[For those of you who do not read the entire show report (no wonder why a few people got upset about the terseness of their room description, they had not gotten into the groove of the whole ‘audio noir’ thing) - specifically the main page with our list of favorites of show and pictorial index to all of the rooms - here is a copy of our pre-announcement of our new online high-end audio magazine]

A New Online Magazine

We are publishing a new online high-end audio magazine in hopefully a few weeks. This as-yet-unnamed magazine will use new technology that will allow us to do things other magazines and websites cannot. It will also be innovative in other ways in an attempt to better serve manufacturers and dealers on the one hand, and audiophiles on the other.

Why a new magazine?

Oh, there are so many, many reasons.

But the primary reason is that they are all so damn boring. ‘Reviewers’ focus way too much on regurgitating cookie-cutter equipment reviews in order to get loaned more free equipment. Bo-ring. Music reviews are written in a manner that has little to do with the way audiophiles actually listen to music. Snore.

The other primary reason is that the relationship between manufacturers/distributors/dealers and the magazines is like that of lobbyists and politicians. It is inherently corrupting to both. The result is that everybody distrusts and fears everybody else.

So, yeah, we gonna do things way different. We are going to focus on the fun and excitement of being an audiophile - all those reasons why we are doing all this crazy stuff in the first place. And we are going to provide several ways for manufacturers/distributors/dealers to get their message heard - without having to compromise their sense of ethics or take out a second mortgage.

To this end, then, …

We are talking with several people about writing for the magazine. If you are interested we would like to talk with you, too. We are not looking for and will not accept [most] reviewers - we will not even have traditional reviews, per se. We are looking for people who are extremely honest and can express themselves, who can bang on a keyboard a little [the Grammar Police have left the building], or use a video camera, or snap a few photos and share their perspective on why being an audiophile is so fucking intoxicating.

We are also accepting press releases, installation experiences, overviews of technological innovations, design perspectives, industry perspectives, biographies, factory tours etc. submitted by manufacturers/distributors/dealers [preferably full-page, but we will work with you], once per month, and will publish them for free. We are looking for serious submissions, in addition to the press releases, that respect the reader’s intelligence - something a reputable manufacturer/distributor/dealer would say to someone in their store or factory. We will also accept traditional ads, preferably full-page, but any size will work, for which we will charge standard prices.

We are also looking for one or more sponsors. Perhaps someone who wants to remind their readership each month that they are proud sponsors of the magazine. Or perhaps someone who wants to take more of an ownership stake. We will be contacting some potential sponsors directly, but if any of you want to contribute to the audiophile community in this way, please contact us as soon as is convenient.

For now, send email to me at: mike@audiofederation.com

… and here’s why: with lower gasoline prices, lower shipping prices, lower food prices, and maybe even lower import prices, it will be like $7K extra in the bank and the audio gear they buy with it will be cheaper. With commodities tanking, audio will be cheaper to make which is good for the manufacturers.

Here are the details [ aka guestimates]. An average family with 2.5 cars drives 30K miles per year, say. Gas prices will return from $4 to the $2/gallon or so they were before the current administration. At 15 miles per gallon that is a savings of $4K. an average family of 4 spends, say, $15K per year on food. If food goes back to, say, 20% cheaper then that is another $3K in savings annually. Expect shipping, plane tickets, everything gas related to go down 30%.

Assuming people still have jobs…. this will be very positive for people not heavily invested in the stock market [and who aren’t shorting this market. Next time the powers-that-be start shouting DEPRESSION! remind me to short everything in sight. I presume THEY are.].

So, chin up, maties, our hobby isn’t down and out yet. In fact, it may just have gotten a boost. Though it might take awhile for people get over the shock and awe on the news channels and realize their good fortune.

AudioVoice Acoustics Ltda. is selling horn speakers, made on demand . Here’s a look at, and a write up about, the most recent speaker they made:

Forum

the homepage is under construction, and will be finished soon.

AudioVoice Acoustics Ltda.

Rua Alvaro Brito 769
49026-030Aracaju ( Sergipe )
Brazil

It is so nice. A little distracting from my blog posting duties though… Spring in Boulder is a wonderful thing - a transition from gray hues to green and yellow and red and blue and purple….

The SoundLab U1 speakers have been sold. The Acoustic Zen Adagio speakers took their place - but it is not as different ‘feeling’ as I expected it to be…. A speaker down at that end of the room is just like any other speaker, I guess [no photos cause the speakers are on location until their new Adagios arrive].

We have a ARC Ref 3 preamp trade-in [that is for sale, BTW] that we are going to plug in to the system here and hear in a known environment.

Stewart Suda who has been with Audiogon for, what, about 5 years? [since the site got bought from Arnie) has left for greener pastures [or, hopefully, at least less stressful].

