Everybody else see this new, online magazine by Absolute Sound and HiFi+?

Playback Magazine

It has a magazine-like layout. Curious as to what people think about the presentation.

The content? It seems to be the standard fare.

Kind of duplicating the whole process that we took with the UN-broken in Odin, 1st one interconnect, then the speakers cable, then as a digital cable, for a 100% ODIN solution.

Immediate impressions similar to the first time:

Louder
Bigger
More dynamic
More balanced
More resolution

New things I noticed:

Really engrossing. After checking the imaging and soundstaging out [It is awesomely clear and stable. Apparently, the better the cables, the less awkward the positioning is, positioning being just being a way to use a room to compensate for problematic system components and cables. Goes against established truths, I know, but…] I got bored and just listened and spaced out - but was drawn back to the performance.

The gestalt was very much that this was a ‘Performance… For… Me’. Or perhaps a ‘Creation’ for me [being that Radiohead KidA was one of the CDs, that being much more of a creation than a performance, and Neli having lost my *2nd* copy of Radiohead Amnesiac. Well, if I can’t find it, it is by definition LOST. ].

Even on classical music, the variations on a theme were almost playful, the clarity of purpose of the composer revealed in a way that did not require intellectual participation - or less so anyway. Just like our systems bring us to greater depths of enjoyment and appreciation compared to a decent car stereo, so do these cables.

OK, trying to stay away from the generalizations here. My text is and should always be too terse to be classified as hyperbole, hopefully, but as a hifi system’s clarity [separation, correct note formation blah blah blah] brings us more enjoyment than a system, like my car stereo, that has good tone, modest separation, and is enjoyable [as one can indeed determine and enjoy the melody is that is playing], so a system with really quality components, properly cabled, can give us an equally improved experience compared to that system with more modest cables.

It is THAT big of a difference.

It is THAT addicting.

I, personally, have only felt this way a few times before. Well, only once, when I met the Audio Note U.K. Kegons for the first time [the Coltrane Supremes speakers made us hallucinate, kind of scary, and anyway, hallucinogenics aren’t addicting - and the Triolons were kind of just much better Campaniles - and the original Cogent horns… well, that is too close to call but they certainly had their problems].

The Coltrane Supremes are like food and water. Not much choice if we want to have competent sound reproduction as part of our lives. But, when it comes to the choices we get to make….

I will NOT live without my Kegons (or Ongaku. or Gaku On. But you get what I mean).

And I will NOT live without my [sorry Neli, OUR ] Odin cables.

You know, it might be a good thing that most high-end audio dealers suck. Otherwise, in Central Park, people’d get mugged by people wanting money not to buy drugs, but buy $16K interconnects. And $57K amps. And 3-box line-stages….

The Vidar has little lights, four of them, that light up after each stage has been completed, from left to right. Three are lit up at the present time, as seen in the photos.. Each pass takes about a day to complete.

There are another set of LEDs for the speaker cable section. Here we see them without a flash and in full, albeit somewhat blurry, color.

I’m glad we spent a few days listening to the ODIN cables before we put them on the burner. Otherwise, I’d never have the patience to sit through these last eight days.

Interesting to see how much difference their is to the sound of the cables.

Every time I hear the systems without them, I think about how it would sound with them. Especially when we have people up here who really emphasize soundstaging.

We don’t, ourselves, and we have been moving things around and testing various amps / preamps, digital on the Coltrane Supremes and Kharmas, etc. And, of course, different equipment is going to want the speakers to be in different positions (optimally).

But we have been focusing on overall musicality and not precise soundstaging and imaging. This is where people have it a lot easier in their own homes, where they do not change out equipment every day or so. Then again, they never get to optimize the sound of their system like this either - just their soundstaging.

Anyway, Nordost Odin DOES soundstaging unlike anything else - and this would be a great way for us, as a dealer, to get darn good soundstaging without having to spend the time to reposition the speakers after every little change to a system. [And, truth to tell, this changing equipment around, seeing what different combos sound like gets old after awhile. Not just because equipment is HEAVY, but they all treat ground differently *hummmmmmm*, with different gains and different power cording requirements… its a lot of work].

One more day… what to do…. maybe we should put the Audio Note Kegons on in place of the Edge upstairs on the Supremes….?

