[Yes, still working on the show report. Taking a break here tho…whew!]

We setup the show system back in our living room with a few changes:

* Using a 2 meter Valhalla instead of a 1.5 meter Jorma Prime interconnect which we had borrowed for the show (thanks Dan!).
* Putting the bass towers inside of the main towers.

We wanted a wider soundstage than what we were getting here, in our room which is narrower than the room at the show. As long as we keep the bass towers back far enough, and close enough to the main towers, it shouldn’t mess up the imaging… much. And it doesn’t, at least with the 1/2 hour of modest volume testing we have had time to do so far. Did make the soundstage quite a bit wider

And, no, before anyone asks, the vacuum cleaner is NOT a secret tweak of ours. Really. It’s not.

We also have, finally!, got the MXR rack and Brinkmann Balance turntable upstairs in the main listening room. Looks awesome there. Seems to sound pretty good too, but, like we said above, we have only just started optimizing this setup.

Another photo of the system.

…. now comes photoshop…

I expect about 500 - 750 photos will make the cut.

We were up to 2:30am packing and crating… but we didn’t stop playing music till 6:00 so we got a late start…(show closed at 4pm)

Then from about 9 to 1 packing the truck, and after the hour drive home, *I* am eating breakfast. And going thru my 150 emails that I ignored for 3 days.

This year we crated everything… which takes a LOT longer than just wrapping it in bubble wrap or towels or something…. but it did allow us to partake of the services of a bellhop who was in any case quite careful with things (thanks Samir) which sped things up a lot.

Great show, and we learned a lot about controlling room? distortion a very loud volumes and manipulating soundstage height, a lot more about speaker placement for this particular speaker, with a little help from our friends (thanks Dan) and toys (the background noise from I25 traffic was about 60dB - with the windows closed).

Much more later, but I better go help move things up the stairs - it would be great if we can get these speakers (re) setup tonight.

P.S.

It took from 2:00 to 6:00 to get the show equipment out of the truck and up the stairs (thanks Jim!)

I am telling you all this because maybe you are interested and so that next year we can look at this blog post and align our expectations a little closer with reality in terms of how long all this stuff takes [I always think, and tell Neli, “oh, it’ll just take and hour or so to unload the truck, yada yada yada… “. Oops].

Getting some photos up finally. Been very busy in our room.

A few photos up at :

We got an early date to hear the Nordost ODIN up close and personal… so, maybe we should sleep tonight?

Doesn’t this look empty?

Down these stairs…

.. into the 10ft rental truck that can make it up the driveway…

And into the room. At this point the Coltrane Supremes were out of their crates. Leif (of Marten) and Jorma (of Jorma Design) - we miss you guys! - were not here this year so it takes us hours instead of minutes for the crating and uncrating task Those guys are the like the pros at the Indianapolis 500 and we are like bumpkins in Model T’s… but we DO get there.

The new HRS SXR rack in a side by side, 3 shelf tall configuration.

A cartridge getting mounted in our hotel-turned-mad-scientists laboratory.

The room awaiting the start of the show… though most of yesterday we had so many friends stop by and help us listen to different speaker positions, cables, pink noise, Radiohead,… that it kind of all started yesterday.

The equipment rack…. yes we brought the Brinkmann Balance turntable, Laurence Along with the Lamm LP2 phono stage, and Emm Labs CDSD Signature and DCC2 signature.

… going into the hard core addictive Audio Note Ongaku.

The configuration is … running the CDSD optiically into the DCC2, and the turntable thru 10 feoot Valhalla interconnect, the the DCC2 direct, no preamp into the Marten crossover, which is piped into the Ongaku. What this means is that volume is changed using both the Ongaku (which is an integrated) for the midrange and highs and the Marten box (active crossover and bass amp) for the bass. And the DCC2 is acting as a passive switching box as well as a DAC so we can remotely switch between the turntable input and the digital input.

Confused? You should be here. It don’t get less confusing here either - but it sounds great.

what this allows us to do is use short lengths of very good interconnect (Jorma Design ‘Prime’) for the digital as it goes from DAC to crossover to Ongaku, minimize the number of preamps (one for the upper frequencies and one for the bass), and still have the transport and turntable in the rear of the room and away from vibrations and distracting people with our long pauses between songs if we had walk up to the front to change a CD orLP (unless we want to change the volume. How much a pain this is with two volume controls in the front of the room like this we will soon find out).

We got this player in a few months ago. Its only about $3500, but… for my money, this is all the player you need unless you want to go up to the $9+K range of the Audio Aero Capitole / Prestige and Emm Labs CDSA and the other Audio Note players. [Yes, I know there are others, but pay attention to what I am saying, not my memory-challenged brain… ]

So much music!

Here are a few photos….