Also about Audiogon, they have once again dropped all show coverage from their site since at least Montreal. This is not to say that it won’t pop back up on their site again someday in the future - as this has happened before.

The availability of the new Nordost ODIN power cords have been announced at about $11K for a 4 foot cord ($10,995 for 1.25 meters). [Can’t wait to hear them! … but we’re going to need two…].

The Munich Show is over and the Portland show is starting NOW [Audio Note is there but Mike and Neli are sitting this one out - though some of our precioussss gear is there].

The AN Kegon Balanced amps are still kicking butt and ruining me for listening to any other amp [Neli is more forgiving and still listens to other amps…. poor girl ].

OK, that is about it. If I know Audio Federation, things are quietest before everything happens at once. And June is the end of our fiscal year… so I think I will be glad I am rested up…

Happy Spring Everybody (above the equator)!

A lot of unrated bits and pieces.

Apparently Hi-Fi+

was in dire straits when it was purchased.

Besides that nugget, 98% of what goes on Audio Asylum is bickering. So, yeah, nothing new there.

Mike (me) is miffed

that 1/2 of the hallway A on the 29th floor of the large photos section of the CES report was missing the photos and commentary and no one (NO ONE) told him (me).

I have been listening

to a hip-hop radio station and it is great. Well, except for the repeating of about 10 songs over and over (not kidding) and the SHOUTING at me between songs to buy stuff, or, as often as not, telling me HOW GREAT they are that they are not running a commercial that particular moment.

But they play the Hip Hop’s that is a blend of techno (electronics), disco (it has a beat), rap (one can understand the words and they use a lot of slang) and soul (it is not angry like rap, instead it is more like love songs and good times). Anyway, sometimes it is nice for a pick-me-up, and then switching to the classical station at the first commercial to balance out the hormones and minimize the speeding ticket income of the local police.

Let’s see.

The Kegon Balanced

amps kick butt. They control the Kharmas like nothing else I have heard. I just sit there and listen to them and it is so fun, switching between the glory of the harmonic structure and the beauty of the music and the impressiveness of he control.

Solid state amps on the Kharmas, and probably on everything, can be likened to SHOUTING [I know, twice in one post with the all caps shouting. What is with that?] when they get loud. The drive the speaker by punishing it. By throwing watts at it. But a great tube amp drives it by controlling it with an iron fist.

I am not saying that solidstate amps don;t have their place. Sometimes we want to punish the senses, to push them aggressively. After work, sometimes we might want to let off some steam, or to get a little rowdy.

Kind of like a couple of shots of tequila versus a glass of fine wine. I’ve enjoyed both [and now enjoy neither] and it is great that music, and our systems, can be tailored to suit our every mood and desire…

Danny Kaey reviews

the Audi car stereo over on sonicflare. This is probably a step above the one in my Audi S8, even though I had it replaced about 6 months ago [a pushbutton on the dash had fallen off, so they replaced the whole unit. Ah, German engineering. You have to love it. You have to wonder why.]. As I get older [yes, it happens here at Audio Federation too, darn it] I wouldn’t mind taking a look at that A8 V12. But just a look, mind you. A good… long…. look.

Oh, the stereo is decent. It is well-balanced, top to bottom for what it has to work with. A little tipped up [or more like pumped up, the port frequency of the door?] in the bass to counter the bass of the wheels on the road. I don’t listen to XM or Sirius - which needs like a tube radio or something to be moire than just bearable, it is so bright and neutral sounding [aka DIGITAL]. The stereo, for me, is better than the ones in the less expensive Audis and was way better than the Levinson in the Lexus, the Levinson being worse than the cheaper Bose in the Lexus. So, the Audi Bose system is nice, but no great shakes… it is not audiophile, IMHO.

The Audio Asylum Critics’ hangout had some gossip. I haven’t noticed HP’s marginalization at TAS - it seems like his copy grows and shrinks at random anyway. It does have a different feel than the ‘corporate’ [is that the right term? Rah rah. Lacking depth. etc.] feel of the rest of the magazine. But rumors of HP starting another magazine… he doesn’t seem hungry or interested enough in what is happening in audio anymore in my opinion… Theyalso mention in this thread that it is common knowledge? that TAS’s circulation numbers are falsified. Maybe so, but it certainly keeps getting fatter and Stereophile keeps getting skinnier… for whatever reasons it appears like TAS is doing better and better these days.

Checked out Dagogo for the first time in awhile. They seem to have a ton of reviews listed on the front page of cool looking stuff. For all you web developers out there, if your target demographic is older people, you need to use a large text font - because we are near as to be blind [although with the FireFox browser, ctrl + or ctrl mouse-scroll-button makes all the text larger - but I happened to visit using Internet Explorer, which I think a few people still use …or is it ].

