What can this mean?

A. Have Mike and Neli decided to take a lesson from Ray Kimber’s IsoMike rooms and make our amps M-o-b-i-l-e?

B. Does it really require geting the right channel amp so drunk it almost falls off its stand?

C. Are Neli and Mike practicing for their turn at the Olymipic tryouts for the brand new sport: Amp Racing?

D. Are they just using the dollies so that they can more easily reposition the amps in order to optimize the system’s soundstage? (We *do* have to do this with the tall Edge Reference ‘pyramid’ amps - they are so large thier position affects the soundstaging dramatically - but we don’t use wheels but instead really on the grunt and shove technique).

E. Or, after staring at the amps for 15 minutes wondering if I REALLY had to move them a couple of days ago did Neli finally just put them on wheels and move them herself?

Yeah, it is E. But I wish it were C.

[Fantasy Island….]

OK, we like the custom room design folks that we have met, and they seem to be doing a thriving business, and there is nothing wrong with that….

But I feel so OFTEN like putting up an ad right next to some of the dealer et. al. ads I see that have photos of their rooms whose appearance makes them come seemingly from ‘the outer world’ [Dune, the movie]

“New High End Audio System!
* Brand new technology, works in any room of your existing home!
* No need for for remodeling, hammering, dust, construction workers, their dogs and cigarettes and trash!
* No “long stream of cost overruns” heartburn.
* No agonizing choices between Brown1, Brown2 and Brown3
* No ackward moments of senility revealed when you have to pay extra to have the bluegreen painted over that looked so good last week.
* No choices between painting over the gray that was painted over the bluegreen and Prozac in order to avoid the depression the gray is inflicting.
* No disturbingly unhealthy choices between having windows and just having a peephole.
* No need to sink your money into something that you will have to leave behind when you move.
* No need to spend Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars on something for your house that for the average buyer will actually lower its resale value!

Save some money and buy instead your dream system, and spend the rest on your significant other. Might we suggest the Marten Coltrane Supremes and Audio Note M10 pre and Lamm ML2.1 amps and Emm Labs digital and HRS MXR rack and….?”

Let’s see, if we run that in Stereophile and the Absolute Sound….what do you think the response will be?

Anyway, the dedicated custom-designed room hype is here and quite strong and I am sure this will rankle some folks - as going against the prevaling winds as the experts have mapped them always does, no matter what the industry.

Sometimes, it seems like we are ‘going nowhere awfully fast’. [Scotty, Star Trek]

Now for something completely different.

Yesterday around 6:00pm we were putting back together several systems in new configurations when we heard a large bang on the roof, 24 feet above the floor in the main listening room.

Neli said ‘Whassat? ‘ Well, that is more like the way I talk, but l am writing the story, so…

‘A bird’, I say… ‘OK, a BIG bird’.

Then I get one of those looks that women give men when they reveal exactly what they think of the male sex’s cognitive powers.

The day before we had a lot of very large birds [Eagles? Their squak sounds like the noise eagles make on TV. And we just happened to be listening to Hell Freezes Over during that time as welll…. Hmmmmmm…] circling the house during a demo for an hour or so, and when the birds landed on the roof, which they seemed to be doing a lot for some reason, there would be a thump - and this was during an audition, so everybody heard it when the music was not at that moment playing very loud.

But then there was another loud bang on the roof, then another. It sounded just like someone was throwing rocks at the house. And it was LOUD….!

Hey, we didn’t go to college for nuthin. It took only about 20 to 30 wacks on the roof to figure out that we were being hailed.

Chucks of hail on the deck post, deer taking shelter and the streaks of hail still pelting the earth.

The front stairs and garage covered in white

The backyard covered in white

You know, it was June 24th, it was in the 80s and the air conditioner had been running, so in my mind this qualifies as “Snow in the Summer” which from a kid’s point of view counts as one of the best days that there can ever be.

… a few months ago.

I am not, we are not, good enough yoyo’ers to do much with these guys. The body is too lightweight and the string is too wide and has too much friction.

But, duh, that was before we figured out they were not supposed to be palyed with but were serious tweaks!

Our first clue was discovered after closely examining the other sides of the yoyos:

Rod, the Audio Asylum bored member who signs these yoyos, writes:

“Thanks! Rod”. Yes, really. That’s what they say.

Now, those of you who are of the more intelligent variety of audiophile will have no doubt already noticed that there is an obvious message here about how these yoyos are supposed to be used.

Here, we will examine this closer for those who are a little slower among us:

Now do you see?

No???????!!

OK, then. *sigh* Look at the ‘o’ in Rod. Do you see how one is filled in and the other left open?

Ah, now I see the light bulbs going off!

