We;ve been playing these CDs that are really pretty well-recorded…

Kind of surprising because they come with our microwavable too-lazy-to-cook Indian-food-in-five-minutes solution. Well, one of our solutions. Whole Foods has at least 3 of these brands of packets… Tasty Bite, something else I forget which is frozen and tastes the best, and this one.

But this comes with a free CD!

And for $299 for dinner AND a CD, that is a decent price don’t you think?

We’ve bought two dinners and got two different CDs so far.

The music is surprisingly well-recorded and is mellow, somewhat like New Age music, except of course, it is supposed to be old age, classical music.

And it has the sitar and other familiar instruments associated with Indian music.

Anyway, I just got the 3rd dinner and am hoping that we get the 3rd CD. I can only assume they put the CDs into the dinners at random, so the odds are somewhat low. But I bought a completely different flavor anyway, hoping to increase my chances

Just saw a copy of the review in HiFi+ of these speakers by Roy Gregory. Thanks mystery friend

Haven’t read the whole thing, but I like where he pointed out the intimate presentation (my words) of these speakers.

The Triolons were larger-than-life, which is not necessarily speaking about the soundstage size, but the overall ‘feeling’ of the presentation. A kind of impersonal presentation. I always felt like an honored guest at the musical event.

The Supremes presentation is more intimate, like the musicians are playing for ME. Much more personal.

I do not think this has to do with their relative size. There are many small speakers that are very impersonal. Some of them make one feel like an unwelcome intruder…

The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest here in Denver is just around the corner. October 12th I think. I hope. Better go look I guess.

Anyway…

We are planning on taking the Coltrane Supremes, like last year. But this time using the Audio Note Ongaku integrated amplifier to drive them. ‘How Sweet it Is!’

We were using the Edge Reference ‘pyramid’ amps you see there in the photo, but not any more, so just delete them somehow with your visual cortex.

The sound is quite sweet and beautiful, the first time we’ve really achieved this with the Supremes (they are finally breaking in, hurray!), which are, to put it simply, the only competent speaker made today. All other speakers have serious flaws in comparison. Not that people don’t LIKE some of the flaws in those other speakers, and they’ve certainly got used to them, but, well, there you have it.

The source equipment consists of the Meitner CDSA and the Audio Note M10 preamplifier. We’re thinking the system may be a little too laid back and are planning on replacing the Shunyata Anaconda Helix Vx with Nordost Valhalla power cords, something closer to the Belden OEM cords the factory recommends , to try to get the system to lively up itself a little bit.

I mean, it is close, but people at shows… its hard to figure them out. Some want rooms to be LOUD and IMPRESSIVE (esp. in this price range ) some want it to be REAL, … etc. just like they do with their own systems. And our goal, and I think we can achieve this, is to make it excel in all categories.

The problem is in the subject flavor - how to flavor the system right… down… the…middle.

To please as many people as possible. And us too!

And then there is the let’s just take the EMM Labs CDSD and DCC2 and the Ongaku and be done with it. No preamps, no second rack. No turntable. No second digital source. … Mt arms feel better already

Of course, there is our second room, the Audio Note room. But that is a small room, a decent-sized system, and adds only a few gray hairs to the noggin.

OK, Comcast was here all day. Our junction box was fried and the Comcast guy a couple of years ago did not ground the cable. Uh, bad.

But we are now up and running (Yay!) and the show report is here:

CEDIA 2007 Show Report

The Comcast guys were all hard-working, friendly guys, but their management is totally confused and unorganized. Surprise… not.

Onward and upward….

OK. I think we’ve finally got this figured out.

You call in a problem.

They send a crew out if it is not raining, dark or Sunday.

They work on the problem.

They go home.

The next day, Comcast updates your account to say everything is A-OK.

Things are not OK.

The crew knew it was not OK when they left. They say that they are going to put in another ticket, or come out again. Yeah. Right.

But, you cannot call them until the next day AFTER they update your account to say it is fixed. Because no matter what, they WILL mark your account as fixed.

OK, you do this.

They send out another crew.

This crew, or guy, has no clue that 5 other crews have been out here working on the problem. That there are several houses that have a problem here. They all start from zero each time.

This is the 7th day Comcast has been down. One of our neighbors uses Comcast VOIP as their phone service, poor chaps.

Hopefully today is THE day….

[Still no Comcastic. It seems the Comcast Confusion is now abating and they now know there is a problem are working on fixing our little neighborhood’s connectivity. When we do get it back, we’ll upload all the big juicy photos. We took almost 700 photos.

The Ongaku, Kharma, Meitner system is OK. One more system to go - unfortunately we suspect that that the Brinkmann Balance turntable may have suffered physical damage as the light switch git blown out the wall and ricocheted off of the platter and ended up 25 feet away in front of the Kharmas. Beezarre huh?. We are insured out the wazoo, as they say, so we are really OK, even if thunder now causes Mike to scoot back away from the windows as far as possible, typing with arms stretched out to the max ]

Saturday was not very busy. The booth people were much more eager to talk to us (anyone!), which is a good thing and bad thing. They have all been friendly this year - though actually asking them questions sometimes reveals them to be kinda clueless (Sony). Maybe we should have started the conversation with ‘We know how to use a browser’ so they don’t just rattle off info that we can easily find on the web.

