If all goes as planned we should be heading up North early tomorrow.

We will upload pictures daily, again if all goes as planned - can never tell about these things - lined off of the Montreal 20006, oops, getting ahead of ourselves here, Montreal FSI Festival Son & Image 2006 show report.

This will be our first time at FSI, in Montreal and in Canada. It is supposed to be up in the 30s during the day, temperature wise, but I hope we can get out of the hotel anyway :-}. We like to check out the city, circumnavigating a mile or two around the show hotels a good bit. In NYC we got to Times Square, Central Park, and the Upper East side.

During the show I will be trying to get to every room (hopefully twice as I want to use two different lenses) taking pictures. The show only lasts three days - so …wish me luck. On the final day, Sunday, we will be listening closely.

While I am taking pictures, Neli will be chatting up, and getting chatted up by, show goers and exhbitors alike, finding out what is new and wonderful in the land of Hi-Fi Audio, Northern-style.

After we get back, we should be putting up the full report after a few days of sleepless nights.

The ‘dailies’ will be in the standard resolution format, usually 1000 pixels wide.

As for the final report’s layout and format, we have plans to automatically make a low-bandwidth version for people still on dial-up, a standard bandwidth version (like the CES 2006 show report but better organized, not day by day this time) and an ultra-high(! whoo hoo!) resolution version.

Some sound tastes BAD. This kind of sound is discussed often and widely.

Some sound tastes sweet.

Some has a strong taste - and many people (usually males) who like strong sound do not care what it actually tastes like, just that it is stong.

But, after one has learned to cook up a good system that tastes pretty good, what is left?

Nourishment.

Without nourishment, no matter how good the sound tastes, one is eventually left with an empty feeling. Over time, this empty feeling grows and grows. This feeling that SOMETHING IS MISSING.

Eventually one (’s passion) may up and die without all the essential ingredients necessary for a healthy sonic existance.

Can we come up with the X basic sound groups necessary for a healthy sound system?

Perhaps our Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy speaker, amp, digital and preamp tables might be a starting place:

Impressive, Enjoyable, Emotional, Natural, Sweet, Real, and Magical.

A healthy system should have a appropriate percentage of all these sound groups.

Perhaps that percentage changes over time, as one ages, and/or as one grows to be more of a sonic connoisseur .

I do think there is indeed a real sensitivity as one matures to the absence of, or an imbalance of some sort, with one or more the basic sound groups in a system. A system can taste… great, but….. it has too little protein, or too much, or it has too much fat, or too much salt, or too much…

Can there be too much enjoyability? or real? or natural? or magic?

Seems like the problem is usually with too little of one or more of the sound groups with respect to the other groups…

We are like Goldilocks, the key is balance.

Or maybe.. the Coneheads.

Perhaps the goal, in a well-balanced diet of course, is to be a Soundhead - ‘consuming mass quantities’ of ALL of the sonic food groups?

To MAXIMIZE each and every key ingredient of the sound as much as possible….?

Just asking…

[A postscript: This thing just up and died on us a few weeks after this post. We do NOT recommend this model, and probably not the brand. But next Winter we will probably get something similar - or try and fix this thing which should probably have all of 2 or 3 electronic components to it].

We used to use our refrigerator to burn in cables - as recommended by Grant over at Shunyata. But our new fridge is too big and immobile and recessed and it just ain’t gonna happen.

But luckily the temperature plunged below zero and it was durn cold down in listening room two - and we decided to get a nice $40-$70 powercord burning device to heat the room a little.

Holmes 1500W, Compact Oil Filled Radiator. Not sure is this is it at Amazon - but we have not had the problems the reviwers there seem to have had. Then again, maybe they needed to use… better power cords!

We set the setting to max current which is about 1500 watts which is what a REALLY big amp might draw during, say, oh I don’t know, just about everything would make one regret turning it up quite so loud.

Here we see how the heater is breaking in a Shunyata Anaconda Helix Alpha power cord.

It is attached using a device that a local friend / dealer, who sold it to us, calls a FBI. I forget what the initials stand for.

But, wait, we get two power cords, two power cords broken in for the price of… well, a heckuva lot in today’s energy market … the price of one.

Finally, we make sure we are using the Hubble hospital-grade outlet on one of the dedicated circuits to make sure the electrons are of audiphile quality. Seriously, do you want YOUR infant power cords seeing their first electrons through an ordinary household socket? I think not.

[Uh oh. Neli reminds me that this outlet is not one of the dedicated lines - and that our poor virginal powercords have now indeed been exposed to the harsh realities of the Cruel Hard Mains. *sigh*]

There you have it. It LOOKS like a $4000 extension cord - but it is really a $70 power cable break-in / burn-in device par-excellance. Well, we haven’t actually compared it to anything else - we’ll have to wait until it warms up outside.

