The Signal Is the Field
Before we talk about pillars, we need to break one assumption that poisons almost every conversation about audio.
The assumption is this: the signal is electrons moving through wire.
It isn’t.
The signal is the electromagnetic field guided by the conductor. The electrons are nearly stationary—drift velocity in copper is fractions of a millimeter per second. The energy, the information, the music—all of it propagates in the field surrounding the wire, not inside it.
This isn’t esoteric theory. It’s undergraduate electromagnetism. But the audio industry—reviewers, manufacturers, forum experts—still talks about current flow as if it were water in a pipe.
Once you understand that the signal is the field, everything changes:
- Cable geometry isn’t about “conductor quality.” It’s about field shape.
- Shielding isn’t about blocking interference. It’s about defining field boundaries.
- Vibration isn’t just mechanical. It modulates field behavior.
- The room isn’t separate from the electronics. Acoustic energy couples back into chassis, racks, and fields.
Nothing is outside the field environment. Nothing is “out of the signal path.”
This is the foundation of everything Synergistic Research designs.
Three Axioms
Before the pillars, three principles that govern our entire approach:
Axiom 1: The signal is the electromagnetic field, not electron flow.
Conductors guide fields. Dielectrics shape them. Geometry determines how energy propagates. The wire is the waveguide, not the pipe.
Axiom 2: Energy domains are coupled, not isolated.
Electrical, mechanical, acoustic, and electromagnetic phenomena interact continuously. Vibration modulates capacitance. Acoustic pressure moves chassis. RF noise couples into audio-band fields. Treating any domain as separate is engineering fiction.
Axiom 3: The system is the unit of analysis, not the component.
No box, wire, or accessory exists independently. Every element operates within a shared field environment. Optimizing parts in isolation produces incoherent systems. Optimizing the field environment produces musical systems.
These axioms generate the Six Pillars—not as a product checklist, but as a map of the domains where field behavior is shaped.
The Six Pillars of Synergy
Every product we design, every system we voice, every room we tune operates within this framework:
| Cable Loom | How signal and power fields are guided through the system |
| Mechanical Energy | How vibration is tuned, not merely damped |
| AC Power | How raw energy enters and how its noise spectrum is shaped |
| Grounding | Where unwanted energy terminates and how stable the reference is |
| Acoustics | How room energy interacts with the system and feeds back into it |
| EM Field Control | How the field environment itself is shaped and stabilized |
When people hear “the Synergistic sound,” they’re hearing multiple pillars moving in coordination under a unified design philosophy—UEF and field-first engineering—compounding rather than colliding.
The Six Pillars describe the system as it exists today.
LogiQ is how the system learns to respond tomorrow.
We’ll return to that.
Pillar 1: Cable Loom
Conventional view: Cables are conduits. Better metal, better flow, better sound.
Field view: Cables are waveguides. The conductor shapes the field. The dielectric stores and releases energy. The geometry determines propagation characteristics. The shield defines the field boundary—and where that shield terminates matters as much as what it’s made of.
The cable loom is the nervous system of the audio system. It includes:
- Power cords
- Interconnects
- Speaker cables
- Digital cables
- Ground cables
Treating these as separate purchases from different manufacturers produces a system speaking five dialects. The fields don’t cohere. The sonic signature shifts unpredictably with every swap.
The SR approach:
We design the entire loom under a common field philosophy—UEF geometry, consistent dielectric treatment, integrated shielding strategy. Power, signal, and ground cables share a design language so they reinforce rather than fight each other.
We voice the loom with tuning elements—adjustable bullets, ECTs, PHTs—so each cable can be matched to the system rather than forcing the system to conform to a fixed cable signature.
We integrate the loom with grounding and EM field control so shields terminate into a designed ground ecology, not random chassis potential.
When the loom becomes a unified pillar, you stop hearing “cables.” You hear the system as a coherent whole.
Pillar interactions: Cable Loom behavior depends on Grounding (shield termination), AC Power (power cord field environment), and EM Field Control (ambient field stability). Changing any of these changes how the loom performs.
Pillar 2: Mechanical Energy
Conventional view: Vibration is noise. Kill it. Mass-load, clamp, damp. The deader, the better.
Field view: Mechanical energy is a field variable. It doesn’t stay in the rack—it propagates into circuit boards, modulates capacitor and transformer behavior, and changes field geometry in real time. Killing all vibration often kills the life of the music. The goal isn’t silence. It’s coherence.