The Marten [previously Marten Design, the guys who make our Coltrane Supreme loudspeakers. Yeah, them.] folks have just finished their new demonstration studio - the Marten Center. Extensive photos and commentary in Swedish is at the Swedish Euphonia AudioForum [anyone else noticing that Audiogon ad at the top of the page on that forum? Now that our country, and by inference everything in it, is worth half as much as it was 7 years ago, This is really a good time for Europeans to shop on this side of the pond for used gear.]

Notice how the bass towers are on the inside? Just like we had ours until about 3 days ago…

OK, we are NOT the Avantgarde news channel. For one, I can barely spell it. But here is the photo of the latest version of the Duo Mezzo:

Anyone else bored by after surfing around trying to find something interesting on the Net?

Me. Too.

Things might appear kind of slow here too, the way we have been having to stage the introduction of new equipment into the systems in order to facilitate a number of shootouts we really, really wanted to hold - so that we can really, really understand what the advantages and disadvantages are of one thing compared to another.

But between shootouts… we are largely just playing music and holding auditions.

So… we will try something new. I wanted to do this for awhile - it is kind of like reviewing the reviewer’s reviews - but wider in scope.

And that is to post news items about what is happening on the Net. Not ‘Musical Fidelity releases version 124.1 of their 206 watt amp’, but rather ‘Fremer reports on failings of Grand Prix Monaco Equipment Racks at Audiogon’ kind of news [I messed this thread myself - but I *heard* all about it.].

And it would help if some of you helped out by posting comments to these News Posts about threads and news about the goin’s on out there.

To start… we will have a little catching up to do.

At CES, Positive Feedback’s Danny Kaey teamed up with Josh to help restart and grow the SonicFlare online magazine. Lately he has been popping out reviews left and right, which, interestingly, are simulcast on Postive Feedback as well.

Audio Circle continues to have an impact, at least on some of our local audiophiles here, larger than their modest membership would indicate. Mostly this means people cycling through Red Wine, Omega, some lower-end PC audio gear, etc. Some ModWright-modded equipment too, but not so much the ModWright-branded equipment. Similarly equipment like Odyssey is left out - seemingly in response to the ever-hopeful search for champagne on a beer budget…. thereby leaving some damn good beer on the shelves while drinking some champagne that might be mislabeled.

SixMoons continues to hang in there - though it is mostly Srajan doing reviews these days. I have no idea why more people aren’t doing reviews for 6moons - and why the number of advertisers keeps fluctuating so much. For those of you who don’t know, Sixmoons has the best online news stream, although to appears to be published only once a month, about the releases of new high-end audio products.

Otherwise, flame wars on Audio Asylum, threads disappearing on Audiogon, Stereophile getting smaller, TAS and HiFi+ slowly losing their edge, the 20,000+ AVSForum is the only high-end forum but still, somehow, largely content free… [except for outing the rumor that there is a new super-Meitner player due to arrive in the 2009 time frame ].

… yada yada yada… same ole same ole.

Let’s see, Globe Audio Marketing and Brinkmann North America have announced that they are bring back Avantgarde Acoustic to the North American continent. This line was previously so mismanaged that it kind of killed the line here for several years. It is of my opinion that European manufacturers just do not understand that some American distributors are just out for a ‘quick buck’. The concept seems to escape them.

Well, it looks like Avantgarde is now going with some reputable organizations and, as much as we think there are problems with their speakers, they are starting to look awfully good compared to the … stuff… that has been flooding the market these last few years. This was something I was going to talk about in the show report as well - that there is a natural percolation up towards the Best of Breed for some brands who just hang in there as every Tom, Dick and Harry puts out yet another new under-performing $40K speaker.

Anyone who knows of anything else, anything else at all, please post about it in the comments section.

Our CDSA just got back, a few days ago now as we let it warm up and start breaking in… again, from getting the latest upgrade offered by EMM Labs.

The upgrade consists of a new German transport, new machined feet for the chassis, and a new bezel on the transport door. The upgrade retails for $1500 and is available only for CDSA’s and CDSD’s made in the last year or two. The CDSA is now shipped only with the upgrade and now costs $11,500 USD. The CDSD SE similarly goes up to $9,900 USD [these are only two in a raft of price increases we are receiving from most manufacturers].

This is the current setup with the upgraded CDSA SE. It is actually sitting on tall HRS Nimbus Couplers, not the new machined feet, and for lack of an extra platform, on the carpet there. That is a Nordost Brahma power cord on the CDSA and Elrod on the Audio Note Ongaku. Along with Stealth INDRA interconnects and Nordost ODIN speaker cable this is a darn simple system. We like these three piece systems [Kharma Mini Exquisites as the 3rd piece in this case].

