We at HiFi-IFAs are fans of fundamentally solid Hi-Fi, but we equally possess an open-minded spirit of experimentation. In our understanding, the devices, speakers, and cables that match the room and the listener’s desires form the unshakeable foundation for an individual, hi-fi delight – naturally, well-matched to the budget. And when all of that is right, then the question may arise: Is there more? And just like that, we’re on the topic of mains power, which we have already illuminated with mains filters, Hi-Fi power strips, and grounding systems. Our opinion: Yes, there is more! Therefore, we are also interested in The Chord Company PowerARAY, which promises clean power and thus better sound with simple plug & play in the socket. Priced at around 800 euros, it’s not a bargain, but in a handy format, it’s an audiophile gadget that invites you to try it out for yourself. We will now look at and listen to what the PowerARAY brings to the music lover for you.

The Chord Company PowerARAY – Initial Approach
Although we HiFi-IFAs visit quite a few Hi-Fi shows and events for you, one presentation or another still sticks in my memory. Especially when Patrick Mitchell from The Chord Company demonstrates his employer’s products to his audience in his extremely likeable and entertaining way. I enjoy lingering at his presentations. These often include cable comparisons – a challenge amidst the show bustle – but also, for example, the demo of the PowerARAY in an A/B comparison, i.e., “with” and “without” the little helper, like at the Steigenberger Hotel during the Norddeutsche HiFi-Tage 2023. The power supply at Hi-Fi shows is, from an audiophile perspective, mostly of disastrous quality and far from a clean 50 Hertz sine wave mains frequency. A perfect feeding ground for a mains purifier, which left a surprising first impression on me. But how does the whole thing look in a home listening room, I asked myself. Coincidentally, I met Patrick again at the end of the show and he pressed The Chord PowerARAY into my hand: “Try it yourself.” Who can think long? You don’t really need to when using the PowerARAY plug. It looks like a plug, it functions like a plug. A glance at the underside of the plug reveals a marking of the pins with “L” and “N,” meaning live and neutral. This indicates where the plug expects the power input. I naturally respect this when plugging it in.

Since it’s about the topic of mains power, I use the opportunity to check the entire chain again for the correct polarity. At the device, this works, for example, with the Oehlbach PHASER phase detector, and on the cable and the power strip, a phase tester helps. Once I know what needs to be plugged in which way, it can begin. But first, a look at the technology.

The Chord Company PowerARAY – Technology
High-frequency noise, a kind of “pollution” of the electrical current, is – if one may put it so vividly – poison for high-quality music reproduction. The HF noise can enter the household from outside, but can also be generated by devices within the household. Since the electrical loads in the power grid constantly change over time due to varying consumers, the “pollution” is also not constant. This can actually lead to the listener perceiving music differently on different days of the week at different times of the day. The effect is individual due to different boundary conditions.

Outside the house, consumers are, for example, industry; inside the house, practically all household electrical appliances that draw power are consumers. Ironically, the Hi-Fi system we want to protect is itself also a consumer, thus equally part of the “problem.” Or in consultant-speak: part of the challenge, because “problems” don’t exist. The greatest susceptibility, however, exists with poorly or unshielded power cables on all three lines: live, earth, and neutral. Through the power distribution, the unwanted HF interference can then enter the mains network to which the Hi-Fi system is also connected.

This is where The Chord Company PowerARAY, as part of the ARAY line dedicated to noise reduction or absorption, comes in. The PowerARAY plug is connected to unused wall outlet or power strip sockets where the power supply for the Hi-Fi devices is also connected. PowerARAY thus acts in parallel to the power going to the devices and is not passed through. Chord deliberately does not use series filtering, where the useful current is passed through, as this can affect the impedance and power supply of the energy system. Nevertheless, the parallel filtering acts equally on live, neutral, and earth.

The idea here is that the PowerARAY plug, due to its low-impedance construction, represents a kind of “escape route” for HF noise. The low impedance is, literally, the path of least resistance for high-frequency interference components in the current flow, which they find attractive. By diverting this, the amount of HF noise that can enter the Hi-Fi system via the current flow is reduced, thereby lowering the noise floor in the subsequent music signal. The actual signal can thus be processed with higher quality within the device, which ultimately benefits the playback quality.

In its operation, the PowerARAY technology generates slight microphonic effects in its components, which is why the entire cavity of the plug housing is filled with a hardening resin for vibration damping and therefore cannot be opened. The Chord Company offers the PowerARAY plug in the common regional plug systems. For the high-frequency noise generated internally by a Hi-Fi system, Chord has developed the GroundARAY series, which aims to further reduce or even eliminate these disturbances.