Your equipment is being played by the room while you’re trying to play music through it. Every footfall, every speaker excursion, every HVAC pulse moves through the system.
The SR approach:
We don’t just damp vibration. We tune it.
Products like MiG SX, Tranquility Base, and our isolation platforms are designed to redirect mechanical energy into preferred dissipation paths, avoid resonances that smear timing and blur imaging, and preserve the system’s dynamic liveliness while eliminating chaos.
Pillar interactions: Mechanical Energy tuning affects Acoustics (room energy couples into racks), EM Field Control (vibrating components destabilize fields), and even Cable Loom (cables are microphonic—they convert vibration into electrical noise).
Get this pillar right and music stops sounding strained, even when the noise floor drops.
Pillar 3: Power
Conventional view: Clean power means filtering noise. Use a power conditioner. Done.
Field view: Everything your system does is a modulation of the AC it receives. The noise spectrum, voltage stability, current delivery under dynamic load, and how energy couples into transformers—all of it sets the ceiling for what your system can achieve. You don’t get better sound than the energy you feed the system.
Most power conditioners trade dynamics for noise reduction. They limit current, compress transients, and make the system sound “clean” in the worst sense—polite, constrained, lifeless.
The SR approach:
Our PowerCell line delivers non-current-limiting conditioning. You don’t choose between dynamics and low noise—you get both.
We use Active EM Cell technology to treat noise in the field domain, not just with passive series filtering that chokes current delivery.
We integrate power conditioning with the loom and grounding so AC isn’t a sidecar—it’s structurally connected to how signal and ground behave.
Pillar interactions: AC Power is tightly coupled to Grounding (line noise and ground noise are two sides of the same loop), Cable Loom (power cords set the EM environment signal cables operate within), and EM Field Control (line-borne RF couples into every field in the system).
Clean, unlimited AC doesn’t just lower noise. It changes how the system breathes.
Pillar 4: Grounding
Conventional view: Ground is a drain. Connect things to it and bad stuff disappears.
Field view: Ground is the reference the entire system is built on. If that reference is noisy, unstable, or undefined, everything riding on it moves too. Ground doesn’t absorb noise—it defines zero. The question isn’t where unwanted energy goes. The question is how stable is the point the system calls “zero.”
Most systems have no grounding strategy at all. Components connect to wall ground through power cords. Chassis grounds float at whatever potential they happen to find. Shield drains terminate into undefined references. The result is a shifting, noisy foundation that modulates everything built on top of it.
The SR approach:
Our Active Ground Block SE and Galileo Ground Block provide a central, low-impedance, actively stabilized ground reference. Components, cable shields, racks, Tranquility planes—everything can reference the same designed ground ecology instead of floating on random chassis and wall potentials.
Ground cables become part of the system architecture, not afterthoughts.
Pillar interactions: Grounding is inseparable from AC Power (line and ground noise form a single loop), Cable Loom (shield drains only work if they terminate into a real ground), and EM Field Control (field-shaping devices like Tranquility rely on inductive coupling to ground planes—that only works if the ground is real, not theoretical).
Change the grounding pillar and the system often sounds like you changed electronics.
Pillar 5: Acoustics
Conventional view: Room treatment means absorption. Panels on walls, bass traps in corners. Make the room dead enough that it stops interfering.
Field view: The room is a reactive partner, not a passive container. Acoustic energy doesn’t stop at the air-wall boundary—it couples into racks, chassis, cables, and circuits. It feeds back into fields. The room plays the gear while the gear plays the room. Over-damping kills spatial information and dynamic contrast. The goal isn’t a dead room. It’s a coherent room.
Most people know their room is a problem. But the conventional solutions—thick panels, studio foam, domestic arguments about aesthetics—address only the obvious issues (flutter echo, bass nodes) while destroying the subtle spatial cues that make live music feel alive.
The SR approach:
Our acoustic products—HFT, Black Box, Vibratron, Atmosphere—operate in high-frequency and spatial domains where perception is most sensitive. They reduce chaos without killing life. They remain visually minimal so you can have performance and a living space.
We treat the room as part of the system, not an obstacle to the system.
Pillar interactions: Acoustics couples directly into Mechanical Energy (room energy shakes gear), EM Field Control (acoustic feedback into chassis modulates fields), and even Cable Loom (microphonic cables pick up room energy as electrical noise).
When the acoustic pillar is addressed as part of the whole, you stop fighting the room and start using it.