The Audio Note M10, the no holds barred, can’t catch this, state-of-the-art line-stage moved on [no, we’re not happy about this. I mean, we ARE, but,…. we’re not. If you know what I mean.] to a new home, Audio Note’s latest U.S. dealer, HiFiAV Supplies in New York City. They are Audio Note dealers from way back and we are happy to have them back again. They also happen to be fluent in Chinese [Mandarin and/or Cantonese, I don’t know] - kinda makes me feel that maybe I should be fluent in a language someday, like English maybe? Nahhh….

The main system this morning.

The main system this evening.

At least no components are in front of the speakers…. at the present time.

Day 5 of the Odin burn-in, got 3 more days to go…. tickety tock tickety tock

OK, seems like we have to do this periodically.

Emails to us have been bouncing for some unknown reason. Sometimes. We are working on it. Our website’s host is working on it.

Until these occasional glitches are wiped out, or just go away, the email addresses that should always work are:

cstinchcomb@earthlink.net (Neli’s email. Her name is really Cornelia [pretty huh?], and her previous last name was Stinchcomb).

and

justacoder@earthlink.net [This is me]

OK, sorry for this interruption. We now return you to our previously scheduled program.

Six moons recently posted their RMAF show report by Marja and Henk.

They said nice things about our room. Of course, they said nice things about E-v-e-r-ybody’s room [but Neli tells me it is just that they are more subtle than my ‘most horrible of show’ approach ].

But they said extra super special nice things about our room, [so we can tell they liked ours the best ], and we appreciate it. Thanks you two.

It was in the style of the very large reports Srajan used to write. In fact, it may have been larger, being almost(?) comprehensive. Now please, please, please do these kind of reports for the shows in Europe that are under-reported on so we can see what is going on at those other shows [Seems like every country in the E.U. has their own show… that’s a LOT of shows. And yes, we peer intently at those other reports of shows we don’t attend (and even the ones we do )… maybe not with a magnifying glass… well, maybe not all the time with a magnifying glass…. ].

Josh at Sonic Flare is back to posting their “room a day report” of the RMAF 2007 show. I can’t decide if this is a brilliant use of content, or doomed to wear thin in the context of people wanting their news to be kind of reported soon after its occurance.

At this rate, with 140 rooms at RMAF and 200+ rooms at CES 2008, by the time these show reports are done it will be time for RMAF 2008…

Anyway, another report with detailed information and analysis and with nice things to say about all the rooms.

My poor ears, they hear various problems with all the systems at shows, unfortunately - some serious and some forgivable - as well as various things they may do better than anyone else, all in the context of what have learned to be several, linearly independent, categories related to people’s sonic preferences.

Maybe I am just too darn picky.

But truth be told - this learning to differentiate the large number of subtle variations between good and bad is one of the things that can make life so rich and interesting - and the only way I know to appreciate the true artisans in this world, who spend their lives perfecting their art, whether they be musicians, painters, martial artists, manufacturers, or just people who make their profession being nice and good hearted. [Add fine furniture and autos here too - except Lamborghinis, Coltrane Supremes beat them out . Kind of straying away from talking about show reports to talking about life, and politics kind of, in case you haven’t noticed ].

Boy, if I could just get rid of this pickyness life sure would be a lot less expensive around here. Of course, Neli is picky too, …really, REALLY picky …so she would need to Just Stop It. [Yeah, Neli, just cut it out…:-) .. Yeah. Right. Someone else is going to have to try and convince her… .]

So, until then…. hee hee hee …. Norodst ODIN is still burning in, and then we have the Audio Note SOOTOO to burn in, and then….

The Nordost Vidar cable burner arrived back yesterday from its repair after the lighting strike.

So just some photos. We got about 8 days of burning in to do.

We did manage to get the two sets of interconnects and the one pair of bi-wire speaker cables on at one time.

The lights go blinky blinky as the Vidar works.

Are they done yet? Are they done yet?

… if 4 days of burning in equals one century of playing, then 3.75 hours of burn-in equals…. well they must be burned in pretty good already, right? Right???

OK. I’ve said it. Wanted to say it for a long time. Whew! That feels better. Well, a tiny wee little bit better.

I will refrain from disparaging the mental prowess of the person who came up with it, or much worse, the industry that continues to promulgate it.

For those of you who can’t imagine using anything else, think about this:

Spades… fall .. off. Well, not very often, that is because we tighten the fastener, jiggle the cable a little, tighten some more, jiggle some more, … until we hope no one moves anything or walks near anything. Anything which might, over time, jiggle the cables loose and caBLAM something shorts out and there is a big mess of a bill to pay.

The solution?