Exactly!

The round, unfilled donut-like ‘o’ is obviously supposed to be put on top of a transport (just like we all know from way back in the 80s that CDs are really flat yoyos, pressed into service as digital media because so many of them were made and few people could even walk-the-dog with them. Geez, schools really sucked back then, huh?). The yoyo with the filled ‘o’ is obviously the complement of the other yoyo and will go on top of the DAC.

So here are pictures of the tweaks in action.

First, on the Emm Labs CDSD Signature transport:

OK, here is a closer view, I want to point out a few things that only became obvious after 100,000s of hours of testing:

See how the yoyo is PRECISELY positioned such that the text faces EXACTLY toward the front of the transport? This is very important. Otherwise, harsh, ugly, distorted pig ‘oinks’ and grunts appear at random in all discs we played except Pink Floyd’s Animals CD (just like the Teac players do without the yoyo … just kidddddding ).

No, for those of you who do not get it yet, the string has no impact at all. Why should it. It is just a string.

When positioned like this, the flatness of the yoyo mimics the flatness of the spinning CD and helps it spin a lot easier, exactly as if the CD was massless.

Now, for a look at the Emm Labs DCC2 Signature DAC:

You will of course notice how the yoyo is positioned in the classical, ‘Upright DAC YoYo Position’ which has the yoyo face due Magnetic North.

Looking at the setup more from the front, you can see that the angle of the yoyo is slightly tilted:

We have found that it is very important for the angle of the top of the text to track the sun as it coasts over head during the day. This may be obviosu to many of you experts, but it took us months to figure this out.

And at night? Yes, it sounds soooo much better when the yoyo continues to track the sun as it winds its way upriver on the other side of the planet.

Luckily, I can just assign the yoyo adjustjing duties to Neli - cause heck if I know where the sun is exaclty in the middle of the night - and luckily our significant others will do anything if you just explain how important it is.

Anyway, sorry if I was a little bit rough on you noobies, but hopefully this will help you utilize the most important tweak since Edison invented electricity.

We spent so much time on this, and no one told us anything about how we were supposed to use these things. It was like a big secret or something. Geez. How are we supposed to get new blood into this hobby if everyone keeps the YoYo tweaks classified?

Now, we can all hope that the Asylum sends out green yoyos, which we hear mate very well with red, next so that we can start stacking them in totem poll like fashion.

!yojnE

;-))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))?

There was a letter to the editor in this month’s The Absolute Sound that was a little off center (Nothing new, that. Magazines like bizarre letters - it entertains readers and attracts attention to their magazine… like this Blog entry ).

One of the things this letter decried was that there were ads for $K cables in high-end audio magazines and this might turn off newcomers to our little hobby here.

Well, for one, ads do not often list prices - and I am sure most readers not familiar with our little eccentricities would think cables go for around $100 - $500 or so.

Why?

Because in every audio store from here to there a Monster Cable exhibit proudly displays what most people think is the best cable in the world. Monster Cable has worked hard to condition people to accept that they can pay a little more and get a better (Monster) cable. I think there are very few people anymore (outside some audiophile loonie bins) that think lamp cord is the best that can be done these days.

So, see?

That is what they have done for us. Made us all seem a little less weird to normal folk.

Oh, and I like this quote from the letter:

“These people are trying to sell me power cords for hundreds of dollars ”

Yeah. Right. If only.

Most of the TAS letters to the editor, along with responses by the TAS glitterati, are posted on the web.

“Life. Nature’s way of keeping meat fresh”. A quote from tonight’s new Dr. Who. [Shades of Douglas Adams, whut?]

It has been our experience that most people who claim to not be audiophiles do ‘have ears’, as they say. From all walks of life, all sexes, they all can hear warmth and digititus and detail and everything ‘we’ hear.

So why can’t we say as much about self-declared audiophiles? What’s up with statements like this that appear daily on the net (and, lest we forget, similar nonsense from print magazines)?

“I found the less expensive Consumer Brand X at a fraction of the price to be indistinguishable from the Megabuck Deluxe”

If one steps back, one can see how ludicrous this is, given the realities of both this being a capitalist economy and the fact that audiophiledom is just not, unfortunately, a playground of the rich and famous. A $20K CD player is not a status symbol - it is bought by people expecting and demanding very high-performance, not a fancy emblem to show off to their friends.

Here is the top ten list of reasons the poster/reviewer might say something like this.