The Chord Company PowerARAY – Sound
The components of my Hi-Fi system generally play through power strips or distribution blocks with mains filtering. To provide the Chord PowerARAY with the most challenging playground possible, I decided to take a standard commercial power strip, which certainly contains no electronic helpers, and connect it to a free wall socket in the listening room. What might potentially have a positive effect in this setup: Only the SPL preamp Phonitor x and the SPL stereo power amplifier Performer s1200 are directly connected to this power strip, no other consumers. My innuos ZENith mk3 serves as music server and player, connected in the vicinity of the mains network of the other Hi-Fi components and linked via a 2-meter USB cable on the signal side.

The results with the DIY store power strip were quite clear, but the starting level in terms of power distribution quality also offered plenty of room for improvement. It was astonishing to realize what could be extracted from it. Of course, there was also a price distortion, as a 30 euro standard power distributor met an 800 euro high-end refinement component. So I was still tempted to try the whole thing with a power strip from the Hi-Fi sector, where the components were then roughly equal in value. It was astonishing that the sound could still make a clearly noticeable leap. The effects were comparable, but at a significantly higher level. Therefore, to avoid having to contort my language unduly, I decided not to differentiate further explicitly in the description of my listening impressions.

I selected various pieces of music that make demands on spatiality, bass, focus, and timbre. Experience shows that positive influences on the mains power drawn by the devices are mostly holistic in nature and often manifest most clearly in the gut region, which is why, alongside A/B comparisons within a track, it’s equally important for me to listen for a longer period in one configuration. With the Chord PowerARAY, the effect showed again that many small changes in music reproduction, in their sum, generate a distinctly different experience. Individually, they are therefore often difficult to describe and sound like platitudes, but ultimately, they constitute the enjoyment of the music. Let’s listen in.

I start with the Neil Cowley Trio and “Hubris Major.” The cover of the album Spacebound Apes features a monkey adorned with an astronaut helmet and spacesuit. This already suggests the infinite expanses of space upon viewing. “Hubris Major” implements this excellently. The track begins very small, I’m already wondering, wasn’t there more? Yes! From the first bars, the space first opens up, as if from a single origin. A hint of ethereal sounds prepares the carpet for the accentuated piano and bass.

When the PowerARAY plug is used, the piano gains naturalness, but the highlight is the bass drum, which strikes very richly, seems large, and then takes the appropriate time to decay. This creates tension with the other instruments and simultaneously the illusion that the drum, although very central, stands in a very wide space where there is plenty of room. An effect that becomes more apparent with the PowerARAY and grows with the quality of the mains components. The recording is very voluminous; on one hand, the energy becomes palpable, but at the same time, the control, especially over the bass, is also noticeable.

As a stark contrast, I play the single microphone recording “The Book Of Love” by Tim Langedijk & Paul Berrner from the album Down To The Down Town. I admit, I’ve become a complete fool for these recordings because of their spatiality. Regarding the character of the instruments, the setup plays somewhat more upfront, which could also be perceived as crisper, especially the guitar. With the PowerARAY, things become more sensitive, which benefits the timbres.

But something else happens with this recording, something that can actually almost be quantified with a measuring tape. The bass plays in the center, the guitar on the left – asymmetrically. But the guitar doesn’t play all the way left. With the PowerARAY plug inserted, the devices connected to the power strip can apparently tease fine information out of the music signal of the single mic recording, allowing the guitar to shift inward by about 10-20% of the stereo width – in my case, around 40 cm – towards the double bass. Without the PowerARAY plug, this information is lost, and the guitar seems to stick almost to the left speaker. That was astounding.

As chance would have it, an acquaintance into car hi-fi stopped by and we had our espresso in the listening room. I was curious, played him the track, and asked him without any specific hint if he also heard a change. The answer was precisely the spatial shift of the guitar. That was a spontaneous impression (without long listening and chatting about it) from a person with rather less listening experience in terms of hi-fi – but as a student, probably still with full hearing. The effect was clear and easy to grasp. He did admit to hearing changes in two or three other songs too, but found them not so easy to describe anymore – which speaks for the gut feeling I described earlier.

Next, let’s get busier: The Tobias Hoffmann Jazz Orchestra brings around 20 musicians to the stage, who really exert themselves on the album Innuendo, such as on the track “No Way Back.” I appreciate that the brass instruments avoid unnecessary harshness, yet simultaneously manage to play to the forefront when the bandleader’s wish dictates. This creates a homogeneous picture, an interplay that the use of the Chord PowerARAY promotes. At the same time, this creates a swinging casualness that suits a big band really well. This, too, is an impression arising from the effect of many small factors, because it’s not as if I hear less overall without the PowerARAY. But I hear it differently. Perhaps a little comparable to two photos where I see the same thing. An experienced photographer chooses the perspective slightly better, uses the light more cleverly, and thus extracts more from the subject – without changing the factual information.

