The first track on Santana’s Abraxus, “Singing Winds, Crying Beasts”, is one of our test tracks.

This track has revealed some supposedly top-flight systems to be incapable of managing the etheral ’sound angels’ flying in and out and around the soundstage.

While listening to the Marten Design Coltrane Supremes I was struck with the a very interesting, some might say bizarre, 3D impression of some of the notes in this song. Now, this happens to me a lot when I am falling asleep, Jazz and Classical music seems to not be ‘heard’ anymore but instead transformed into moving, interlocking 3D soundscapes that I fly around in.

Hey, those white coated fellas can just stay where they are, thank you anyway.

But in the Marten Design room at CES, I was awake! I mean it WAS the last day of the show and all, but seriously….

O.K. First I will describe what I usually see when I hear the sounds, in this case, the tiny bells that kind of fade in and out at various places in the soundstage during this song, while listening to the Acapella Audio Arts Triolon Excalibur speakers.

What I see is this:

It is right after a fresh snow, and it is very cold so the snow is not sticking to itself or anything else, it is very fluffy but not so fluffy that it does not have a good ratio of water to size. The sun has come out and is shining on a large number of very tall pine trees. A gentle breeze comes up and sends a number of snow flakes dancing, as they are wont to do, in all directions: up down swirling bouncing gliding…As some of the 100s of flakes hit the rays of the sun that are penetrating through the bows of the trees, the flakes ‘light up’, temporarily, in a prismatic flash of dozens of pure colors alternating with pure white snowflakeshine, before they are again returned to invisiblity as they reenter the shadows to be replaced by a 100 others. These flakes are small, about 1/2 inch or smaller.

These sparkling, flashing swirling colors popping in and out of existance is what I ’see’ when hearing these bells. This more or less seems like a normal kind of thing to ’see’, to me, and corresponds pretty well to the ‘type’ of the sound. To me.

But. The Coltrane Supremes….

What I ’saw’ was weird, man.

What I saw were these aluminum things shaped like Cheeto corn chips, in kind of an unpolished silver metal color varying between 1/2 and about 2 inches long and about, I guess, 1/8 inch thick. They kind of faded into existance, moved a little bit closer then a little bit away from me, rotating a perhaps up to 45% during this time period, before they faded out again. There was a gentle diffuse white light playing on these ‘bell chips’.

I cannot let myself beleive that the resolution was so good in that room that I was ’seeing’ the sides of the bells as the overall sound outlined their shapes as it bounced off them and into the microphone. I mean, SACD has a lot of detail, but this is crazy.

Anyway, I wonder if other people sometimes see music as ‘things’.

And I also wonder if sometimes they also experience visual musical shapes that sometimes come unbidden and are shockingly different from what they normally ’see’. While they are awake.

This CES 2006 room review was added after the report had been published and so is available here as well.

The Kharma mini-Exquisites - like the Kharma 3.2 but with a diamond tweeter and made to look a lot like its bigger brother, the midi-Exquisites. Driven by the small Kharma amps and MBL electronics with Kubala-Sosna cables.

The Kharma Mini Exquisite room at CES 2006

Very engaging, very musical in that classic, ‘what we want music to sound like this’ fashion. Not so much a ‘you are there’ presentation like the Marten Coltrane Supremes - more like a ‘you are alive and feel good about it’ kind of thing. I really loved the sound in this room - for a small scale system it really does ‘it’ for me.

We described the sound of the Midi Exquisites driven by Lamm amplification at the Home Entertainment New York show in May, HE2005, as being almost drug-like, like a magnetic force it tried to suck you into the music, and, if you let it do this, if you gave in to it, there was a rush of feeling and emotion that swept one away, flying with the music.

The ASR amps on the Midi Exquisites, at this show, did not have the same effect, on me anyway, for whatever reason, but the Mini Exquisites…now they had an interesting effect, though somewhat different, from my perspective. Instead of having to consciously ‘let it’ do its magic, the magic just ‘was’. And whereas the ‘magic’ was thick and dense, like a hot summer night with the Midi Exquisites / Lamm system, the Mini Exquisites were light and airy, like a sunny Spring day.

