Well, it DOES take a system - otherwise no music comes out of them speakers.

And building a great sounding system takes time. It is not something everyone has the patience for, or the skill for, or desire for, or the time for.

I was remonded of this when a commercial came on TV for some, what I presume to be special in some way, brake pads. Yes, I am sure there are lots of people who shop the Auto Parts store and like to install custom brake pads on their automobile.

But I am not one of them. And I think the vast majority of people are like me.

So where does that put the ordinary person who does not want to put together a system a component at a time anymore than they want to put together a car a brake pad at a time?

We’ve talked about the system approach before, on both our Classic Systems page as well as our old Turnkey Systems page.

There are actually very few systems that really sound great - and they take awhile to find - but there are some. And most can be tailored a little bit one way or the other to suit the type of sound to suit the buyer (do you want all-season or performance tires, do you want a sunroof, do you want a nav or a dvd player, …).

To this end we are creating a Recommended Systems section that will list the systems we set up here that we think are killer in some way or another - and we will try to categorize the system’s sonic goals in the same way as was done in the Audiophile’s Guide’s sections on speakers, amps, CD players and preamps.

We are just starting the construction of the Recommended Systems pages - so if anyone has any ideas on how they would like to see the systems arranged or what information they would like to see about each system - please let us know!

Thanks, and Enjoy!

P.S. Oh, so it looks like Sonic Flare also mentioned selling complete systems this week as well. This meme must be getting around. Good.

Not sure how many people realize it, but we are one of the few dealers who put the prices of everything up on our website (whenever our supplier permits it). I know I always like to know the price of something BEFORE I call about what I think is a $500 thing only to learn it is a $5000 thing and am going to have to save up a few months to get it.

We still have the monolithic price list, and it will be here for a little while still.

But we have added another price list section, with one web page per product line, with little thumbnail pictures (so far, only Edge, Audio Aero, HRS and Marten have pictures) for each product and links to other parts of our site where there is more information. This will be the lower bandwith approach of the three views we are building:

* The old ‘product page’ for each product line accessible from the Products page and now the Site Map

* The new glossy Catalog pages (under development)

* The Price List pages (still being flessed out)

We hope these various views that each celebrate the excellence of the prouduct lines we carry in a different way will help people enjoy the site even more than before.

… over in somebody ELSE’S system.

Repeat after me:

There is no perfect speaker.

There is no perfect amplifier.

There is no perfect…

It is the components that one Hasn’t heard that are the most incidious at making us doubters, making us wonder if THEY perhaps are the *** U-L-T-I-M-A-T-E *** COMPONENT.

Some of the Jones’ components are good, most are just OK, just like all components once you actually get to hear them for yourself.

It is the one’s we haven’t heard, where we wonder “maybeTHAT box has EVERYTHING… sophistication AND magic AND impressiveness!”, that are the most insidious, making us doubt everything we have learned up until now.

Truth: There are very, very few components that really ARE significantly greener than the rest. Most are just… different. Hey, at least half are actually worse than average .

However, it is the actual hearing one of these 8th wonders of the world that REALLY gets us hooked, dooms us to keep looking, always looking, across the street to see if the grass really IS greener over there.

It is our job here, our responsibility, tough life that we have, to scout around the 1000s of speakers, 1000s of amps, and cables and cd players, and preamps and powercords and determine which are truly special and which are just …nice.

Unlike most dealers we actually do not care if they ’sell well’ - if they are really great sounding we will make the effort ourselves to help build their brand and get the word out there.

Unlike most reviewers we do not have to find a great component each and every month.

Unlike most reviewers (and most dealers who seem to rely more on the big bamboozle - yes, I just had to put bamboozle in somewhere; bamboozle is just too fun of a word to leave out of any good Blog for too awfully long ) we actually care about how the components really sound because we play them here for very picky people who will spend some of their hard-earned to take what they are hearing home with them if they really like what they hear (and can afford what they hear).

We take this responsibility to heart - some components are really pretty good so there is no real need to replace them with the hot new brand X, the grass often really isn’t greener (it just the low angle you are looking at it from that makes it look greener ) - save a few bucks.

OK, three smiley faces is all I allocate myself for each post (not really, but I bet you wish it were true) so I had better be…

…outa here.

