[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….

Here are some pics of the player…

Sorry for the blurry text (Oh. Wait. With my glasses on it is actually more or less readable). The player has both analog out (RCA and XLR) and digital out (Toslink and Coax at 16 bit/44.1 Khz).

On the newer player, one can chose to lift ground or not. Haven’t had any need to use this feature yet… but hey, you never know…

The controls on the left side…

… and the right.

We only heard it a little while - and it needed to be warmed up and to be played awhile and broke-in in. Given all this, it sounded pretty darn good.

Wish we had got to keep it here a little longer - but it weren’t our player for very long (Thanks, T.A. !).

The tubes on the Audio Aero Prestige monoblock amplifers give off a rather uncommon white light. So we just had to take some pictures…

The amps were moved downstairs and put on the Marten Coltrane / EDGE/ Lamm / Audio Note system. They do quite well with these speakers - despite the low impedance in the speaker bass frequencies and the minimal 40 watts per channel from the amps.

The amps are actually swapper here in these pictures - usually, putting the left amp on the left would have the tubes be on the ‘outside’ of the amps from the perspective of the listening position - whereas here they are on the inside.

The Prestige is better sounding than the Capitole.

What a relief.

You know, we really like the Capitole (especially me). So much of the competition that is supposed to be ‘better’ sound like a lot of digititus to me: heavy on the detail, light on the music.

But the Prestige had sounded pretty darn good at CES… but that was over a year and a half ago. And there had been rumours that they had made some changes since then…

But, no, all is OK. This thing really sounds pretty good.

In comparison with the Capitole:

A tighter denser soundfield. More solidity. More coherence. More transparency. More real.

More detail but NOT at the expense of the music.

More midi and micro-dynamics. About the same macro-dynamics - which has always been one of the premiere features of the Capitole.

Warmth is about the same, … well, maybe a little less. Still has that analog-like romantic tinge to it.

Tighter in the bass. Much. Much more detail. Which is a good thing… and it was one of the few weaknesses of the Capitole that its bass did not have enough detail for some people, but….Actually I am hoping and anticipating that the bass loosens up a little more over time (the Capitole took awhile too, about 6 weeks or so). Just a little. There is this balance - between detail and control in the bass yet a natural looseness that makes it all sound real - can’t describe it, but you know it when you hear it (the Audio Note U.K. Kegons amplifiers got it in spades).

Just one compaint.

Why do all these SACD players have to be so SLOW? Yes, they have to scan the disc dozens of times to determine which kind of redbook format the CD is recorded in, and then to determine if it is also an SACD. But, geez.

No, it is only marginally slower than the Meitner. And not as bad as the Sony SCD-1 as I remember it. So it is not unusually slow. What IS unusual is for the person putting in the CD (for exmaple, me!) to be of the patient, I’ve got 5 to 10 seconds to spare, variety of audiophile.

So, ***drum roll please*** …

Presenting the New World Champion of the Single Box Players (and it even plays SACD)….. The Audio Aero Prestige.

I like it.

As we mentioned last time, we decided to move the Audio Aero Prestige CD/SACD Player downstairs and put it on the Sound Lab U1 system in place of the Audio Aero Capitole.

The equipment rack with the Prestige on the bottom shelf (hey, at least this one is a front-loader) topped by the Brinkmann Balance and Walker Proscenium Gold turntables. We run the turntables through the linestage built into the Prestige (and previously the Audio Aero Capitole).

A closeup of the Prestige with HRS damping plate on top.

Underneath the Prestige, with HRS triple-tall Nimbus feet - notive the black diamond racing cones are still attached.

The new solid metal, heavy weight, remote control for the Prestige.

A close up of the remote control.

A close up of the remote control logo.

Next… sonics. Hint, its a across the board improvement compared to the Capitole, and this from an avowed Capitole lover, me.

With the caveat that the Meitner is 50% more expensive than the Prestige, we will try to provide some illumination on our impressions of the differences and similarities of these two CD/SACD players… both with built-in linestages.

The Prestige is still not quite broken in but it does have about 600 hours on it - and the Meitner CDSD tranport has an upgrade which we have not had here yet. But I think we can say something about their relative sonic attributes.

In comparison with the Meitner the Prestige has about the same soundstaging and imaging capabilities, though perhaps a little higher noise floor and a little less detail - as one might expect from a tube output stage - lending to a little bit of fog between the musicians in the sound field.

In some sense the Prestige is more enjoyable to listen to, presenting the music with an enthusiastic and optimistic attitude, with a slight exaggeration of various tonalities lending it an ‘analog warmth’. This seems to me to be much more so than the Capitole, which had an ‘analog-like’, somewhat accentuated, macro dynamic attack but not so much of the wonderful micro-dynamic attack and inner warmth of the Prestige… at least that’s what I am hearing, anyway.