The Mini’s magic was less intense, but more accessible. Perhaps this was in some part attributable to the better support the Mini had for an audiophile-quality presentation compared to the Midi system - I was able to relax more because the Mini presentation was more balanced and more realistic - albeit at a smaller scale.

Lots of detail, stable imaging, good separation, a rather narrow soundstage which we blamed on the room, good dynamics, and bass was scaled nicely to the room. Based on our two, admittedly short auditions, we think these are a slam-dunk, you are going to be so happy, upgrade for people who have the similarly sized Kharma 3.2’s and have had the money for the bigger Kharmas, but not the room.

In fact, I have a sneaky suspicion that the little 2-way 3.2s may have been the best speaker, for my tastes, of any in the amazing Kharma lineup of much more expensive speakers - and that now I have found a new ‘best’ speaker, the Mini, also a 2-way, with more of the Kharma magic and more of the audiophile attributes that make the music both more realistic and enjoyable.

The associated equipment is interesting: warm, smooth, and somewhat detailed MBL into a small (sized anyway) detailed solid state amp. The system was quite detailed sounding and engaging. It would be interesting to put these speakers on something more conventional, like Lamm amps and Meitner digital. THEN, with this cross-section of equipment, we could perhaps pinpoint the location in paradise these speakers come from - or whether, after all, they are from planet earth like most other speakers.

Oops, being a little overly effusive, I am. Time to turn Effusive menu option to OFF.

Only problem is the price: $45K. At this price it is going up against the similarly-priced Wilson Maxx II, Acapella Violon, Marten Coltrane, Avalon Eidolon, and Audio Note speakers.

Let’s discuss the competition some.

The Mini Exquisites are for small to medium sized spaces for people who want engaging and startlingly emotional and detailed renditions at the expense of having less detail in the low bass.

The Wilson Maxx 2 is for larger spaces, and for people who want an impressive sound: large scale soundstages, midrange and bass details, and dynamics at the expense of an almost complete lack of emotional capability and some unruly behaviors like drivability and an overly enthusiastic treble / upper midrange.

The Acapella* Violon is also for larger spaces and for people who like a very natural musical realism and large engrossing soundstages at the expense of some bottom end slam.

The Marten Design* Coltrane speakers are for people who like a very accurate and realistic presentation, at the expense of not having a big and open type of sound.

The Avalon Eidolon Diamond is also for bigger spaces and people who like emotional yet dynamic presentations at the expensive of deep bass control and drivability

The Audio Note* U.K. AN-E SEC Signature is for smaller spaces, like the Mini, and for people who want very dynamic and exciting and harmonically rich and detailed presentations, supplied by the necessary Audio Note electronics upstream, at the expense of looking at a box.

Looking at this run down - it seems that there is indeed a place for a $45K 2-way speaker, as much as this price for a relatively small speaker may make us uncomfortable. And that place is for people with relatively small rooms who still want one of the best, no compromise, musical experiences that money can buy.

The only alternative, from the perspective of this quick survey, is the Audio Note speaker, (though the Coltrane speakers are known to work very well providing a full-range experience in as small a room as 12.5 x 16 feet) and it is also an expensive 2-way speaker - albeit one that can be driven by that amazingly pure first watt of a small SET amplifier - and it does not quite have the visual presence and beauty of the Mini, but then few speakers do.

This CES 2006 room review was added after the report had been published and so is available here as well.

We spent the end of the show listening to the Marten Design* Coltrane Supreme speakers, with Bladelius electronics, Jorma Design* cables and the Power Wing power conditioner.

This system re-created the recording venue nearly as well as the Acapella Triolons here at the Audio Federation, on a smaller scale but with more resolution. Nothing else comes close in our experience to this kind of feat. Everything else creates this simulacrum, this hoax, which requires you to forcibly suspend belief to imagine that there are real ‘musicians’ out there.