Nordost Reference Dealers, like us happy folks at Audio Federation, now have another tool that will make sure that the cables their customers receive now sound even more better, yes, more better, than the competition than they already did before. And what a monster, er, make that kick-ass tool it is.

Physically the unit is about 9.5 inches by 17 inches and weighs, I don’t know, say about 10 lbs.

What does it do? And how does it do it?

What it does, using 44 amplifiers, is:

1. Neutralizes spurious charges that build up around the cables and its insulation.

2. Conditions the conductor core, which changes the way signals pass through the metal using wide-band sonics

3. Conditions the surface of the conductors using ultrasonics

How does it do it?

The VIDAR “uses a proprietary combination of composite and complex signals to condition the cable.” I bet you could have probably guessed that part.

The process involves ultra-low frequencies (to condition the core of the conductor), ultra-high frequencies (to condition the surface of the conductor), bouncing the signal ping-pong fashionup and down the length of the cable. The manual then goes on to describe how the VIDAR conditions the rest of the conductor as well as the dielectric area above the conductor.

Does it work?

Don’t know yet. It was very cold when it got here so applying power anytime soon was out of the question.

But sometime…. we really should do some listening tests; perhaps one interconnect brand new, and another brand new but burned-in / broken-in / conditioned.

Our general experience has been we have never experienced any deleterious effects from burning in anything, and burning in does seem to add some predictability to the sonics, taking some of the edge off that seems to be occaisionally heard with a brand new cable sometimes… [sometimes we are in too much of a hurry to hear a cable and wham bamm out of the packaging and into the system it goes - so we do sometimes experience what un-burned-in cables sound like ].

In any case, it at least looks cool - and it is heavy enough that the cables won’t tip it over. About 95% of the time our customers do want their cables burned-in before we send them out - and we are always happy to do so.

Doh!

We are slowly creating an online catalog of the products we carry in order to provide both a more traditional presentation in this online medium and as a way to show off how awesome some of this equipment is.

But one of the problems with all this nice, shiny equipment is that when one has to move it, adjust it, or do ANTTHING with it, one leaves finger prints. Big honkin’ smudges. This is similar to the dreaded dust buildup problem, except that it is harder to remedy (The hell if I am going to wear gloves to use my equipment, no way no how )

For example, in the catlog there is the picture of the Brinkmann Balance turntable. Nice picture I think. Spent the time to remove the background in Photoshop, added it to the webpages and then uploaded them - only to finally notice after all this that there are smudges on the platter where someone was too impatient to wait for it to slow down and used their fingers to force it to stop. [This photo was taken at the HE 2005 show - so it wasn’t me who was the impatient one… this time ]

This isn’t the only piece in the catalog that had finger prints that stood out like a sore thumb. But the others I was able to use photoshop to dissapear them.

So, I’ll take another picture of the Balance we have here and redo the picture - but the real problem is that finger prints are all over our equipment, as they probably are all over yours, and all these smudges distract from the visual aesthetic of the pieces and of the overall listening experience. But in reality we are just too lazy and too ‘the visual aesthetics shouldn’t matter - its the music stupid’ that this will not likely change here any time soon at the Audio Federation.

But if someone came out with an audiophile-grade equipment polish - say Walker Audio, it could come with the VIVID CD polisher and the SST silver contact enhancer - then I bet we could convince one of us here (not me) to spend the time and apply the polish very few weeks, and remove the fingerprints so that my photos would not be pictures of equipment with fingerprints all over them.

What do you say, you entrepreneurs out there? Let me know when it ships!

The Power Cords page is still in woeful need of having a half-dozen power cords added to is list – there are a lot of new very-high-end power cords out there.

The CD Player, Amplifier and Preamplifier pages all now use the same purpose-directed approach as the speaker page does.

The CD Player page might be a little controversial – there are a lot of players that just seem to be competent, but are not otherwise special. ‘Workhorses’ as we call them. Maybe we should rename the ‘Workhorse’ category to something else – but as of now we cannot think of a better name.

This table also clarifies our perspective on the Esoteric et. al. versus the Meitner discussions. Yes, the top end Esoteric may have more detail and tighter bass – but we think the Meitner is QUALitatively better than the Esoteric.