Speaking of which, this is a Winter-only device. During the warmer months it wants to live in the garage.

It is not 100% quiet, however, as the thermocouple of the thermistat makes an audible ‘click’ when it goes on and off - which it does every 2 - 3 minutes because it is a very localized sensor, which is the main complaint on Amazon about this heater.

Burn-in baby, burn-in.

The dCS P8i Player.”

So says the cover of the Stereophile magazine that came today.

Now, when they said the Halcro was ‘The Best Amp Ever’, that ‘could’ have been true. At some instant during the review process, the Halcro ‘could’ have been the best amp ever built. It is at least in the realm of possiblity, whatever the probability of it being true is, it ‘could’ have been the best.

But his month’s cover is patently false. Unless someone can tell me how else to parse what they said, the only way it can possibly be true, is:

That the dCS player is not only better than its more expensive siblings and all the other players that curently exist in the universe (well, on planet Earth anyway), but also:

1) There is an asteroid headed our way and we have days, if not hours to live - so there will be no more engineering of better players in the future, because there IS no future.

2) That Bart Simpson, or some other savvy folk, have been found with an ironclad patent on SACD and they will sue for $100 Billion anyone who improves or develops any SACD player for whatever purpose

3) That same asteroid misses the Earth but causes a loud boom, so loud that not only is everyone everywhere now deaf, but all sucessive generations are also deaf.

4) HD-DVD and /or Blueray are found to sound so much better, and to be so much easier and less expensive to build players for that all high-end manufacturers and modders IMMEDIATELY cease development on SACD and swtich to the newer better formats

5) All Emm Labs and Audio Aero and other SACD player manufacturers and the owners of their players take every player and the player’s schematics outside and heap them in a very expensive pile and set it alight, swearing ‘Never More!’.

Hopefully we will be able to add more plausible speculations to the list over time…

Well, I hope they know something I don’t and they did an exaustive survey and it is #4 above that permitted them to say such a thing.

[This post was split off from the previous post, as it was on a totally different topic. Don’t know WHAT I was thinking at the time….]

The Nordost Valhalla power cord

Not your ordinary Beldon-fabricated conductor: Closeup of the Nordost Valhalla power cord.

Really close.

Amazingly enough, these cords have the same sonic signature as the Nordost Valhalla speaker cables and interconnect. I guess this is how they had to construct them to accomplish that.

A number of things are going on here behind the scenes.

The last month was one of our best months ever . Thank you, everybody, very much. We apprecitate your business and support.

We also anticipate being able to announce a major addition or two here any time now. Yes, it may involve speakers.

And the website, hopefully our internet guests (you!) enjoy our presentation of an audiophile’s-ear-view and audiophile’s-eye-view of ‘high technology in service of the music lover’. And hopefully it helps make worthy buying decisions.

We use a multidisciplinary approach using high quality digital photography guided by a couple of very passionate audiophiles (aka us), decades of professional software and HCI design research, combined with the near ubiquity of relatively high-bandwidth connectivity and relatively inexpensive large computer monitors.

The Audio Federation Home page on the new DELL 30007 FPW 30″ monitor.

A tremendous amount of effort is expended to make our webpages load as fast as possible, while keeping the quality of the site and content, and the resolution and size of the photos, at, hopefully, Oh-My-Gawd levels.

To this end we continue to update the website, adding gallery pages for many of the lines we carry (and some that we don’t), expanding the high-gloss Catalog, enhancing the magazine-style Price Lists, and growing the Recommended Systems review pages. It is not as good as actually hearing what something sounds like, but at least we will get to show you what it really looks like in addition to, succinctly, describing what it really sounds like.

Well, we try hard, anyway.

The Audio Federation Recommended Systems Page on the DELL 30″ monitor.

Enjoy!

Now, I should preface this by admitting that I do not know everything there is to know about video. But I do know some things; I read the trade magazines and forums and scope out various video technologies every so often, so I think my points will be valid, to some extent anyway.

This post was inspired by a casual thought I had that video technologies were objectively better at doing their job than audio technologies. That videophiles didn’t seem to have all these wars over how close XYZ technology was to being objectively real as opposed to being subjectively ’somewhat like reality’.

But is this really true?

The idea here is to compare video technology to audio technology in terms of how close they are to reproducing the ‘real thing’.

Both technologies have products that are ‘warm’ (Pioneer Elite, some CRT projectors and I think LCOS as well).

Both technologies have products that are overly detailed (Mitsubishi, some might say DLP as well).

But in the audio world people often build systems for the types of music they like (rock & roll, classical, jazz all have different system profiles and only the best systems can do all genres well), but I am unaware of people designing their video systems to best display specific genres; say sci-fi movies, or love stories, or horror movies. Is this because video technologies all reproduce subject matter objectively so well, that they are way beyond this need to tailor the technology to the subject matter type?

