In order to better serve audiophiles who are interested in HRS products and who may not have a local dealer, Audio Federation, in partnership with and under the aegis of HRS, now offers a 20 day trial period for Harmonic Resolution Systems products.

Under this factory-authorized performance guarantee program, HRS products can be purchased from Audio Federation and auditioned in your system for 20 days. This allows you to experience the significant improvements these products will make in your system and provides you with a money back performance guarantee.

HRS is the only vibration control product that we have tried that not only consistantly improves the quality of the system it is in by a signifiacant amount, but also does not have the unpleasant side effects that, to our ears, the other vibration control products seem to have.

The offer is only available in the U.S. at this time.

If interested, here are the details about the joint Audio Federation - HRS Performance Guarantee Program.

I thought a site like this would be fun, and have owned the ratemyhifi.com domain name for awhile now.

And, well, finally got around to setting it up.

You can get to it from our home page at Audio Federation or by going to ratemyhifi.com.

This will both be a place to collect our best-of-the-best photos from shows and those taken of components from our own showrooms floors…

… and PRIMARILY a place for folks to post their photos.

Not just of their systems, but their amps, LP collections, listening chairs… all sorts of stuff. [Hey, I am always looking for great listening chairs… a VERY important part of the listening experience if you ask me ]

We see people post so many photos on the net that come and go. Great photos. Photos that make one really appreciate that ALL components, no matter the price, can look awfully delicious to the hungry audiophile…

It doesn’t necessarily have to be components that you own now, or that you ever owned yourself, or, who knows, maybe nobody ever owned one!

We just want photos: cool, strange, fascinating, kooky, awesome, sleek, kludgey, new, old, beatup, or spiffy photos.

[We’ve put a few pics up, and will put up losts more over time, especially in the Show and Conferences Photos category - but right now we have our photo processing engines resting a little in preperation for the upcoming giant photo storm…. aka HE 2006.]

Because of the current SPAM storms, and also so the software knows whose name to put under the photos, people need to register before they upload or comment on pictures.

If this becomes too much of a pain for people we can modify the software to be even smarter… But the software will never be smarter than its programmers - and so please don’t expect too much

Anyway, hope y’all like!
Mike.

Let’s see.

We added a bunch of Kharma photos to the Kharma pages:

Kharma Mini Exquisite photos
Are there too many similar pictures? After getting rid of about 95% of the photos of these speakers that were just not ‘right’, these last few I just can’t decide between.

Kharma Ceramique 3.1 Photos

Kharma MP-150 amplifier

We added a bunch of pictures of the Brinkmann LaGrange turntable with 12″ arm:

Brinkmann LaGrange Photos

and still need to add a few picturing its dissasembly.

Also added some pictures of the L2, ML1.1 and ML2.1:

Lamm ML2.1

Lamm ML1.1

Lamm L2
Again, some of the photos are probably too similar to each other - but we will remedy this over time

Rearranged the Audio Aero, Marten Design and HRS photo galleries to make them easier to access (and more visually attractive) and to prepare for adding galleries featuring others of their product line (in the very near future )

Like all photo galleries, they will be updated with photos over the months and years that are ‘better’ and/or more ‘artsy’ and/or more ’sexy’.

The Hifi’ing magazine has also eveolved into its next stage. The pictures still need ALT text for people who can’t see the pictorial index, but it is pretty close to being finished - for the near term anyway. It allows indexing into this Blog both by Article Category and now by Major Article. And, of course, this Blog allows browsing of the articles in Cronological order. And as a last restort there is always Google.

The new look of the HiFi’ing Magazine

Kharma Mini Exquisites still breaking in….

Audio Federation is raising the bar once again.

We are excited to announce our partnership with Marten Design and Sound Advice in bringing this technological tour-de-force to the Americas. We are now and will be the exclusive U.S. dealer and showroom for Marten’s statement speaker: the Coltrane Supreme. We are also the Coltrane Supreme dealer for our friends up in Canada for the forseeable future.

Marten products have always had industry-leading price/performance, and it is just mind-boggling contemplating the performance of these cost-no-object loudspeakers.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you all know how picky we are.

Picky, picky, picky.

So it was with great pleasure, and a little surprise, that after extensive consideration and evaluation of any and all speakers worldwide, we found that the next giant step forward, the state-of-the-art both technologically and musically, in the ongoing evolution of high-fidelity speakers was right here with one of the product lines we already carry.

The Coltrane Supremes list for $250,000.00 and should be here, ready for auditions in the July-August time-frame and we plan on exhibiting with them at RMAF, the 2006 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, this October in Denver.

Perhaps it was best chanted by John Coltrane, and later Santana / McLaughlin (my personal favorite), the Dead, and many, many others…

“…
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
…”

As most people who hang out hereabouts know, we have liked the Kharma approach to making music for many years now. So it is probably not much of a surprise to many of you that we are pleased as punch to be able to ‘put our money where our ears are’ so to speak.

The Kharma Ceramique CE 3.1c speaker at FSI 2006. Very nice sound, exactly as one would expect a smaller version of the Kharma 3.2 to sound like.

We should be getting in the Mini-Exquisites in a few weeks. After what they sounded like at CES, we can’t wait!

We finally got around to adding an email-powered Audio Federation newsletter.

This newletter will have news like advance information on steals and deals before they are made public and other choice audiophile-grade tidbits. Some parts of the newletter will be more commerce oriented than this blog, which I think is more hobby oriented.

The newletter subscription page is Here.