In general, the equipment with the best quantitative performance and/or measurements does not always provide the most magical listening experiences, in our experience. One would think that the memory of the decades of the quantitatively better solid-state versus tube amplifiers debacle or even the quantitatively better CDs versus LPs travesty would be fresh in people minds… but guess not.

… to the Galaxy.

I think the new page more accurately reflects the general types of sounds people are searching for when they choose and/or like a speaker’s sound.

Our personal penchant has been moving from emotional to real to, now, magical and during this move the number of recommended speakers kept dwindling in numbers. The new table no longer recommends speakers, per se, but hopefully helps a person decide what kind of sound they are interested in and then provides some of the best (oops, there is that word again) examples of the state-of-the-art speakers that produce that type of sound.

Most people who are not hardcore (aka crazy, nuts, obsessive, … need we say more?) want an impressive speaker - and as one can see from the table, most popular speakers are impressive… and unfortunately they have little else going for them.

The speakers that can do multiple things, like communicating emotion and produce a convincingly real presentation, as well as being impressive at the right times, would seem to me to be speakers that both women and men might like as well as providing enough depth and sophisitication to allow their owner’s love of music to grow deeper and wider over the years.

Thinking about the added suspense that the music on the SACD version of Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms seemed to have (see last post), I wonder if and how this might be artificially produced by a system.

When humans talk to each other, at least in English, they can communicate to a listener that they should expect something to follow a particular phrase by at least three methods:

1. raising the frequency of the last word of the phrase, near the end of the word
2. drawing out the last word of the phrase (saying the word very slowly)
3. adding a lot of ‘uh’s or ‘um’s after the phrase

It seems like music also uses these same techniques (a background beat might replace the ‘um’s to mark tiime after a phrase).

So why are only a few systems able to communicate this ’suspense’? Are so few able to render the characteristic raise in frequency at the end of an anticpatory note? Or is it that LPs and CDs for the most part do not have a high-enough resolution to contian this kind of subtle information?

At a CES a few years ago, there was a system with Joseph speakers, Joule amps and Audio Aero CD player that had oodles of suspense. It was great fun and seemed to communicate the musician’s desire to be suspenseful with both the listener and their fellow band members. So now one can wonder things like: did this system have a tendency to raise the frequency of the sound at the very end of major notes, just a little, to artificially add suspense?

What about the recording engineers who made the Brothers in Arms CD? Did they do the same? Do they have a little knob in the studio that says “suspense”?

I don’t know. I do know I like suspense and anticipation in music. It adds to the excitment and highlights the webs of communication going on both between the individual band members (for example, think jazz and one musician prompting another to play a few notes, who does the same right back at them, back and forth) and between the band and the audience.

The audience can also communicate suspense and most other emotions back to the band and to others in the audience though crowd mutterings and clapping and shouting and whistling. This is one of the things that can make live shows and unprocessed live bootlegs that are recorded from the audience so involving.

[I would like to talk some more about this ‘muttering’ another time, by which we are refering to the largely involuntary sounds an audience in response to what the musicians are doing - and how this is a large part of the (near) instananeous feedback loop between the audience and the musicians which is a whole nuther communication channel being used that is almost completely disjoint from the actual melody being played. The ’suspense’ added by a musician is almost a bridge between these two channels; one channel being of sound and the other one is .. a deeper message about being human and alive at that moment].

OK, it is time to start composing these posts in somethng that has a spell checker…

Last weekend, K.O. and I listened to the title track of these two CDs back to back in order to hear the differences between them, if any.

This was on the following equipment: EMM labs / Meitner digital running into Lamm ML2.1 amps on the Triolon speakers, Stealth INDRA interconnects and Shunyata Anaconda Alpha powercords, HRS isolation bases and nimbuses, the CDSD transport resting on an Acoustic Dreams rack.

We both agreed that we liked the SACD version better.

Of course there was more detail on the SACD version, but it also had more suspense, which I found to be an unexpected difference. Or maybe one can call it anticipation. This refers to that feeling you get, which this album does so very well, at the end of a loooong drawn out note when …you …know …the …next …note ..is …coming… …it …is …almost …here… …YES!

Imaging was also better and there was more solidity and presence.