10. An axe to grind with someone associated with Megabuck Deluxe
9. They own Consumer Brand X and want to feel good about it
8. They can’t afford Megabuck Deluxe and do not want to feel bad about it
7. They listen with their mind and their mind tells them that Megabuck Deluxe shouldn’t sound better than Consumer Brand X, so it does not sound better.
6. They listen with their emotions and they like someone associated with Consumer Brand X and so they like the way it sounds.
5. They listen with their emotions and they do not like someone associated with Megabuck Deluxe and so they do not like the way it sounds.
4. They listen from the point of view of the existing marketplace and its internal politics to decide what sounds good or not
3. They desire the popularity that comes from attacking the product at the top
2. The room/system which they are doing the listening with is so unbalanced and/or has insufficient resolution that nothing can be determined about the relative qualities of these two products
1. They quickly compare products that take more than a few minutes to warm up and sound the way they are supposed to
0. They omit the ancillary tweaks that most people likely to own the products will likely be using.
-1. Their ears are not used to the subtle differences of products of this calibur that may take weeks in not longer to explore
-2. They are one of the few who really do not ‘have ears’.
-3. They gain commercial advantage from attacking Megabuck Deluxe and/or promoting Consumer Brand X

Geez, 10 wasn’t enough.

[Personally, I try and give people the benefit of the doubt and assume #2 is the reason they say things like this. And keep saying things like this.].

There are so many reasons for posters and reviewers to post erroreous information, how can anyone believe what they read about how something sounds?

It is certainly a question that has plagued us, both as audiophiles, shocked when we heard both how good and bad things REALLY sound, and later as a dealership and high-end audio show reviewers, as we try to communicate what we hear.

How do we not get drowned out by the sea, nay ocean, of missinterpretations out there about what things do, can and should sound?

All we can say is: “Use the ears, Luke!”

Oh, and if you are an audioophile, don’t forget to make sure you calibrate those ears once in awhile using a worthy system, Luke.

Top Secret ASCII-encoded message dated: 4/20/2006

Under no circumstances may this information get into the hands of hotels or nervous exhibitors.

It is only through the utmost care and stealth, and the slience of you, the reader, can the Mixhibitors live on to create uber systems out of what they consider to be the crude parodies found in rooms at high-end audio shows throughout the world.

As a reminder: The Mixibitors are a group of fanatical audiophiles who live to form sudden, temporary teams very late at night at various shows in order to, with the utmost care and subterfuge, move components from one exhibitor’s room to another’s (usually large) room, mixing and matching the very best components to create Ulimate Systems and, thereby, the Ultimate Listening Experiences. Finally, in the wee hours, they must, with their last ounces of strength, return everything to their original rooms and systems, verifying that everything works as well as it did the previous day, as well as appears the same (this year, they almost ran out of the synthetic dust they use to sprinkle over everything to replace the dust that was displaced during all the moving - it was a dusty show).

Exact numbers of the Mixibitor membership are only available on a need to know basis. And since nobody does need to know this, nobody knows just how many there are in the world. There have been cases when groups of them, unbeknownst to each other, have hit a show at the same time. In cases like this there have been only minor dissagreements about what uber systems to build - it being obvious to everyone but the exhibitors themselves - and it has often been observed that more substance abuse than normal occurs under these circumstances.

This show was a nice change for Mixibitors, as there were not an excessive number of widely unbalanced systems in Montreal. But Mixibitors will be Mixibitors, so the itinerary went like this:

The big WAVACs from the big Verity Lohengrin room went down to the big Avalon Eidolon Diamond room, replacing the VTL amps. To replace the WAVACs there was a fight to see if it would be the new Berning monoblocks or the Nagra solid-state amps. As usual when there is a tie like this in the voting, the lightest component wins - so Berning it was. Not to take this lying down, the Nagra contingent moved the Nagra amps down to drive the gigantic Pierre Gabriel speakers.

And, well, that was it! It only took about 20 minutes for these senior system-swapping experts - with a lot of milling around of the Mixibitors who had nothing to lug from one system to another. And the results, they say, were mixed, but if it is one thing they tell me over and over - if you don’t pay the price of having to move these hernia-indiucing works of art - you don’t get to hear, or hear about, how they sound.

Hey, I just wonder how they don’t get caught lugging someone elses mega-buck equipment to and fro late at night. Or maybe it is when they do get caught that they decide to recruit the catchers as new members. Guess I might just start strolling shows late at night, seeing if *I* can be the one to catch them in the act and get to hear these Ultimate Systems.

Neli thinks that maybe we should be going for a kindler, gentler show report. This from someone who wanted me to give out Q-Tip awards to rooms that needed, uh, some more time to work on their system.

What does this mean exactly? It is not like I can just not say what I heard.

Otherwise, what is the point? Just to type “Everthing sounds great” 100 different ways? Oh, and a bunch of prices and product announements? I. Don’t. Think. So.

She says “No more ‘Terrible’”.

