[Hopefully, some of these techniques apply to other speakers as well, but regardless, perhaps you might find them interesting as a study in What is Possible with the right design and tools].

This setup in our main listening room is more or less the setup we used at the show [well, the bass towers are on the inside, and there are a few cable changes, but….yeah, the same. Kind of.]

This is part of the Marten ‘Coltrane Supreme’ speaker system. It contains the amp, for the bass towers, and, most important for this current discussion today, the active crossover.

On the back of the active crossover there are controls for the phase and the bass level (volume).

Because we were / are using an integrated amplifier (the Audio Note Ongaku) to drive the main towers, and no preamp in the system, we are forced to change the bass volume every time we change the main volume on the Ongaku.

Turn up the volume on the Ongaku, then turn up the volume on the bass amp. [For some reason, I always think about turning UP the volume, but it is the same when turning down the volume, when and if that ever happens].

So, that is the situation, we are forced to keep adjusting the bass when changing the volume because of this particular system setup we are using.

We keep having to judge what is the EXACT right amount of bass… for a particular volume, and sometimes for a particular song (have to turn it up the bass for reggae, Mon).

OK, here’s the thing. With one person adjusting the bass and others listening to the result, certain behaviors are noticeable.

* The resulting sound is linear, by which we mean that it smoothly changes in response to the change in bass volume… EXCEPT at a particular point

* At this particular point in bass volume, the sound suddenly ‘fills in’. It reminds me of something like an old TV / CRT - like the beginning of Outer Limits - the ‘picture’(i.e. sound) suddenly grows from nothing to fill up the entire soundstage (room?).

* At this particular point, and this is weird [well, it is weird to me, along with being an awesome side-effect] certain in-room distortions disappear.

At this particular point, where the bass level is just so, we could increase the volume to our (my) pain threshold and every note was clear and separated and positioned perfectly - whereas at a lower volume, when the bass was not just so, it was a little bit confused and not completely enchanting, shall we say.

Well, that is all we have to report to this date - we have not tried this here yet, we still have a way to go to position the speakers correctly [ Yeah, we’ve been busy here, which is good, but…]. And we only learned this the last few hours of the show when we felt that it was OK to get a little wild and experiment a little.

Hey I think one lucky room visitor did to hear all this… Perfect Circle, perfectly rendered at 110 - 120dB and something else which I always forget the name of…. But I imagine people outside in the hallway, and in the nearby stairwell between floors, well, not sure WHAT they thought…

Maybe this has to do more with the ears and not room interactions. Maybe we are just nuts. We’ll let you know when we try the same thing here, in a vastly different space.

Generated the different reports with the different sized images, and, oh, I’m tired of working on it. I know I put Thorens instead of Thoress, and forgot the name of the TW Acustic table, but, I just don’t want to regenerate the report again right now. Maybe later.

Concast is either at 110%, blazingly fast, or at 10%, slower than dial-up, or 0%. Hopefully it will finally settle down (at 110% and I’ll do the minor fix update release.

The Apogee, which would have got probably 4th place if we had time to hear another tune on it before we had to move on.

Until then, for those of you who haven’t bee reading it as it unfolded, here is theRMAF Show Report October 2007

[… previously on Audio Federation…]

[… as we return to our story…]

:-)

The Kharma Mini Exquisite speakers [the Lamm ML2.1 amps are out on audition]. At reasonable volumes, this combo is SO seductive.

Sometime we should all have a sit down and talk about what is a reasonable volume. This is probably the area of most divergence among audiophiles, by which I mean some people like it always around 80 - 85 dB and some like it always around 110 dB, and lots like it in between these SPLs. This is a WIDE range, and a system optimized for one level may not necessarily do so great at the other extreme.

The equipment driving the Lamm ML2.1s [The Walker has been moved so that work can be done on the light switches that melted during the lightning strike]

The room from the Kharma’s eye view. Those are the soundlabs in the back there and the red leather command chair in the front.

The equipment driving the Ultimate Soundlabs. Neli set up three digital on this systems: Audio Note, Emm Labs, and Audio Aero for people who want to do a digital player taste test. It is somewhat compromised, everything running through the Audio Aero Capitole CD Player’s built-in preamp, but it does help people understand the CHARACTER of the different player’s sounds.