Everything was better, though stepping back from the music a bit, mentally, one might say they was a slight artificial taint to the whole thing. That the ‘whole’ was not blending together as it might.

My interpretation of this was to reflect that the XRCD, being a very smooth, almost tube-like presentation, was also just as artificial, it is just that most of us are used to it because we grew up with that kind of artificiality.

This implies something interesting about the younger CD / DVD / MP3 / SACD generation, but I do not think I care to speculate right now on what that ’something interesting’ may portend. No reason to think about tomorrow’s problems, we got enough right here today, thank you very much.

By the way, in the past we have compared the LP version to the XRCD version - and the LP was laughably (or very distressingly, depending on your point of view) better. It so out-classed its digital counterpart that I really felt ripped off that I had paid the $35 for the XRCD. Oh well. I think the day of the XRCD is over - it was great when most CDs and CD players had a strident edge . Now most CDs sound pretty good and the playback equipment either rolls off the treble a little or just plain sounds pretty darn good [or at least the playback equipment no longer sounds so bad as to require CDs like this that roll off the midrange and treble in order to make the music halfway listenable].

I guess we should next compare the SACD to the LP, but I am thinking that altough the SACD is closer now to the LP in quality, it will still be no match. Well, when the new HRS MXR equipment rack gets here (gloss black, ahhhhhhhhhhh. Yes, like that pictured in the post below this one. Oops, can’t let Neli see me drooling all over the keyboard or she’ll never type on this thing again) we will move the Brinkmann Balance upstairs and try this very thing. You want to be here for this, K.O.?

The Audio Federation website is always trying to maintain a balance so that it serves equally well all the different kinds of visitors we get: customers and audiophiles, the hobbiest and the merely curious, those looking for information and those looking for audio por*n/photos.

Finally happy with the look of the home page, and we’ll probably keep it until at least June, if not longer.

We added a Site Map page accessible from the home page to make it easier to get around - which I even find myself using more and more. The links at the top of each page in the dealership now let one easily get back to the home (top) page.

The Music page will evolve to become an annotated index into the Blog’s forthcoming posts of audiophile-relevent music reviews. Our emphasis will be somewhat different than other music reviews, focusing on the quality of the sound more than the history of the band or how the album fits within the bands other work, or fits within the genre as a whole. Not that this other information isn’t interesting - it is that it is already done quite well by others in the industry, and no reason for us to duplicate or detract from their good work

The Hifi’ing Magazine will evolve into being not only a list of recent show reports but an annotated index into the Blog so that people can more easily find ‘major Blog posts in history’.

The Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy will be updated, both visually and content-wise. Finally.

We’ve added a number of photo galleries to the dealership product pages, and these will get fleshed out a lot more with both pictures that we take here and those we have taken, and will take, at shows.

We’ve also started adding ‘experience reports’ to the dealership’s product pages, which collect and display information about our experiences with the various products in several situations. The HRS vibration control product line is the first of many products we will do this for.

Neli will start working a lot more on the website; she knows a lot more details about most of the products than I do.

This means letting Neli have access to the website. I can just see it now. If you notice some descriptions going back and forth between say “lovely and detailed” on the one hand and “rich and detailed” on the other - you will know it is one of THOSE types of discussions going on here on the other side of your computer.

This is kind of like lending your spouse the keys to your Lamborghini (well, let’s just imagine we all had a Lamborghini, OK, and thatmost of us hadn’t spent all our money on audio equipment and $30 a pop LPs). How many times can you say ‘pleeeeease don’t break it dear’ before you get one of those matrimonial Death Ray looks? Once? Yeah, that is the way it works here, too.

I do try to get her to post her ideas on this blog…at least once a day, (and sometimes hourly. This nets me another kind of look). She made her own trip to Planet Abraxus, and to planet [whatever opera Mike Lavigne was playing the last hour of CES in the Swedish Statement room] and I am sure people would like to hear what she has to say about it.

But she is more comfortable talking about audio than writing about it, the opposite of her way too softly spoken husband. So it will still mostly be me who is posting stuff on the Blog about the ‘goings on’ here at the Belfry - with hopefully some occasional posts by Neli, and perhaps even some special guests, from time to time.

If you have any other ideas, please let us know. Thanks!