Browsing through my music server, I came across AMIINA. In the broadest sense, a Scandinavian girl group, but quite different from what you know from TV casting shows. They create almost ethereal, celestial sounds that transport me to another world, like “Sogg” from the album Kurr. The sound lives off bright, delicate, floating sounds – guaranteed bass-free here. Home music in the upper octaves. This could quickly become annoying. With PowerARAY, I am rewarded with a beautiful playback quality that helps tease out the important subtleties from the music, which makes the music natural, thus exciting, and does not trivialize it: keystroke, plucking, reverberation, beats, and vibrations of the sparse instrumentation.

Finally, I still give myself a little blast. “Power is nothing without control,” they say in circles that want to talk about tires. Well, I’m not testing any massive power amplifiers here, which would also suit this motto, “only” an electronic helper, but the rule applies throughout the Hi-Fi chain anyway. The one-man show Burial has a bass rocket on deck with the album Untrue, a stark contrast to Amiina. The effect of the PowerARAY actually plays into its hands here. The voice at the beginning, which sounds like an announcement, is placed plastically in the center; clearly delineated sound effects, which move somewhat forward, create a spatial depth relative to the bass, which plays wide and thus forms the foundation of the scene in front of me. Here too, as with “Hubris Major”: the energy in the music becomes more distinct, yet it also seems more controlled and atmospheric. How the setup handles the complexity – it’s fun, and it makes you want to keep listening with the PowerARAY plug. Once you know what you’ll be missing, you’re reluctant to risk going back – after Plug&Play comes Unplug&Pray.

The Chord Company PowerARAY – Conclusion
The Chord Company PowerARAY works before the music is created: in the power supply. The PowerARAY plug is simply inserted as a plug into a free mains socket, for example, in the power strip of the Hi-Fi system. This allows the plug to interact with the current flow of the connected devices. The consideration that a clean music signal requires clean power and that this rewards the music listener is demonstrably proven by our test. Naturally, this happens depending on the existing power supply. The PowerARAY plug delivered astonishing results in my listening room. Fine disturbances in the signal, which lead to subliminal irritation in hearing, seem to disappear, with a positive effect on spatiality, naturalness, and musical flow. You could call this tuning or consider it a hygiene measure. If there is a desire to get even more out of your Hi-Fi electronics with the described changes and the piggy bank still has around 800 euros to spare, then the practical Chord PowerARAY is an unreserved recommendation to try out for yourself. Simply Plug&Play.

Components in the Test
Digital Sources – LUMIN U1 mini with SBooster power supply, Merason DAC1 Mk II, Music server Innuos ZENith Mk3, NuPrime Stream 9, NuPrime CDT-9 with LPS-212, NuPrime DAC-9X with preamp function

Turntable / Phono Preamp – Rega P8 with Excalibur Platinum, Vertere Techno Mat, SPL Phonos

Amplifiers – SPL Phonitor x with DAC768 headphone amplifier/DAC, SPL Director Mk2.2 preamplifier/DAC, SPL Performer s1200 stereo power amplifier, Makroaudio LittleBIG Power mono power amplifier, sonoro MAESTRO Quantum

Loudspeakers – Dutch&Dutch 8c, Diapason Adamantes V, Elipson Planet L Gold Edition, Velodyne DD-12+

Headphones – ULTRASONE Edition 15

Signal Cables – WSS Platin-Line KS-20 XLR, WSS Premium-Line KS-200 XLR, Boaacoustic Evolution BLACK.rca, Sommer Cable Epilogue XLR, FastAudio Black Science mk III XLR

Loudspeaker Cables – in-akustik LS-1205 AIR, in-akustik LS-404 micro AIR, Boaacoustic Mercury

Digital Cables – Boaacoustic USB cable Silver Digital Xeno, Supra Cables USB 2.0 Excalibur, Supra Cables DAC-XLR AES/EBU, Supra Cables Excalibur DAC-XLR AES/EBU, WSS Platin Line DIGI 2 RCA

Network Cables – Wireworld Starlight 8, Boaacoustic SIGNAL.lanCat.6A, Supra Cables CAT8+

Power Cables – Power cables Supra Cables LoRad 2.5, bfly bPower, WSS cables Platin Line N3 & N4

Accessories – Power strip Supra Cables LoRad MD07 DC 16 EU SP MKIII, SBooster BOTW P&P power supply, NuPrime AC-4 Power Conditioner, NuPrime Omnia SW-8 Hi-Fi network switch, Innuos PHOENIX USB reclocker, MUTEC MC3+ USB, Ideon Audio 3R USB Renaissance mk2 Black Star, Puritan Audio GroundMaster CITY & RouteMaster