The way I think of it is that the Prestige sounds like the way music sounds after a half (YMMV) glass of wine. The Meitner sounds like the music does when stone-cold sober.

The Meitner sounds real, like it really sounded like in the studio. It is a wayback machine with frequently astonishing capabilities - like having the awesome privilege of having a special ticket to attend, in person, the recording sessions of your favorite music.

And for those who have not heard the Meitner and hear something completely different than what I hear when listening to live sound, whether in a studio or elsewhere - this is not the overly etched, harsh, in-your-face dante-reality of the accuracy-must-mean-extreme-exaggeration-of-treble-attack-and-decay-so-it-sounds-like-delta-function-hell situation here. This is the ‘you are there, believe it or not, this is what the musicians cum studio engineer actually sounded like’ show.

The Prestige sounds like music, like the way music is supposed to sound. Enjoyable, a smile and toe-tapping required (in this toe-tapper sense I felt it was better than the Meitner - but we have yet to try the HRS Nimbus trick on the DCC2, so stay tuned), beautiful with all the detail and coherency and clarity that our minds want, along with all the juice that our hearts want.

So, really, it is up to each of us to choose our poison, or, actually, to choose our preferred elixir.

Next: The Audio Aero Prestige vrs the Audio Aero Capitole.

Party on, Garth!

Before we get to the comparisons…

We put the Prestige up on the HRS Nimbus ‘’feet’ which helped dial in the Prestige as it was sitting on the HRS M3 Isolation Base.

Here is the Prestige up with the 3 black diamond racing cones that come with the Prestige as their standard feet lying in front of the Prestige.

More pictures of the Prestige and the HRS Nimbuses, which in this picture were put under the place where the Black Diamond Racing cones usually go, abd you can see that the screws that stick out and screw into the cones are now sticking into the Nimbuses.

We changed this in the current configuration to put the Nimbuses in a configuration so that they would not get stuck… But we haven’t done a sonic comparison to determine any differences besides the aesthetic.

The Audio Note Kegons are also up on Nimbuses…

Just an FYI, here are the controls on the left side control panel of the Prestige

And on the right side…

Sonically, this improved the clarity, lowered the noise floor tremendously, and made the Prestige competitive with the Meitner, albeit with an entirely different sonic flavor. More on the comparison next, and as we moved the Prestige downstairs in preperation for the weekend’s (and Monday’s (today)) guests, replacing the Audio Aero Capitole with the Prestige in the SoundLab U1 / EDGE system, we can now also report at some length on the differences we hear between the Capitole and the Prestige.

Yeah, yeah, everyone wants to know how it sounds and how it compares to the Meitner…

So do we!

You can really tell it is still breaking in because everyday it sounds… different from the day before. One day is is bright. The next it is over-damped. Tomorrow… ?

And, like everyone else, there is some trepedation on our part that it will get ’stuck’ with of these abnormal personailities and be done breaking in, stuck in a less-than-optimal ‘gear’.

But the Capitole takes about 6 weeks before it settles down (usually, but sometimes it seems to break in much more quickly (!?)) so we are trying to be patient.

And the sound is converging towards something very… I would say analog. It doesn’t have the detail of an LP, of course (nothing digital has that much resolution, …so far, anyway), but there is this feeling, this kind of warmth that is not like tubes and not like anything else but vinyl. I know, it is kind of weird - but the Capitole was somewhat like this, at least dynamicaly, and the Prestige seems like it is following in its footsteps - but more so…

At least today it does.

We have a pair of the yummy Audio Aero Prestige monoblock amplifers here on loan. We’ve had their baby brother, the Audio Aero Capitole 50 watt stereo amplifier here for a few years and loved it - so we have high-expectations for these puppies.

Here are some pictures…

More on how they sound later (they are however, largely unbroken-in, and we need to fit them in between auditions… too many things breaking in at once makes for not-so-nice listening sessions)….

Meanwhile the Prestige SACD/CD player in continuing to break-in quite nicely.

Got the new player in… was it yesterday?

Here are some pics:

The player is sitting on an HRS Isolation Base and has a HRS damping plate on top.

You can see here that the Prestige, like the Audio Aero Capitole, comes with three Black Diamond Racing Cone feet, two ‘4’s and one ‘3′.

The Prestige has a built-in preamplifier, also like the Capitole. The powercord is a Shunyata Anaconda Vx, the interconnects are the Stealth INDRA.

Our first impressions are very favorable. Our expectations were low, switching from the warm Meitner, which had been on for a week or two since the show, and has been broke-in in for a year now, to a cold Prestige with no time on it . But we were very pleased… out of the box, CDs were actually very enjoyable - as we couldn’t help but play about 10 different CDs to check it out (naw, just like most people, we can’t stand waiting until the player is warmed up and broke-in in more than a few hours like we are all supposed to….).

Burn(in) baby, burn(in)!