Pillar 6: EM Field Control
This is where Synergistic Research becomes something fundamentally different from a cable company.
If the signal is the electromagnetic field, then the entire game changes. It’s not just about what wire you use or what box you buy. The question becomes:
What is the field environment your system exists within?
Every component, cable, rack, and surface has an electromagnetic presence. Noise doesn’t respect signal path diagrams—it attaches to fields. Those fields overlap, interfere, reinforce, and degrade each other. You can optimize every component in isolation and still have a system that sounds incoherent because the field environment is chaotic.
The SR approach:
We engineer the field environment itself.
Tranquility Base, Tranquility Pod, Tranquility Rack create field-shaping planes that establish a coherent EM environment around components. They don’t just isolate—they define the field space.
UEF treatments operate across EM, RF, and audible domains to tune how fields behave at surfaces and boundaries.
FEQ Carbon is a ULF field generator that establishes a low-frequency bias field the entire system locks to—a designed field reference, not random ambient chaos.
Pillar interactions: EM Field Control touches everything. It stabilizes how AC Power and Grounding are perceived at the circuit level. It makes the Cable Loom behave as a single coherent system rather than separate runs. It reduces how Mechanical and Acoustic energy kick fields around. It’s the integrating pillar—the one that binds the others into a unified whole.
The Next Step: LogiQ and Intention-Driven Audio
FEQ Carbon establishes a fixed field bias—carefully voiced in our listening lab, optimized for broad application. Red channel, blue channel, set and forget.
But fixed is a limitation.
Every recording is different. Every track has different energy, different spatial encoding, different demands. A fixed field bias is a compromise—better than chaos, but still a single solution applied to infinite variation.
LogiQ changes this.
FEQ LogiQ and Atmosphere LogiQ are the next evolution—dynamic field control that responds to the recording in real time. Instead of a fixed bias, LogiQ analyzes the signal and adjusts the field environment continuously.
Today, the Six Pillars describe how to build a coherent system.
Tomorrow, LogiQ enables a system that doesn’t just cohere—it responds. It adapts. It meets the recording where it lives.
We call this intention-driven audio: a system that doesn’t impose a fixed signature but responds to the music’s own demands.
The Six Pillars are the foundation.
LogiQ is the nervous system.
Intention-driven audio is where this is all heading.
We’ll go deeper in the next Tune In With Ted.
Why Six Pillars Beat One-Offs
Most companies in high-end audio live in a single pillar.
They make power conditioners. Or cables. Or room treatment. Or footers. They can produce real improvements within that domain—but they hit ceilings fast, because the rest of the system remains unaddressed. Push one pillar harder and harder while the others stand still, and you get diminishing returns.
This is why so many audiophiles reach a plateau. They’ve optimized one domain to its limit while five others constrain everything they’ve built.
Synergistic Research doesn’t win because of any single product.
We win because everything we engineer shares a common design language—UEF, field-first, system-aware—and communicates with everything else. Each new element increases the value of what you already own. The system compounds.
You can copy a single product.
You can’t easily copy a six-pillar ecosystem that’s been evolving, testing, listening, and refining for over three decades.
That’s the difference between:
Chasing the next product
and
Building a system that keeps getting better as it becomes more complete.
How to Use the Six Pillars
This isn’t just our internal design vocabulary. It’s a diagnostic framework you can apply to your own system.
Stop asking: What single tweak should I buy next?
Start asking: Which pillar is most constraining my system right now?
Sometimes it’s obvious:
- Noisy power
- A difficult room
- Random mix-and-match cables
- No grounding strategy
Sometimes it’s subtle:
- You’ve done strong work in several pillars, but the EM field environment remains chaotic
- Your cables are excellent, but they terminate into undefined grounds
- Your room treatment works, but mechanical energy is coupling into your rack
You don’t have to address all six at once. But once you see the system as six interacting domains rather than a pile of parts, you understand why:
- Some changes are transformative
- Some changes are inaudible
- Some changes work in one system but not another
The systems that transcend their parts are always built on multiple pillars moving together.
Closing
The Six Pillars of Synergy aren’t a marketing framework. They’re the way we think about audio as a field-driven system—and they’re a map you can use to understand your own.
The pillars describe what exists.
LogiQ describes what’s coming.
Intention-driven audio is the destination.
We’re not building better cables. We’re building systems that respond to music the way music deserves.
— Theodore W. Denney III
Founder, Synergistic Research
Coming soon in Tune In With Ted: LogiQ—When the System Learns to Listen
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