On the Triolons, you don’t have to do this nearly as much, and this leaves our poor overtaxed brains much more free to ponder the quality of the musicianship, the score, the soundboard engineering, the art, the spirit, the love, the meaning of it all. To see much, much deeper into music’s other dimensions than just the physical dimension of vibrating compression waves moving through air.

This difference has had a unexpectedly intense emotional impact on our perspective of what music is, and on our lives as a whole. Seriously, this just isn’t a fucking stereo anymore.

The Coltrane Supremes gave us a taste of this. We would love to have them here and put our favorite electronics on them - and see just how far we could push them. To see just how far they could take us.

One channel of the 2-channel system at the show

The Swedish Statement room presented a sonic experience that was incredibly true, but not in that in-your-face style that so many large, high-end speakers do these days. It make take a few minutes for a listener to relax and realize that the music here is not a parody: it is not pumping the bass dynamics in your face to impress, not spotlighting midrange detail to distract from a uneven frequency response (these speakers are +/- 1.5 dB up and down the scale). All aspects of the performance, EVERYTHING is absolutely top-notch in quality, and EVERYTHING is treated fairly, nothing has more tone, more jump factor, more warmth, more presence, sharper images, more stability in the soundstage, than anything else.

To be clear: very, very few speakers in the world are able to do this. I would say that just about none of them even try. They try to make something that sounds pretty damn good, pat themselves on the back, and go home.

So here you have a sonic presentation that sounds and quiets and quickens and slows just like it is supposed to, just like what our brains have been wired to expect and treat as real for millions of years. What does this do for the listening experience? It allows us to relax many of our layers of defenses and buffers and filters and shields we have built up around our listening processes to both protect us (from physical damage, from harmful and socially unacceptable psychological reactions, from headaches, from who knows what else) and to interpret for us what we are hearing.

When was the last time you heard a piano and had to think ‘that is a piano’. I challenge the listener to hear a piano on a stereo without thinking ‘that is a piano’ AFTER considerable, (and lengthy, taking perhaps up to 1/2 second, causing much of the music to be lost while we are trying to determine ‘just what the hell was that note, anyway?’) mental calculations and interpretations.

These mental gymnastics often consist of a little voice in our head that narrates a process that goes something like “that was a single note, so it has to be a guitar, piano, harp, or some kind of electronic effect”. Then we rule out things: “I didn’t hear a pluck (assuming the system is capable of rendering such a thing, stick in probability factor here that there was, in fact, a pluck), so it is not a guitar or harp. It wasn’t an open ended kind of decay, so it might be an electronic keyboard, but was there an associated sound of the echoes in the piano body? Hmmmmm… that was awhile ago now, lets see if I can pull it from the very short term aural memory…” Oops, song is over already.

The solution for most people to this dilemma, of not being able to tell what they are listening to in real-time, is to not even care. They enjoy the tune and the bombast, and do not care that they do not, and cannot, hear or understand what the musicians are actually doing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. You can still groove to the tune, tap to the beat, and get a smile on.

But if you, personally, think there is a difference between a snapshot of a woman’s face and a painting by Leonardo da Vinci (if you have ever seen a Leonardo painting in person, you know exactly what I mean),

if you personally want to experience the art and the majesty, the talent and the skill and the message and the emotion and the awesome delicacies and complexities of the human condition as communicated by the musicians to listeners just like you throughout the ages, then perhaps a system like this is for you.

Yummy.

These pictures are found on the Swedish Statement website and the new Marten Design website.

Every time I close my eyes I see these speakers. I do not know about all of you - but I like eye-candy. A lot. And some things just imprint themselves on the minds eye and won’t let go.

Hmmmmm… Is this my mind’s way of trying to tell me something? I could get into a LOT of trouble following this line of thought…

The actual system to be shown and heard in Las Vegas at CES 2006

The subwoofer tower and the main speaker tower

Another CES is upon us. At CES we are not exhibitors and get to play tourist - albeit ones that take a lot of photos and write a lot of notes about what we are hearing - but this is much more relaxing than being exhbitors. And fun!