And yes, I am supposed to be getting ready for the plane but Neli is still asleep and I’m not going without her… so might as well get a few things done that need doing. At the very last minute of course, *sheesh*.

Not sure how many people realize it, but we are one of the few dealers who put the prices of everything up on our website (whenever our supplier permits it). I know I always like to know the price of something BEFORE I call about what I think is a $500 thing only to learn it is a $5000 thing and am going to have to save up a few months to get it.

We still have the monolithic price list, and it will be here for a little while still.

But we have added another price list section, with one web page per product line, with little thumbnail pictures (so far, only Edge, Audio Aero, HRS and Marten have pictures) for each product and links to other parts of our site where there is more information. This will be the lower bandwith approach of the three views we are building:

* The old ‘product page’ for each product line accessible from the Products page and now the Site Map

* The new glossy Catalog pages (under development)

* The Price List pages (still being flessed out)

We hope these various views that each celebrate the excellence of the prouduct lines we carry in a different way will help people enjoy the site even more than before.

The Power Cords page is still in woeful need of having a half-dozen power cords added to is list – there are a lot of new very-high-end power cords out there.

The CD Player, Amplifier and Preamplifier pages all now use the same purpose-directed approach as the speaker page does.

The CD Player page might be a little controversial – there are a lot of players that just seem to be competent, but are not otherwise special. ‘Workhorses’ as we call them. Maybe we should rename the ‘Workhorse’ category to something else – but as of now we cannot think of a better name.

This table also clarifies our perspective on the Esoteric et. al. versus the Meitner discussions. Yes, the top end Esoteric may have more detail and tighter bass – but we think the Meitner is QUALitatively better than the Esoteric.

In general, the equipment with the best quantitative performance and/or measurements does not always provide the most magical listening experiences, in our experience. One would think that the memory of the decades of the quantitatively better solid-state versus tube amplifiers debacle or even the quantitatively better CDs versus LPs travesty would be fresh in people minds… but guess not.

… to the Galaxy.

I think the new page more accurately reflects the general types of sounds people are searching for when they choose and/or like a speaker’s sound.

Our personal penchant has been moving from emotional to real to, now, magical and during this move the number of recommended speakers kept dwindling in numbers. The new table no longer recommends speakers, per se, but hopefully helps a person decide what kind of sound they are interested in and then provides some of the best (oops, there is that word again) examples of the state-of-the-art speakers that produce that type of sound.

Most people who are not hardcore (aka crazy, nuts, obsessive, … need we say more?) want an impressive speaker - and as one can see from the table, most popular speakers are impressive… and unfortunately they have little else going for them.

The speakers that can do multiple things, like communicating emotion and produce a convincingly real presentation, as well as being impressive at the right times, would seem to me to be speakers that both women and men might like as well as providing enough depth and sophisitication to allow their owner’s love of music to grow deeper and wider over the years.

The Audio Federation website is always trying to maintain a balance so that it serves equally well all the different kinds of visitors we get: customers and audiophiles, the hobbiest and the merely curious, those looking for information and those looking for audio por*n/photos.

Finally happy with the look of the home page, and we’ll probably keep it until at least June, if not longer.

We added a Site Map page accessible from the home page to make it easier to get around - which I even find myself using more and more. The links at the top of each page in the dealership now let one easily get back to the home (top) page.

The Music page will evolve to become an annotated index into the Blog’s forthcoming posts of audiophile-relevent music reviews. Our emphasis will be somewhat different than other music reviews, focusing on the quality of the sound more than the history of the band or how the album fits within the bands other work, or fits within the genre as a whole. Not that this other information isn’t interesting - it is that it is already done quite well by others in the industry, and no reason for us to duplicate or detract from their good work

The Hifi’ing Magazine will evolve into being not only a list of recent show reports but an annotated index into the Blog so that people can more easily find ‘major Blog posts in history’.

The Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy will be updated, both visually and content-wise. Finally.

We’ve added a number of photo galleries to the dealership product pages, and these will get fleshed out a lot more with both pictures that we take here and those we have taken, and will take, at shows.

We’ve also started adding ‘experience reports’ to the dealership’s product pages, which collect and display information about our experiences with the various products in several situations. The HRS vibration control product line is the first of many products we will do this for.

Neli will start working a lot more on the website; she knows a lot more details about most of the products than I do.

This means letting Neli have access to the website. I can just see it now. If you notice some descriptions going back and forth between say “lovely and detailed” on the one hand and “rich and detailed” on the other - you will know it is one of THOSE types of discussions going on here on the other side of your computer.

This is kind of like lending your spouse the keys to your Lamborghini (well, let’s just imagine we all had a Lamborghini, OK, and thatmost of us hadn’t spent all our money on audio equipment and $30 a pop LPs). How many times can you say ‘pleeeeease don’t break it dear’ before you get one of those matrimonial Death Ray looks? Once? Yeah, that is the way it works here, too.

I do try to get her to post her ideas on this blog…at least once a day, (and sometimes hourly. This nets me another kind of look). She made her own trip to Planet Abraxus, and to planet [whatever opera Mike Lavigne was playing the last hour of CES in the Swedish Statement room] and I am sure people would like to hear what she has to say about it.

But she is more comfortable talking about audio than writing about it, the opposite of her way too softly spoken husband. So it will still mostly be me who is posting stuff on the Blog about the ‘goings on’ here at the Belfry - with hopefully some occasional posts by Neli, and perhaps even some special guests, from time to time.

If you have any other ideas, please let us know. Thanks!