While at Stereophile’s Home Entertainment Show 2006 in Los Angeles we visited the home of one of the principals of Cogent True-to-Life. Cogent is working on modernizing the field-coil compression driver that was used in loudspeakers ‘back in the day’.

To hear what these drivers sound like they put them in custom loudspeakers such as the white horn loudspeakers we heard at CES 2006 and earlier this month during our visit.

Close up of Cogent True-to-Life high-frequency horn

We very much liked what we heard both at CES and during our recent audition - though we feel that both systems were comprimised and wonder what these modest horns with their state of the art drivers would sound like hooked up to comensurable equipment.

Perhaps the Mixibitors will come to the rescue…

But until then here are some pictures and some listening impressions:

The Audio Federation Cogent True-to-Life Horn Loudspeaker Report

Enjoy!

It was only on loan - we thought we could keep it for awhile, but some lucky person decided to buy it and this morning I wake up to them sitting on the table, all cleaned up and shiney.

We only got a chance to hear them a short while - but I am ex-ex-experienc-ing with-draw-all symp-symp-symp-….

Audio Note M10 preamplifier

One of the Audio Note M10 preamplifier’s Galahad power supply

Audio Note M10 preamplifier front panel

More later when we recover….

[Audio Note AN-E/SEC Silver Signature loudspeakers, Lamm ML1.,1 amplifier, Audio Aero Prestige CD / SACD player in listening room #3]

What a nice system. Works great in this room - deeply enjoyable, great PRaT, emotion, realistic and well-articulated voices…. we like it!

And everyone else so far likes it too

OK, we have an audition this evening - now! - so we’ll have to post more on this later….

This confuses the hooey out of some people in the industry - especially those who are salespeople who are only mildly interested in audio.

“What?!?!? You mention brands of audio equipment on your website that you don’t even sell?” “You tell people that there are pieces of equipment that you don’t sell that they should consider buying? Are you nuts??!!”

Ignoring the literal interpretation of nuts for the sake of argument…

We are not here to push equipment on people. We don’t do the lie, cheat, cajole, threaten, intimidate, techno-babble rag to make people buy something. We don’t like it when it gets done to us, and we bet our customers don’t like it when it gets done to them either.

We ARE here to help people build systems that they love and that they can grow with.

Sometimes this takes awhile - everybody has a different word for, say, detal, and everyone thinks transparency means something different from what everyone else thinks it means. It would be kind of funny if it weren’t so tragic.

But eventually we do determine what each person’s personal preferences are, and make recommendations about how they can get where they want to go, either step-by-step, component-by-component, or as a compleete system upgrade.

And, yes, we have to admit it, we do indeed carry some of the world’s most consistantly state-of-the-art equipment - each of our components provide a sound that is the best-in-category solution to several different types of sonic preferences - and which have little, if any, deliterious …side-effects.

But we don’t carry everything.

It a customer wants bottom end slam, and that is all they want - and they don’t care about any … side-effects… then we would probably recommend a Krell or VTL amplifier - they are some of the very best at this in our opinion. No we don’t carry these lines and never will - too many people (including us!) want something more than just slam. [And besides, on a near-perfect vibration-controlled system, the Lamm ML2.1 or high-gain Audio Note Kegon will provide as much slam, in a much more realistic manner, on many if not most loudspeakers - that is for all kinds of bass except that originally generated by the muscians using electronics for, say, techno - which we love but it is only one genre we love of many].

What are our preferences?

Our personal preferences, as always, are that we want everything. From Impressive to Magic. Lots and lots of everything.

We run our systems, when they are tuned just for our ears, with very low-profile tires, close-to-the-metal, red-lining the performance so that it is as real as possible without being too neutral sounding, as much slam as possible without overloading the room or causing an unbalanced presentation, as much detail as possible without the midrange calling undue attention to itself, etc., etc., etc., etc.

Neli feels like we may be leaving too many people behind, as we continue to optimize the systems as we try more and more pieces from all over the world that increase the performance a little bit more here and a little bit more over there….

However, I think that people want somebody who is going the same way they are (no, not to the loony bin, we are all already there! ) and want someone they can talk to about what each of these optimizations do so that they can decide which one is right for themselves at this time - and which ones might be right next month, or next year.

In any case, this will hopefully give our readers an idea of WHY we have the Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Show Reports that talk about the sound and don’t just gawk at the pretty things, and this Blog that talks about the different purposes of different systems and components and how each of us wants a different balance and therefore different components - and the rest of our ever-evolving ever-expanding Audio Federation website.

And hopefully this will give our readers an idea of why WE are here.

Sucks, I know.

But it was getting out of hand.

And you only have to register once.

Been in effect for a few days now. Seems to work.

Of course, this only affects those of you Who Actually Post Comments……..

:-)

Now for something completely different.

Yesterday around 6:00pm we were putting back together several systems in new configurations when we heard a large bang on the roof, 24 feet above the floor in the main listening room.

Neli said ‘Whassat? ‘ Well, that is more like the way I talk, but l am writing the story, so…

‘A bird’, I say… ‘OK, a BIG bird’.

Then I get one of those looks that women give men when they reveal exactly what they think of the male sex’s cognitive powers.