How about ‘Icepick in the ear?”, says I.

“No”, she says.

“Ear bleeding?”

“No.”

“Finger nails on chalkboard?”

“You’re kidding, right?”, she says, annoyed with me and my intentionally slow witted ways, as usual.

So, before we publish our next report, we will perhaps have to post a little dictionary, or table, that goes something like this:

Terrible -> Having severe difficulties

Icepick in the ear-> Tons and tons and tons of energy in the treble region

Ear Bleeding->Unable to play at high SPLs in this room that was always played at high SPLs

Finger nails on chalk board-> High-fidelity Headache Helper? No? OK, this one needs work.

I guess they all need work.

But seriously, it will be interestng to see if something like ‘difficult to recognize our favorite songs on this system due to unusual behavoir with respect to the dynamic and frequency note envelopes as well as a somewhat Himalayan-like frequency response” is interpreted as easily as is the almost universally understood: “It Sucked”.

[A postscript: This thing just up and died on us a few weeks after this post. We do NOT recommend this model, and probably not the brand. But next Winter we will probably get something similar - or try and fix this thing which should probably have all of 2 or 3 electronic components to it].

We used to use our refrigerator to burn in cables - as recommended by Grant over at Shunyata. But our new fridge is too big and immobile and recessed and it just ain’t gonna happen.

But luckily the temperature plunged below zero and it was durn cold down in listening room two - and we decided to get a nice $40-$70 powercord burning device to heat the room a little.

Holmes 1500W, Compact Oil Filled Radiator. Not sure is this is it at Amazon - but we have not had the problems the reviwers there seem to have had. Then again, maybe they needed to use… better power cords!

We set the setting to max current which is about 1500 watts which is what a REALLY big amp might draw during, say, oh I don’t know, just about everything would make one regret turning it up quite so loud.

Here we see how the heater is breaking in a Shunyata Anaconda Helix Alpha power cord.

It is attached using a device that a local friend / dealer, who sold it to us, calls a FBI. I forget what the initials stand for.

But, wait, we get two power cords, two power cords broken in for the price of… well, a heckuva lot in today’s energy market … the price of one.

Finally, we make sure we are using the Hubble hospital-grade outlet on one of the dedicated circuits to make sure the electrons are of audiphile quality. Seriously, do you want YOUR infant power cords seeing their first electrons through an ordinary household socket? I think not.

[Uh oh. Neli reminds me that this outlet is not one of the dedicated lines - and that our poor virginal powercords have now indeed been exposed to the harsh realities of the Cruel Hard Mains. *sigh*]

There you have it. It LOOKS like a $4000 extension cord - but it is really a $70 power cable break-in / burn-in device par-excellance. Well, we haven’t actually compared it to anything else - we’ll have to wait until it warms up outside.

Speaking of which, this is a Winter-only device. During the warmer months it wants to live in the garage.

It is not 100% quiet, however, as the thermocouple of the thermistat makes an audible ‘click’ when it goes on and off - which it does every 2 - 3 minutes because it is a very localized sensor, which is the main complaint on Amazon about this heater.

Burn-in baby, burn-in.

The dCS P8i Player.”

So says the cover of the Stereophile magazine that came today.

Now, when they said the Halcro was ‘The Best Amp Ever’, that ‘could’ have been true. At some instant during the review process, the Halcro ‘could’ have been the best amp ever built. It is at least in the realm of possiblity, whatever the probability of it being true is, it ‘could’ have been the best.

But his month’s cover is patently false. Unless someone can tell me how else to parse what they said, the only way it can possibly be true, is:

That the dCS player is not only better than its more expensive siblings and all the other players that curently exist in the universe (well, on planet Earth anyway), but also:

1) There is an asteroid headed our way and we have days, if not hours to live - so there will be no more engineering of better players in the future, because there IS no future.

2) That Bart Simpson, or some other savvy folk, have been found with an ironclad patent on SACD and they will sue for $100 Billion anyone who improves or develops any SACD player for whatever purpose

3) That same asteroid misses the Earth but causes a loud boom, so loud that not only is everyone everywhere now deaf, but all sucessive generations are also deaf.

4) HD-DVD and /or Blueray are found to sound so much better, and to be so much easier and less expensive to build players for that all high-end manufacturers and modders IMMEDIATELY cease development on SACD and swtich to the newer better formats

5) All Emm Labs and Audio Aero and other SACD player manufacturers and the owners of their players take every player and the player’s schematics outside and heap them in a very expensive pile and set it alight, swearing ‘Never More!’.

Hopefully we will be able to add more plausible speculations to the list over time…

Well, I hope they know something I don’t and they did an exaustive survey and it is #4 above that permitted them to say such a thing.