And the main system upstairs. Still not positioned 100%, as Neli annoyingly reminds me. We just need to play a few dozen records and start the speaker positioning rumba: play, listen, move, listen, move, play something else, repeat.

The 3rd listening room is still a mess: Adagios, our RMAF Audio Note system and rack, trade-in Nolas, DeHavilans, cables galore,…. it is a very expensive Mess.

OK, here is an idea that some smart guy presented to us during the show.

The high-end audio marketplace is splintering into two main product delivery categories.

In the bottom tier, the product (brand) is sold on the internet or through second tier dealers at a discount. Service and support is minimal, and there is lots of used cheap product on the net at an even steeper discount.

In the upper tier, the product (brand) is sold through first tier dealers at little or no discount. Service and support is extremely high, and there is rarely used product on the net and when there is, is at high enough of a percentage of the new price that it tempts people to pay extra to buy new to get the service and support.

Of course, we see this happening all over the place.

A corollary to all this is that brands rarely straddle the two tiers and dealers who carry brands from both tiers will be forced to choose between carrying either exclusively top or exclusively bottom tier products.

It is unclear where music direct and acoustic sounds fits into all this. They offer high price and minimal service. A profitable business model if it is sustainable.

Orthogonal to this is brands moving rapidly through new versions as the manufacturer struggles to stay alive by encouraging people to ‘upgrade’.

One can certainly point to a number of brands that do this all the time, and bottom tier brands with so much product available on the net at such large discounts, what else can they do. [ignoring digital, where the optimal cycle is like two weeks these days of rapid innovation].

Transitioning from the bottom tier to the upper tier takes several years, several years of little or no sales as the supply of cheap product drys up and people stop expecting to being able to buy it at steep discounts.

Anyway, if it isn’t obvious, we are very much a top tier dealer. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

We heard, and are hearing, a lot about how bad the high-end market is these days.

Audio Federation is growing faster than Google, so we are thankfully we are only seeing this second hand. (A big thank you to all you out there, customers, manufactures and people keeping the flame alive)

But we hear concerns about Krell’s health, the deal for Harmon being terminated because there “were material changes that had hurt the company’s business”.

Many, many dealerships are hurting, or just closing their doors altogether.

And there are the explanations: age demographics this, home theater that.

And then there are all the new products hurried to market as people continue to add to the glut of non-selling product out there.

Sounds pretty bad, huh?

Well, I’m here to remind people about cycles. Stock market cycles, real estate cycles, fad cycles, etc. and that stupid and vacuously untrue cliche: it is always darkest before the dawn [seems like it is darkest at midnight, several hours before dawn, but let’s not digress just yet].

Let’s take something most of us are not heavily invested in, like office space. Most cities go through cycles, at at one point they will overbuild office space until there is so much they can’t give it away.

Smart people then go in and buy office buildings at that time. When it looks like the most stupid thing to do ever because there will never be a need for this much office space, ever.

Ever in the foreseeable (aka IMMEDIATE) future.

OK, that is the crux of my argument that It Will Get Better.

But not before it gets worse.

Based on this model, one might expect it to be ‘popular’ knowledge that this industry is not a place to make money and the new products rushed to market are mostly focused to the home theater installer market [designer in-wall speakers, expensive cable tuned specifically for home theater, luxury-class amps designed to be installed in the walls, etc]. We are of course seeing some of that now, for example this post - and almost every speaker and electronics manufacturer, some very recently, offering in-wall and multi-channel versions of their product line.

If our fellow audiophiles in Europe and the Far East weren’t keeping most of these companies going, we’d have seen a mass extinction already.

Now the fun part (for me)

How will the industry come back? Why?

My wild-eyed guess is that the iPod / computer / DVD generation will eventually want good sound.

So in this scenario, the system of the Mary and Joe of the future will be computer (media server) based with a docking station so people can upload and download music into a portable device, and it will be integrated with their video device.

But, a word of caution.

There also exists the ‘buggy whip’ scenario. In this scenario, new homes come with built in systems, with in-wall speakers which are ‘good enough’ for 90% of the population, just like cars come with stereos that are good enough for most people. And when the 10% people upgrade, they just replace these system with other better built-in systems. People will upgrade their home electronics systems like they do their dishwashing machines and cooktops.