We probbbly won’t go back Sunday for the last day. We’ve kind of seen everything, several times.

There must have been some kind of survey that indicated that ordinary Mary and Joes think speakers are unattractive - because there were a lot of booths talking about hiding speakers. Here we see Sony and one of their solutions. 450watts split between 5.2 channels, < 10% THD.

Krell’s new Martenesque Duke Ellington-ish Modulari Duo speaker.

The front of the Talon ‘Hawk, Thunder’ loudspeaker

The rear of the Talon speaker showing how one connects to the other.

An outdoor speaker that can handle being a little (a LOT) wet. Sounded pretty gurgley to me. Or is that gargley?

In the Stewart booth, they had a bar with live video - in this case embedded in the actual bar, underneath our drinks. It seemed really cool, and natural, to me. Guess the cost of LCDs and projector technology is getting low enough for all sorts of ‘why didn’t I think of that’ innovations.

Marantz was one of the worst sounds at the show. That is really saying something, too, at THIS show. Again, Totem was sounding fairly good, not just because they don’t suck, but because their booth setup allowed them to screen out a lot of their neighbors noise. Still no picture for the blog, oops.

The Technician Olympics - The AMP THROW competition. Really. Maybe we should start one of these at RMAF? Who wants to donate a couple of amps? Maybe we should have a amp LIFTING competion first?

The new Sony VPL-VW60 $5K 1080p projector, replacement for the VW50.

The big PHC horn speaker. Now THIS can produce dynamic swings and transients - as PHC demonstrated over at T.H.E. Show. The resolution of the mids and highs? Well,….

[Still no Comcast… So miniature photos is what we got for supper again tonight]

The conference was not much busier today than yesterday, it seemed to me, which was different than last year.

But oday, they did not hand the conference microphone to the SpeakerCraft people, at least it sounded like they were from SpeakerCraft, but he was such an exuberant salesman - SHOUTING his enthusiasm, that the SPLs had us all curled up in fetal positions on the floor trying to stuff carpet fibers in our ears - anything to try and protect ourselves from the Onslaught. But seriously, it was LOUD but decipherable as words in some parts of the all, and total noise in others, and in some the volume was just ridiculously loud. I mean, the announcement system is perfect if someone is trying to tell everyone in the hall that there is a fire. It would work fine. Just keep sales people away from it.

Velodyne has a new subwoofer. Looks like it will produce some of dem bass type notes, all right.

A close up of the marketing specs. Of course, who cares about THD? Most poeple probably care about dynamic distortion. But is is not a horn, nor is it pulling 100 amps, so THAT is likely going to be more than 0.5%. But I bet is is something to hear.

Gallo Acoustics’ cute little speakers.

The EDGE Electronics room at T.H.E. with Montana loudspeakers.

The EDGE Electronics room at T.H.E. with Montana loudspeakers.

The HAL Audio Server user interface. Media server user interfaces were all the rage this show. Kind of like an iphone for non-liliputs. Or an iphone for the home. Or for people who have large fingers or bad eyesight. Personally, I am in all 4 of those cagtegories, so these UI’s interest me.

The new Acoustic Zen subwoofer

Phillips had a supersized remote control. Kind of cool to imagine actually using something like this. A remote control for giants. CEDIA is become like Gulliver’s Travels, I guess.

At least some people are looking for some good sound to be associated with good video…

ADAM speakers has a new line for the home. These use a improved Heil driver for the tweeter and midrange.

Another Media Server interface.

Another Media Server interface.

Sonus Fabers new Cremona M

Sonus Fabers new Cremona center channel

Over at T.H.E. Show. [need to insert speaker manufacturer name when brain comes back on line]. The gunshots had WAY too much low bass. Sounded more like close canon fire, the way it punched a person in the chest, or morter fire. Not that I have had direct experience with those events, but I had heard a gun go off before).

Media Max’s Media Server user interface.

So far the Totem booth has the honor of best of show in the main conference, (oops need to put up a photot ot two) and EDGE / Montana at T.H.E. Show (which only has 4 or 5 rooms this year, depending on how you count - though we did not wait in the line for the Maggie / Bryston demo there).

Still no broadband from comcast. Maybe tomorrow. So no large juicy pictures tonight… but here are some nice little tasty ones.

I thought there were more people this year, but after covering more of the show floor, there were strange concentrations of crowds [mostly congregating right in front of the booth I want to photograph, of course:-)], so perhaps it is only about the same. Thursday was kinda slow last year, so we’ll see.

The McIntosh M110 turntable. I think this is new - at least I have never seen one before… so it is new to me!

Another photo… the platter glows with a purple-ish blue-ish tint - which this photo tried to capture. Static display only… like most things at CEDIA… so do not know how it sounds.

Savant had a few of their innovative user interfaces on display. This was a 40 inch LCD touch panel that you could use your finger to tap on or drag around the screen in order to organize and play your collection of movies and music.

Most of their LCDs aren’t this big, they had a number that were around 8 to 12 inches.

