Silencer is Golden: The Puritan Audio Laboriatories SILENCER Inter Component Radiated and Parasitic Ground Noise Control

The Puritan Silencer, or just Silencer as I’ll refer to it here, is to coin a phrase in my book, an odd duck. I mean look at the name: “ Inter-Component Radiated and Parasitic Ground Noise Control”

I’ve never seen those words strung together in any product name before in my life! :-)

According to Puritan, even the most expensive cartridges, DACs, pre-amps, and amplifiers cannot deliver a truly faithful performance if the “ground” is moving, shaking, and wobbling with the noise that is perpetually present on every ground line. Which makes sense to me, and to which the Silencer provides an alternative route for the those existent undesirable ground currents via a complex internal structure that firstly absorbs and then neutralizes, by converting to harmless heat, the noise voltages present across all frequency bands.

Connection of the Silencer can be made from chassis to chassis, signal ground to signal ground, tone- arm ground to pre-amp ground (Which is where I have it connected between my Amadeus GTA turntable ground and the ground of my Lejonklou Entity Phono stage) with the appropriate cables and connectors that are available and included for all eventualities.

So how it works other than by the straight forward description Puritan provides I don’t know, what I do know is it works!

I will be the first to admit I’d never thought there could be nasties affecting my music enjoyment lurking within the grounds of my equipment, but there sure must be, cause after listening with the unit in and out of my system, to the same reference recordings/songs I always use and am inherently familiar with several times over, I am able to notice a subtle, yet very definite and positive difference in the over all tonal accuracy and presentation of the performance of the songs I played.

Now I consider my system to be a very detailed musical ensemble consisting of the aforementioned pieces along with a WTL Kauri cartridge, Line Magnetic IA219 Amp and JM Reynaud Cantabile Jubilee speakers all connected with Linn silver interconnects and JMR’s own speaker cables, and with all with Iso-Tec power cables through a Puritan PS106 Advanced Strip Purifier. I loved/love the way my system sounds, and yet with the Silencer installed it sounds better!

Now I’ve been at the music listening game a long time and know all well and good that the human ear is a remarkably sensitive piece in its own right, and if you listen to a piece of music for one particular aspect, or instrument. or tone, your going to hear the overall song entirely different, and that may make you think the piece of gear is causing that audible change when in reality its just your own ears and brain noticing the difference caused by what you are listening for or focusing on. So that being said, I wasn’t going into my listeining sessions, listening for or expecting anything at all…which is why I say it works…Just sitting back and listeing to the music play I heard a difference…a positive difference….Another reason why for me, I know it works is that it was hard at first to pin down exactly what it did to the sound of my system.

After several hours and listening sessions, I came up with this analogy

As a possible image, imagine you have a window and its a sunny day outside, no window shade, just the sheerest of curtain in front of it. So sheer in fact, that you can see everything outside and feel the warmth of the sun through it. Then you move the curtain out of the way, and all of a sudden things are clearer, not different, just clearer, cleaner if you will. Imagine then that the curtain, as sheer as it was, were the nasties lurking in the grounds that I was talking about and the Silencer, being your hand pulling the curtain aside. The musical “elements” were more focused… sharper.

I like to think that any changes I make to my system now, other than a major one (I.e.amp, speaker, cartridge,etc) is not going to make a monumental difference in what I hear, instead, changes like the Silencer, move the needle that elusive 1 or possibly 2 percent up the realism scale.

Which again at this level, can be perceived as a lot for such a small amount of money considering what some other equipment might cost you to obtain that 1 or 2 percent improvement.

And I know there are going to be some skeptics, who based on what I mentioned above about using the Puritan Advanced Strip Purifier, may be thinking, Oh he just likes Puritan and is always going to say their stuff makes a difference. To which I would answer them, no I wouldn't…but yes, I am a fan, but why?, because what I’ve used of theirs IS that good and makes a real difference to the musicality of my system… and on top of that, like the Silencer here, for considerably less than that of products by other manufacturers that don’t perform nearly as well or make any difference at all.

As I mentioned before the Silencer comes with cables (2 so that if you need a longer length, you can use the other to extend it), and an assortment of connector ends to plug/screw into different types of equipment grounds… some of which I have never seen before!

 This is a well thought out piece of audio equipment that from what I can hear does what it says it does, and is easy to install with very little effort and most importantly should be taken seriously by anyone serious about listening to music..

I know that it works in my system as my music is more lifelike sounding and more enjoyable than ever before!

Highly recommended!