I wonder….

Though they advertise that some of the new LCD display technologies are like ‘looking out a window’, they have not fooled a single person as far as I know (the 102 inch flat panel at CES was really amazing, but it wasn’t REAL. It wasn’t capable of fooling someone). But I have read of several audio demonstrations where people were easily fooled into thinking that the sound came from real musicans and not the stereo system behind the curtain which was really generating the sound.

Are our ears just more easily fooled?

Or is audio just inherently easier to reproduce?

I think that when the day comes that videophiles are arguing about video technologies that fool people into thinking, say, a persons face is real - but fool them in different ways - well, I imagine that day is still a goodly distance in the future.

Will they someday determine that enlarging the red pixels a little and shrinking the blue will make horror movies scarier?

So we audiophiles should be happy (yeah, right) that we have got it pretty darn good. We can reproduce the sound of a guitar, some singers, and most percussion so that it fools people, even people who are skilled listeners.

Not too shabby.

We are all set to attend the Montreal Show this year.

Enjoy The Music.com did a pretty good job covering this show last year, but we’ll throw our two cents in anyway and do our usual show all and tell all report.

We hear it is in a new venue this year. Hope it doesn’t suck.

I know, that is a fine attitude to have…

One is supposed to be excited, hoping to hear and see mar-vel-ous things….

Well, I think Neli is excited enough for both of us.

Besides, I got a new lens and flash for my camera - which is now weighing in around 4 lbs. This is striking some trepidation into this intrepid show reporter, I can tell you.

Well, if nothing else, this show is going to be great for my biceps….:-)

Just some fun pictures we had laying around on the hard disk…

Closeup of the diamond tweeter and ceramic midrange of the Marten Coltrane speaker. This is the walnut version of these speakers and the wood is starting to take on a nice rich patina as it ages.

The Edge NL Reference 800 watt ‘pyramid’ amplifier. This picture really captures the sleek metalic look of the amplifiers.

Closeup of the top of the Edge NL Reference 800 watt ‘pyramid’ amplifier. Here you can almost see how nice it is to touch these amplifiers, the powder coating feeling very nice, almost soft, to the touch. The cap on top and the way the sides are fastened makes the amplifiers water tight (and maybe even dust tight, which would be nice… see below).

The EMM Labs Meitner DCC2 at dark on an HRS M3 Isolation Base. This picture captures the color-coding of the buttons nicely, as well as showing a how the volume knob is so much fun to turn by hand.

The Lyra Titan cartridge on a Brinkmann tonearm. This picture does not show it perfectly, but there is this feeling of the loooong tonearm snaking out fron the depths at the back of the turntable, the head ready to strike with it diamond tooth into the platter.

Closeup of the Brinkmann tonearm. Ah, engineering. Lovin’ it.

Closeup of the Lyra Titan cartridge. Dust. There are lots of little dust particles, perhaps hairs from the wool carpet. They do not look serious enough toimpact the sound. But they are everywhere…

The Blue Magic Diamond cartridge on the Walker tonearm

Closeup of the Blue Magic Diamond cartridge on the Walker tonearm. More dust particles.

The Brinkmann Balance turntable control buttons. Left is 33 rpm, right is 45 rpm, center is OFF.Sometimes we turn it on and off just for the fun of touching the buttons.

The Nordost Vidar cable burn in device. More pictures from the post a few days ago.

The Nordost Valhalla cables on the back of the Marten Coltrane loudspeakers. I like the reflections of the cables and binding posts in the shiny carbon fiber on back of the Coltrane.

The Nordost Valhalla cables on the back of the Marten Coltrane loudspeakers. More reflection. These are the EU-safe WBT binding posts.

The Nordost Valhalla cables in sunlight. I like the pattern of shdows the various layers of conductors make. When this picture is blown up large, this looks like a work of abstract art. Or maybe industrial art.

Closeup of the Nordost Valhalla cables in sunlight held against the blue sky. You can really see how the cable is constructed. As desribed on the Nordost website:

“Each conductor is made from optimized diameter solid 99.999999% oxygen free copper that has 78 microns of extruded silver on the surface. The surface of each conductor is highly polished before a high precision Micro Mono-Filament wrap is applied.

The Micro Mono-Filament is helically wound over the conductor. A precision FEP jacket is then extruded over the conductor. A number of proprietary methods are used in this difficult and extremely precise manufacturing technique that reduces dielectric contact by a factor of more than 80%. Extremely mechanically stable, the conductors are effectively suspended in inert air, preventing oxidation. ”

Well, hope this all was as fun for you as it was for me!