Then again, they had this coffee table sized.. coffee table… that was the screen. Not sure what happens when you place your beer on a song when you are watching a movie… but it is so cool! No more remotes on the table, the table IS the remote.

The new Sonus Faber ‘Elipsa’ speaker. THE front.

THE rear. Serial #00001.

Finally, we got some photos of the new Nordost ODIN interconnect. Note the signature decorative wooden block.

It is quite a bit thicker than their Valhalla interconnects.

And the Odin braiding is different, more regular, and appears tighter.

More Odin’y eye candy

And more…

A lot of the show looks just like last year (and CES this January). Kind of dissapointing. But, like the stuff in this post, there are some new goodies. And, you know us, we like the goodies

… or 42.6 Kbps on the dialup connection… whoo hoo!

Well, we got hit by lightning late yesterday afternoon. Well, not us, thankfully, but our house.

It came and smacked the front of the house, about 20 feet from the window I was sitting at, at one of the corners of our hexagon-ish walls, came in and attacked a light fixture in our hallway and ran down the ground into listening room two, melting the ground and ‘hot’ wires together, and blew out the light switches across the room so that 30 feet away the Kharmas now have light-switch-pieces in front of them.

It looks like we lost 4 TVs, the ovens, Neli’s computer , my computer’s networking, the Nordost Vidar cable burner, ….

We also lost cable and phone, though the phone is now working (the 4 wires just melted at the box outside so it was an easy fix).

The Coltrane Supreme system works, the small Audio Note system was unplugged, the rack with the Walker and M10 was unplugged. The rest - well, I am a little trepidatious about testing it all out - but Neli is game…

We were lucky. In a lot of ways.

None of the systems were ‘on’ - because we’ve been getting so many lightning storms this week, we got tired of turning things off and on and off and on. But we had grown lax, just turning things off, not unplugging them like we usually do. Oops.

Funny, this lightning storm gave little or no warning. Usually the thunder gets louder and Louder and LOUDER until we can’t stand the suspense and turn everything off and unplug it.

This time, it was like nothing… distant rumbles… BLAM! and then it was over.

So anyway, cable is out (i.e. broadband network connectivity). Neither of our main computers can talk to the net anymore, even if the cable was working. I am typing this on our ‘out-of-town show reporting laptop’, which is OK but not sufficient for a whole show report. We got a Mac somewhere - but that’ll be worse (no photoshop on it, for one, and an even smaller keyboard).

And guess what? We have a show tomorrow. CEDIA 2007.

So, the plan is to transfer photos to my main computer, process them, the put them on DVD and transfer them to this laptop, which hopefully will upload them over the cable, that will be working sometime soon, we hope.

Well, I guess that there will be fewer pictures during the show and until we get computers that are both capable of processing several gigabytes of JPEGs …and … connecting to the net.

Maybe we’ll also post a few photos of the smoked switches and boards hanging off the side of the house - but I think you all understand now why there aren’t any in THIS post.

But seriously, we were lucky. Especially me, who was sitting in the symetrical location in the window across from the strike. And the house did not catch fire. And the circuit breaker blew after the first leg of the circuit melted, trapping the major damage to the hallway circuit. All of the equipment was off, (except the Vidar) and lots unplugged.

So, fingers crossed, hopefully the rest of the gear is AOK.

Kind of messes with your head, this stuff does…

Anway, next post: CEDIA 2007!

Kharma Mini Exquisite speakers on Audio Note Ongaku, driven by Meitner CDSA CD / SACD player, 100% cabled by Jorma Design Prime cables.

Very small, very exquisite system.

Upstairs we had the player across the room, so always connected it to the system using he 10m Valhalla interconnects. So this was the first time we heard the Kharma speakers, and later the Marten Coltrane speakers, in a 100% Jorma Prime system.

Yummy.

Sonically, it was just more of what we heard upstairs, taken to a higher level. Specifically, more PRESENCE. Voices were just THERE. Bass seemed even tighter as well, though that might be the smaller room.

The chairs are turned away so that people can hear the Soundlab system in this photo.

Later, we put the Martin ‘Coltrane’ speakers in this system. First time we heard the Ongaku on the Coltranes. Compared to the Kegons, the Ongaku seems to control different frequencies, … differently. It is sweeter than the Kegons - but not sweet in the sense of warm, but perhaps in the sense of more color, and a better sense of the ‘right’ note decay.

The Kharma and Marten are worlds apart in this kind of uber-system, and, to generalize, the Marten in a more neutral speaker, more even top to bottom, soundstage behind the speakers, and the Kharma is a more exuberant speaker, very high-resolution in the mids and upper mids, soundstage in front of the speakers, and probably can’t be beat on vocals.

Also, the Kharmas prefer larger rooms and the Coltranes smaller.

Again, just generalizing.

The soundlabs!

Finally, the SoundLabs get a chance to breathe…. Nice to have them back out from behind the Coltrane Supremes…

And speaking of the Supremes… here we see them all nicely polished up by Neli.

The aesthetic of these speakers, tall vertical, wooden, in this room with its tall vertical wooden beams - is striking now that we are getting used to the whole idea that they are FINALLY up here.