They are so, simple. They sound good. They don’t cost a lot in interconnects and equipment racks and are visually appealing.

The name tag remains the same.

The bezel looks slightly different?

The machined feet are significantly more robust, wider and heavier looking.

Now a bunch of photos of the new transport. Much more robust feeling and looking.

A lot more metal and less plastic.

I have no idea what the 6, 9 is doing on the Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms CD - or even whether it is something Neli wrote or is on all CDs.

How does it sound? Well cold, out of the box, it sounded pretty good - but it has been a few weeks without our CDSA now and we missed it dearly - so I think the old model would have sounded pretty good at this point.

But we will do a better job as it is now warmed up and has 24 - 48 hours on it. A few more days…

And hopefully we can rescue more equipment from all the other shootouts we are running here simultaneously.

We got the:

* New Elrod power cord versus new Elrod power cord with a week or two on the Nordost Vidar cable burner test running.

* We got the Walker Proscenium Gold Signature versus the Audio Note TT3 Reference turntable shootout always running

* We got the Lamm LP2 photo stage versus the one in the Audio Note M1 preamplifier [Yes, I know which one is probably going to win, Neli, but I want to hear HOW it wins ].

* We still have the rerun of the recent interconnect shootout but not as digital cables, not as tonearm cables, but as honest ordinary interconnects

* We want to do a shootout between the Kharma and Audio Note SEC Signature speakers [yes, I know they are very different, but the new completely upgraded AN speakers should compete in the basic areas of frequency extension and overall resolution, trading efficiency and dynamics for upper midrange uber resolution - but I want to hear that they do].

* And then there is the new Audio Note Kegon Balanced versus the Ongaku versus the older high-gain Kegons.

And we will most likely have an older 6 month old or so CDSA here to do a shootout against the upgraded CDSA quite soon.

And the real problem is many of these have to run on one of the two major systems [and we like to be somewhat familiar with the sound of the system in a large sense to do the shootout in order to have a slightly higher level of confidence in our findings - so we can’t do too many changes, too fast] -and so we got a complex traffic jam on component substitutions planned that we really could use an advanced project scheduling tool to manage - if we didn’t hate these tools so much [long story, to do with idiot managers… need we say more? ].

… from: China, Hungary, Malaysia, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro, Belgium, Singapore [Hi guys!], and….. Croatia [Hi hrky! We should get to that shootout this weekend].

And of course the U.S. of A. and Canada [Hi Canada!]. Where would we be without them? Living somewhere else, I guess.

We know some of you better than others, whether because we see you at shows or you or your friends have the same equipment as we do, or just… because. You know, we audiophile nuts got to stick together in this big fishbowl we call the world [badly paraphrasing Roy Buchanan’s The Messiah Will Come Again - he can do the best ‘crying’ guitar ever].

But we appreciate ALL of you stopping by our little [or not so little] website and if you have any ideas about what shootouts we should do next, or subjects we should explore, just drop us a line, send an email, or post a comment here in the blog [no registration required. You just have to indicate that you are a human and not a spam robot].

Anyway, once again. Welcome!

Yes. Onion.

Let’s see, Romy is blasting Lamm and the new ML3 amp’s propoglicity - but at the same time saying that they are the only ones worthy of being blasted.

6moons has become THE news outlet for audio news, although the reviews and advertising on their site could be considered minimal [even though the site is more popular than ever according to online metric gathering software sites - so why people are not advertising there, I couldn’t tell you. Advertisers, search for 6 moons on Alexa, or A9.com if you prefer. No, not a perfectly reliable metric - but better than guessing with the eyes firmly closed].

The latest HiFi+ spends several pages talking about the RMAF 2007 show, or rather, about *their* room at the show. But, silly me, I didn’t even know they had a room. Anyway, maybe show coverage is only going to be provided by their Absolute Sound brethren.

Stereophile… does this issue seem kind of boring to anyone else? [No, I don’t think ALL of the issues are boring… though thinking back on it….]. For example, the Gear of the Year [nice phraseology there] - Chord and Ayre, digital and amp respectively, OK. Good workhorse equipment. But the Linn LP12? Watt Puppy #8254? Dynaudio Confidence C4? ARC/Cary multichannels?

Not a banner year. [Yes, yes, they CAN all be made to sound good, and most will work tomorrow as well as today, but did the reviewers spend the time to try different amps and cables for the, uh, very particular demands of these speakers, which almost always sound Poopify at shows? No. It was just a year of not much exciting happening over at Stereophile this year. I mean LOOK at the runner ups… EEEEeeeewwwww - though I am surprised they chose the Watt Puppy over the Sophia mk.2, especially given all their attempts to go slumming this last year (did I say that? I guess I did. Funny, when Apple made the computer ‘for the rest of us’ they made it more expensive than the ‘computer for most of us’)]