Mana Acoustics

Personally i have not found multiple high pressure direct spiking to do anything at all.
And with the Manna which introduces more factors than the spikes maybe it does work,
But it abandons the principal of simplicity and puts reason out the window so maybe you
can get to the moon if you strap enough sky rockets onto something so it’s a means
to an end.

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Such a strange notion - and in the interview I posted above (which I just discovered you can read once before it’s locked behind a paywall) John resolutely refuses to analyse how it does what it does. But people hear the benefits build - as you clearly did here. What’s super interesting is the degradation that a “like for like” replacement of the Sound Organisation table with 1 level delivered - so it clearly does different things differently!

I’ve seen uglier to be honest….

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Not necessarily. This is a story I’ve recounted on a couple of occasions but I did discover that using a special shaped piece of material on top of a SO table and then using one of their smaller half tables with another material produced a sound even better than my four phase Mana. I took it to my dealer who then got me to take it to Paul Messenger. He, in turn, arranged for Naim to hear it. To my surprise JV came into the dem room for five minutes and gave me the thumbs up.

Trouble was it looked even uglier than the Mana table. It was a very precarious arrangement when in use and would have been a total nightmare to manufacture, hence why it was never seen for sale. However, it does go to show that even the Fraim can be improved upon?

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The Clearaudio rack introduces also more factors than the spikes. The shelves are made from panzerholtz material.

Well I wish I had seen some of these hideous rack pictures before, as I could have shown them to the misses as something I wanted, (obviously I don’t) but the fraim then wouldn’t have been a problem and I could have had it years ago

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It might be me but i find the Mana racks more interesting to look at than the Fraims, maybe because they look so otherworldly / sci-fi. Fraims are quite boring visually, they’re just racks. :wink:

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Indeed - exactly my thoughts.

I used the same principal recently on getting another cat. I wanted one - she didn’t. I shifted my focus on persuading her we should get a dog. After a month of sharing dog pictures and owner anecdotes, I was then allowed to get us another cat. Simple. Effective.

There’s a huge downside to that approach though.

Not if the original desire for a dog would be a Chihuahua :laughing:

I was thinking, well now he’s got a cat when he could have had a dog.

Nothing wrong with Chihuahuas. Many years ago, my boss had one and it slept on my desk next to the warm CRT monitor. Less thrilled when it put it’s bum on my mouse. But it was cute.

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Been using Mana for 25-30 years and I like what they do (not everyone does of course). Whenever second hand Mana turns up, I always consider it. Recently I bought two additional Sound Stages, bringing the LP12 up to Phase 11. Great improvement!

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There has got to be some Freudian explanation why people buy these things!:flushed:

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That’s just Beautiful mate🥰

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Because they are not you. Go figure🤪

I wanted another cat - the dog interest was just part of the phycological warfare!

(Although I would actually like a dog - so I’m not sure how I’m going to approach that now - might have to start campaigning for a Monkey)

That does look pretty special I have to say…

It just blows my mind that going from 9 levels, to 11 levels made a great improvement. Not wishing to draw you into sound speak - can you expand upon what improvements you got and in any way explain why you would hear them?

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Apologies. Taste is a privilege and I keep on forgetting not many people are that fortunate. Let’s call them visually challenging! :sunglasses:

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More levels just gives you more of everything. More PRaT. More dynamics. And, actually, LESS distortion. In my experience, Mana tears away distortion, enabling you to turn up the volume. I’ll quote myself from another forum: “After tearing the entire TT-stack down and rebuilding it (which, by the way, means that 88 screws, 10 boards and one piece of glass must be painstakingly adjusted) the question remains - is there a special Mana Magic above Phase 10? I would say definitely yes! Lower noise floor, more dynamics, “the musicians-in-the-room-feeling”, control and that feeling that you can crank up the volume no end! My 35 year old Sondek was worth this, no doubt about it!” I can’t really explain it better than that. But I always try to be humble about these things. I am no scientist, but I am a human being full of feelings and ideas. So, of course, it can’t be ruled out that I have imagined everything. But I don’t think so. Improvements have been to big for that. I have sometimes bought Mana from people who said: “I understand what they do, and I see why people appreciate them. But it’s not for me, because I want my reproduced music to sound sound like XXXXX”. I can totally respect that. But when I hear someone say “I heard NO difference whatsoever”, I always suspect that they haven’t been set up properly. Because they ARE difficult to set up.

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I would put the Lp12 on top of that rack. The Prat should be stratospheric :joy:
image

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Always remember the 3, 5, 7 and 9 odd number sweet spots, each phase gave a good uplift but the sweet spots with Naim just complimented PRaT.

Sadly the fraim for me was a major let down, looks nice but negligible improvements.

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