This year we ARE going to make it to the main conference center exhibit halls - where CES proper lives. Every year we say this half-heartedly, but this year it is with full heart. We want to check out some of the new high-definition video front projectors and a couple of other, top-secret for now (hee hee hee), audio products.

At the usual high-end audio part of CES are a number of new products we are looking forward to seeing and hearing. And at the top of the list has to be the new Marten Design Coltrane Supremes:

Here we see prototypes of the Supremes. This system uses Lamm hybrid amplifiers to drive the speakers, however at CES the Swedish Statement room will demonstrate (in Suite number 2007 at the Alexis Park Hotel):

“Bladelius Beowulf amplifiers: $37,500
Bladelius Gondul version 3 multiplayer: $14,000
Jorma Design Jorma Statement cables: $71,800
Marten Coltrane Supreme loudspeakers: $250.000
Nordic Concept, Artist Signature turntable: $18.000
WOO Design furniture: $11.000

Total: $402,300″

Yeah, this might qualify as a statement system . And for those of you wondering why we do not have a quartet of the Supremes here at Audio Federation, well, we just do not have the room:

Seriously, we should do a photo montage of our rooms here at the Belfry - although this is a 4-bedroom house, 2 bedrooms are chock-full I am not kidding to overflowing offices, one we sleep in, and one is our small listening room. Our livingroom and rec rooms are listening rooms. And yes, we (mostly me, I will admit) talk about converting the small dining room to a listening room, as well as the bedroom - at which point we would instead sleep in the walk-in closet. It would work, I just know it…

OK, back to CES…

The Swedish Statement room has its own website

The speakers are certainly something special, check this out:

“…Marten is now the first loudspeaker producer in the world to use Accuton’s 5cm diamond midrange in the Coltrane Supreme. Each of the Supreme’s two main speaker towers employs one diamond tweeter, one diamond midrange unit, one ceramic lower midrange unit and four woofers for the upper bass. The two bass towers employ six 9-inch woofers each, and a 2000W power amplifier. The cabinets are made of carbon fibre laminate and wood. The integral stands are made of polished stainless steel, and use cones and pucks from Black Diamond Racing.

“…The Coltrane Supreme is a four-cabinet system, consisting of two main loudspeakers and two dedicated subwoofers. The cabinets are made of extremely rigid, light, and stiff carbon fibre laminate with a Kevlar honeycomb in between. The main loudspeakers have a frequency range from 100 to 100,000 Hz. The crossover is a fully balanced, active, fourth-order design, with digital room correction possibilities below 100 Hz. The subwoofers have a frequency range from 15 to 100 Hz.

“Each main speaker tower employs four 7-inch ceramic upper bass units, one newly developed 7-inch ceramic lower-midrange unit, the world’s first 2-inch diamond midrange, and one _-inch diamond tweeter. Each subwoofer employs six newly-developed 9-inch, long-throw ceramic bass units with extreme low bass capabilities. All drivers employ neodymium under-hung magnet systems. “

Ah, one of the good things about the impersonal nature of the net - you all can’t see me drooling.

Finally, here is another view of the prototypes:

We already know how good the Jorma design cables are - they are the only speaker cable that we think might be better than Nordost Valhalla (read between the lines of what all the other cable manufacturers say, Valhalla is darn hard to beat). And now they have come out with a statement cable: The Jorma Design ‘Prime’:

Jorma Design (no photos yet)

“The newly-developed cables that Jorma Design will be contributing to this project are made of top-quality materials: gold, copper, transparent Teflon and walnut, all fine-tuned to get their best possible result. The cables have completely new conductors that were developed especially for this project, by a small European producer that really had to push its limits. The manufacturer had to change its machines to be able to make these conductors, and it took more than half a year to test them. The screens are made of extra-sturdy copper, and the cables make use of Bybee Slipstream Golden Quantum Purifiers. “

We have not heard the other components that are used in the Swedish Statement system… but soon, very soon now, just 16 more days….