The day before we had a lot of very large birds [Eagles? Their squak sounds like the noise eagles make on TV. And we just happened to be listening to Hell Freezes Over during that time as welll…. Hmmmmmm…] circling the house during a demo for an hour or so, and when the birds landed on the roof, which they seemed to be doing a lot for some reason, there would be a thump - and this was during an audition, so everybody heard it when the music was not at that moment playing very loud.

But then there was another loud bang on the roof, then another. It sounded just like someone was throwing rocks at the house. And it was LOUD….!

Hey, we didn’t go to college for nuthin. It took only about 20 to 30 wacks on the roof to figure out that we were being hailed.

Chucks of hail on the deck post, deer taking shelter and the streaks of hail still pelting the earth.

The front stairs and garage covered in white

The backyard covered in white

You know, it was June 24th, it was in the 80s and the air conditioner had been running, so in my mind this qualifies as “Snow in the Summer” which from a kid’s point of view counts as one of the best days that there can ever be.

We just got this going. Still doing radical repositionings (i.e. we are moving the speaker a whole 12 inches every time we adjust the placement).

It does certainly seem to have enough SPLs to fill our 15 foot by 25 foot listening room #2.

Stay tuned….!

We put the Audio Note M10 preamplifier on the main system upstairs today. Things were kind of in a mess after a recent audition, anyway… so we took it as an impetus to see what a Meitner front end driving the Audio Note M10 preamplifier itself driving an Audio Note Kegon amplifier would sound like.

[By the way, that white stuff outside, that is a couple of inches of hail. Yes, it is indeed June 24th.]

I mean, instead of using the Meitner DCC2 DAC built-in preamplifier, which can only but be about $5K of the cost of the DAC, we put a $50K preamplifier in the system with its brother $50K amplifier.

How do you think it is going to sound?

Neli is planning on writing a nasty letter to Peter Q. of Audio Note for letting us ever audition the M10.

We did most of our listening after the unit being on for only 5 minutes, It has now been 3 hours or so.

There are some audiophile-approved attributes that got a big jump up in quality: harmonics, bass, room pressurization, continuousness, imaging, solidity….

But, people, this is not about me devolving, dehumanizing, detaching the sound into its constituent parts.

OK, Janis’s Rachmaninov on SACD is playing - and I am trying to write this during the breaks between pieces because it is too hard to concentrate when the music is playing down the hall outside my office in the livingroom.

For many people, of a certain age and certain life experiences, music and the pursuit of the reproduction thereof, is an attempt to not only experience the music of our youth, but to recapture the feelings and sense of wonder and appreciation of the beauty that life offers us - but which the years and a well-nourished cynicism distances us from; slowly, inexorably, until life sometimes seems like a cold, boring, cruel joke.

But for a few minutes, or hours if the system is very, very good, and most of the time if the system is this good, our defenses are ripped away and we are filled with the child’s sense of the wonder-of-it-all.

[Here we see the Emm Labs DCC2 DAC, the silver-ish box, which is receiving a signal through 10 meter long optical cables from the transport located on the other side of the room. This is connected, by the Valhalla interconnects that are looping through the sky like the St. Louis Arch, to the M10 preamplifier in the center front. The M10 preamplifier is powered by the two, large, black, about 50lb each power supply boxes called Galahads located in the rear. Finally, the M10 preamp is connected, through INDRA interconnects, to the two Kegon 300B single-ended triode amplifiers (whose tubes are plainly visible).]

What we want our systems to do, what this system does for the both of us:

To communicate with our hearts and minds so well, so powerfully, that we are defenseless against it.

Neli says: “Yeah, Neli hates almost all preamplifiers … finally found another one she likes, 3 big boxes, 2 of ‘em heavy boxes, $50K. Verrrry nice linestage. Ack!!!”

Check it out. It is run by the previous Audio Note distributer, ‘Triode Dave’, in the hopes of being able to both provide information on the Audio Note product line as well as insight into The Mind of the Designer.

Believe it, this is going to be interesting.

Why?

Because it is focused, unlike the magazines out there, and

Because it is about high-end audio, unlike most of the forums out there.

The Audio Note News and Answers Blog

It arrived right before we left for the HE 2006 Show and we left it playing while we were there, and for the weeks we have been back.

Still changing on a day-to-day basis…

It looks great on the piano black Harmonic Resolutions Systems’ MXR rack with the gloss black Audio Note 4.1x Balanced DAC and matte black Lamm L2 linestage and power supply.

Soon now we are going to tear apart this very synergistic, or is it synerblisstic, system replacing the front end with the Audio Aero Prestige CD / SACD player.

Why?

1. In order to be able to put the Brinkmann over on the HRS rack with the Lamm LP2 phono preamplifier

AND

2. to put together a 100%, well 90% because we do not have any Audio Note cables here right now, a 90% complete Audio Note system:

Audio Note CDT Three transport
Audio Note 4.1x Balanced DAC
Audio Note M10 preamplifier
Audio Note Kegon amplifiers
Audio Note SEC Silver Signature loudspeakers

and eventually we will have to find a way to get a turntable into listenng room #3 in order to add:

Audio Note M8 Phono preamplifier
Audio Note AN-S4 step-up transformer

All this to ‘Hear What it Sounds Like’.

Ain’t life fun?