In this price range you just don’t get soul-rendering detail and finesse and harmonic structure. Sorry. [So many people believe that if they just buy enough of the players in this price range, they will find THE ONE that is as good as the $10K+ crowd but sells for 1/4 the price it could bring in a market economy. And they are not just looking for stupid manufacturers who make wonderful CD players either - but wonderful stupid amp manufacturers and speaker manufactures and … ]

But what you do want at this price range is livability, enjoyability, musicality, harmonic insight, everything a person needs who wants to listen to music and is not obsessed with having the BEST they can afford (or not afford as the case may be for all of us pushing the limits of fiscal responsibility),

This player. This is what I would have if I weren’t crazy.

In the Audio Note room this year we are planning on a modest system comprised of pieces totally about $15K + turntable cartridge step-up transformer and cables and rack.

Audio Note AN/E Spe HE
Audio Note OTO Phono SE
Audio Note TT2 turntable with Arm Three
Audio Note AN-S4 moving coil step up transformer
Audio Note IO1 moving coil cartridge
Interconnect: Audio Note AN-Vx
Speaker cable: Audio Note Lexus XL
Acoustic Dreams 4-shelf equipment rack
Audio Note CD 2.1X/II CD Player

Anyone else using the new MS Word? It comes with your new PC (remember, ours got fried by lightning, so we both got a new one), even if you do not get Vista (which I didn’t). There is no ‘Save As’ option so I had to go out and into Windows Explorer and manually copy and rename the file. Geez.

We will be taking photos, we hope, during the show.

The (currently empty) main page of the show report is showing our room this year. Hey, why not? I never seem to get a chance to take a photo of the hotel itself from the outside, with the mountains in the background - which would be my first choice. Maybe this year I’ll get outside? With the camera?

Only other show report I could find was EnjoyTheMusic. Hmmmmm…..

Supposed to be 130 room this year compared to 100 last year. Let’s hope people come. But it’ll be fun in any case. And lifting all this gear up and down the stairs, and setup at the show, is great exercise - Neli and I are always a lot skinnier when we get back from these things.

… is shaping up…

We are now running the Emmlabs CDSD transport through 10m long optical cables to the DCC2 DAC/Pre into the Marten Coltrane Supremes Crossover/ Bass amp into the Audio Note Ongaku and finally to the Marten Supreme speakers.

The key is that the cables are all Jorma Design Prime and one Stealth INDRA interconnect. Less cable, better cable, sound.

Now. This sounds better. But is REALLY sounds better running the DAC direct to the Marten box, not going through the DCC2’s preamp.

When I say ‘really sounds better’, it is both somewhat subtle and somewhat not subtle at all. There is an energy that was present without the extra preamp in the loop that was amazingly hypnotic… but it is hard to hear this when just listening to frequencies and dynamics and other audiophile-type attributes. I guess that is why we call it magic.

Anyway, without the preamp, to change the volume requires changing the main tower volume on the Ongaku and the bass volume on the Marten box. We are running with unity gain into the Marten box, but the bass volume knob works really well. Neli think this is too weird for a show. I think it is no weirder than having two knobs, one for each (left and right) channel, We just have a top and bottom channel instead.

But is is a pain to walk up to the front in a large room like we have at RMAF and adjust the volume all the time, along with syncing up the bass volume to the midrange volume - so it is unclear if we will use the optimized setup at the show (and we want to support use of a turntable as well). But when we get back… This is just too good to pass up.

………and then perhaps swapping out the INDRA for more Jorma ‘Prime’ cable, or Nordost ODIN, or Audio Notes new SOTTO …. How much fun!

We purchased a LG 20 inch LCD TV to replace our old Sony 13 inch CRT that got lightninged. [Firefox thinks lightninged is a real word, cool].

The picture is really pretty good - and I watch it from about 2 - 3 feet away, as it is on my desk to keep me company during those long hours on the computer.

But the sound sucks. SUCKS. It is so tinny, and frequency limited. It is pit-eeee-full.

And it has no stereo output jacks either. Oops. Usually I remember to check for this but, well, age takes its toll.

So anyway, I decided to use a trick I used in College, and take the output from thbe headphone jack and run that into the stereo (such as it is, a Lexicon DC-1 that is still working, amazingly enough - our MC-1 spontaneously died, the POS, POS defined as the repairs costing as much as a used one, about 10% of the orig $6500 price, plus upgrades like $100s to ‘fix’ DTS, which never worked in the first place - running into self power Yamahahaha speakers, througb Nordost Quatro Fil interconnect that I bought way back before we started Audio Federation, off of alt.rec.audiomarketplace or something).

And, lo, this jack to get the audio from the computer to the stereo happened to be lying on my desk - my desk is very cluttered with such things.

Works great. BETTER than the audio straight out of the Sony Blu-ray BDP-S1 player, (IT has stereo out), in fact. Not much better, but hey, it is WAY better than the sound coming out of the microscopic speakers in this LCD TV.

Whew! It was really driving me nuts.

And, yes, that is the last episode of the Season 1 DVD of Heroes on the TV there. Thanks, Steve for recommending it. It was great!