playing The Doves’ I Will Not Hide at 24bit/96kHz. As is, before I inserted the Regenerator into the chain? I liked the sound, it was detailed, good clarity, plenty of delicacy around the upper mids and treble, bass was compact, not amazing power but solid nevertheless. 

Inserting the Regenerator into the HiFi chain was quite the revelation, especially around the mids and the treble but generally too, across all frequencies. My first impression was a quite startling reduction in high-frequency noise producing a whole heap of extra air and space across the soundstage, giving the mids and treble far more room to manoeuvre, adding immeasurably to extended reverb tails but also isolating each instrument. This separation allowed the ear to focus on each instrument opening up the ear to more detail and information. 

FINE DETAIL

To better illustrate? Imagine listening to a guy standing in a room, playing an acoustic guitar in the middle of a noisy crowd. You can hear his playing, the guitar sounds good, you hear the music, the notes played and his strumming but you do fight a little with that crowd noise. Then remove the crowd and suddenly the subtle elements of the guitar are now more accessible, the delicate elements of the strum, minor mistakes, human elements like extra power on this strum but not that strum are more evident, the starting and stopping of notes are more noticeable and all because that crowd noise removal helps the ear to focus. Removing high-frequency noise from digital sound, which is a largely parasitic entity in terms of the sound signal, achieves a similar effect.

Bass wasn’t any stronger but it was more precise and impactful now while the boundaries of the soundstage appeared to stretch laterally adding to grand nature of the performance.  

Flipping over to Tommy Dorsey’s Sunny Side of the Street, played via a CD rip was equally informative, the relative distance between The Sentimental Gentleman’s brass and the ear, the vocals and the ear and the wind instruments and the ear could easily be judged during the playback, despite the age of the recording. That lowering of the noise floor allowing the ear to make judgement calls easily in terms of the 3D nature of the track. 

VS SMOOTHLAN

I then brought in Stack Audio’s own, lower-cost, digital filter box, the SmoothLAN (£240) which I reviewed here. In that initial review, I loved the SmoothLAN. Doing the ‘with and without’, A-B test, the SmoothLAN offered a breath of fresh air to digital play, lowering the noise floor to enhance detail. 

It performed a similar job to the Regenerator but it’s not as advanced or as thorough as the latter and that showed in sound tests where, in a direct comparison, the SmoothLAN sound slightly harder in the upper mids, offered less air and space in the same and gave a relatively claustrophobic feel.

In effect, the Regenerator did everything the SmoothLAN did but carried on a few more steps down the sound quality path.  

CONCLUSION

The Stack Audio Regenerator is just a dinky little box but it performs impressively in terms of the digital chain in your HiFi. That small footprint will help in terms of installation, it’s not going to impose itself on your system, by any means. It will make itself known in terms of improved sound quality, though. 

Sometimes accessories and ancillaries help improve the overall sound of a HiFi chain and do so by degrees which is useful, sure. The Regenerator goes much further than that. It improves sound as if you’ve just bought a new streamer, server or some such. That is the leap in sonic improvement here and you hear those improvements right across the frequency spectrum. 

Stack Audio is certainly on a roll in terms of its hardware releases, the Regenerator is one of the company’s best yet. Oh and still not convinced?

Then take advantage of the company’s 60-day money back guarantee to make absolutely sure.

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STACK AUDIO SMOOTHLAN REGENERATOR 

Price: £750

Website: stackaudio.co.uk

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GOOD: small footprint, easy to install, midrange clarity, bass detail, treble delicacy

BAD: nothing

RATING: 9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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REFERENCE
Benchmark DAC2 HGC

Melco M50-S38 Digital Library
Aesthetix Calypso pre-amp
Icon Audio MB845 Mk.II monoblock amplifiers
Quad ESL-57 speakers with One Thing upgrade
Tellurium Q Statement cables
Blue Horizon Professional Rack System
Harmonic Resolution Systems Noise Reduction Components
CAD GC1 Ground Controls
Air Audio AC-2K Balanced Transformer
Russ Andrew Superrouter Grounding block
CAD GC1