Of course, at the bottom of every cycle, in every industry, there is always a ‘buggy whip’ scenario… So who can tell.

Don’t have the lower res photos generated yet, but for the most part, the report has been reported.

Again the link is: Denver Audio Show Report 2007

OK, pith helmets on, annnnnnd…. POST!

Are up on the web… Next, floors 5 and 4.

Nordost ODIN speaker cable

The RMAF 2007 Report

Everybody likes music. And Everybody likes the best quality of reproduction they can afford (with respect to their other priorities in life, like food, heat, kids, and stuff].

So everybody SHOULD be an audiophile.

But a surprising number of people are Luddites - or more correctly, I think, completely ignorant of science and the scientific method [and this includes many PhD’s who pontificate on all sorts of things they do not understand well - drowning us all in the sea of ignorance that has become the internet].

The Scientific Method: People are experiencing phenomena for which there is no explanation. Develop theories and develop experiments to test the theories [high-end audio has no funding, no governmental or corporate grants to do this].

The Let’s Stay Ignorant Method: People are experiencing repeatable phenomena for which there is no explanation. Let’s just declare that the phenomena doesn’t really exist and pontificate endlessly about how it doesn’t exist. It’s not like we are doing anything useful, so we got lots and lots of free time.

These people, when approached with a light bulb - probably mutter to themselves:

“Light bulbs are so obviously a scam. People are so stupid they’ll buy anything.

Scientists don’t even know if light is a particle or a wave!

Yeah, I think I see light sometimes, shadows, colors, all that mumbo-jumbo, but until they figure out what light is, and can explain it to me and my friends, I am not going to spend my hard earned money on light bulb rip-offs. Plain sunlight is AOK with me and my friends.”

[Did I get it right Steve? Seemed like it was funnier at 1am ]

And so on, for other things like Art, Music, Wine, Cars … all lovers of quality are derided by people who seem to be afraid they are missing out on something … but aren’t sure exactly what.

It is fine if one’s priorities do not allow one to dedicate money or time to the pursuit of the ultimate in quality vis-a-vis this or that hobby - but to deny that such qualities even exist - that is Ludditism.

The process is to model how to value, how to score, a system and then let the brain to the math.

For example:

* How much to I want to take this system home and Live With It for a long time? [Is it fun to listen to, but it is too much of a good thing and would sour quickly? Or does it feel like something you have wanted your whole life but did not know it?]

* What emotions does this system instill in me across several types of music? [Uncomfortable? Anxious? Got a headache? Looking around for a vomit bag? Or, perhaps, falling in love with each musician played, and oh how to break it to the spouse?]

* How does this system make me feel about the state of humanity? [Is there hope, or are we doomed with perhaps only days or hours before the end?]

* How does this system make me feel about the skill of the designer? the fabricator? [Is this contraption before your the apex of 10,000 years of civilization, that all the sweat and tears finally culminated in something worthwhile? Or perhaps, scopping back a little from the system because the speakers look like they might fall on you at any moment - and thank goodness for a remote because… are those sparks?!]

* How does this system make me feel about the musicians? [Are they real people? Are they supremely skilled? Are they filled with the emotion appropriate to the song they are singing? Are they just making a buck? Can you even tell? Sometimes this just says something about the musician, not the system. Frank Sinatra, in his later years, came across as bored out of his mind when he sang many songs - really turned me off to his music until I heard him sing when he still had the old fire in the belly]

This system is orthogonal, independent of yet works within the system of the categories of sonic preferences: Real, Impressive, Sweet, Emotive, Magical. It helps us answer: How Impressive? How Sweet?

It does require some introspection of the listener’s part. But the idea of mapping a quantitative question like How Real? to a emotional question, and letting the brains massive computational capability figure out how it ‘feels’ about the question, can help us put in relative terms measurements that we do not know how to measure yet.

This show report will be floor by floor. Floors 9 and 10 are up, more or less, in high res photos. Comcast has been going up and down all day, so not sure all the photos made it, this the second time it has been uploaded.

Hope to have floors 11 and 2 done late tonight / very early morning.

Photo of Constantine Soo’s camera, from Dagogo, taking the same photo I am taking. We’ll link to their report as soon as there is something to link to / my foggy-brain here can find it.

And the link is…. Rocky Mountain AudioFest 2007 Show Report - The Main Reportage