Replace ‘C’ shaped spades with one shaped like an ‘O’, i.e. a washer. Reduce the mass of the washer (and of the fasteners) if you want to improve the sound while your at it.

Won’t jiggle loose. No having to tear skin twisting the fasteners so very, very tight. Sleep better at night. Reduces stress while re-re-re-positioning of the speakers.

And it will work with 99% of the binding posts out there.

Only company I have seen do this is Acapella, and only with their cables hard-wired to the speaker crossovers [and they use a loop of braided conductor, not a washer-like doohickey].

The fact that the E.U., worried that children might receive .00001 volts by touching an exposed binding post, made manufacturers shield binding posts with plastic, but still let the children pull loose the spades and ruin $100K pieces of equipment just shows how much this industry is used to walking lemming like over the cliff of unintentional short-circuits.

OK. Get on it you cable manufacturers you.

Well, moving the equipment back about 3 or 4 inches away from in front of the speakers solved most of the sibilance problem [note to Mike: do not put equipment in front of speakers] … could probably move it back further… but too impatient and went on to the next experiment and put the Audio Note M10 3 box linestage in the system replacing the 2 box Lamm L2.

Oops, the CDSA is back in front of the speakers again. Well, what can I do? In the short term I mean. Eventually we could put up high rises (racks), overpasses (elevators), bypasses (longer runs of cables, especially power cords in this case), etc. But for now, we just listen.

Emm Labs CDSA CD/SACD player in front, Audio Note M10 line stage (center) and its power supplies (flanking) in the second row, Marten crossover and bass tower amp with Edge Signature One amps flanking.

Neli wants me to remind people that she is not inn favor of the CDSA player being in front of the left channel bass tower that way.

The system sounds bigger, stronger, more forceful with the M10 linestage. This is more of a ‘room pressurizing’ big overwhelming sound than the more measured stately sound of the Lamm L2 linestage.

The Marten Coltrane Supremes at morning

The Marten Coltrane Supremes at morning. The redishness is the sun reflecting off of our bright red leather couch.

Teck, from Singapore, played a female vocals CD in our room, and likely a few lucky other rooms as well, at RMAF, and kindly and generously sent us a copy of it:

And, uh, it is surprisingly difficult to render well. The second track, specially, the singer has lotssssssss of sssssss’s in her ssssssinging that can caussssssse ssssssibliance when played back [i.e. sharp S sounds instead of delicate, sweet s sounds]. Luckily, the completely optimized system we took to the show played everything perfect, but some of our experimental systems, that otherwise play flawlessly [more or less] have difficulty here, and truth to tell, the playback in general on this CD could be better.

I think the answer will turn out to be a combination of the fact that we are playing it LOUD [what? L-O-U-D!!! Anybody else have these strange conversations when the music is loud? That usually end in “Forget it. I’ll Tell!… You!… Later!…”. “WHAAAAT!?”], the equipment is sitting very nearly right in front of the speakers, and the bass needs adjusting because the room is so large - we got used to using an integrated, and I do not think we have used solid-state on the main towers for over a year.

So we struggle, changing power cords, cleaning the CD, changing cables etc. to try and figure out what thing[s] are responsible. Everything to avoid having to move things or put a rack between the speakers [on the other hand, Neli is happy as a clam to have Mike move things, including racks, to and fro, fro and to].

System 1

Lamm L2 linestage’s power supply

Lamm L2 linestage. Just about everything is on HRS M3 Isolation Bases.

Emm Labs CDSA CD / SACD Player.

Anyway, that is what’s happening here. The Vidar has not yet arrived so we are not burning in anything that needs to be burned in. So, we are circling the field waiting to land.

System 2

Audio Note Ongaku integrated amplifier

Audio Note DAC 4.1x Balanced

Audio Note CDT Three transport

And, yes, Teck, your other CD arrived to [Thanks SO much!]. But, uh, I accidentally left it in the Emm Labs CDSD SE which, uh, is unplugged and at the moment away from an outlet, and I need to find a power cord for it somewhere [can I use a stock $2 Belden power cord? Of Course Not ] and plug it back in so I can eject the CD [See, I TOLD you all that I do this ALL THE TIME. Don’t know what it is… some kind of curse because I ‘let’ Neli clean all the CDs (and records, too) or something… ]

We like the CDs. We are certainly playing them a lot. The soundtrack is a little like the Gladiator soundtrack… I mean, doesn’t it seem like soundtracks have their own genre -they’re not classical and they’re not pop. Cool depth of field though, and amazing drums.