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.

… the loudspeaker / amplifier pair. [OK, yes, this is really the two most important components…:-]

Like Laurel and Hardy. Abbot and Costello. Arnold and his body…

You get this pair right and the supporting cast: sources, preamplifier, cables etc. can be customized to fit individual taste… or used to optimize, highlight, support the amplifier / loudspeaker team.

OK. Fine.

The kicker here is that good teams are hard to find. Really hard.

And without a team such as this, the results are almost always boring at best, distressing at their worst. [Martin and Lewis both went on to make good movies without each other, IMHO, so there are exceptions…:-]

This is why we are so happy, exuberant even, about how well the Lamm ML2.1 amps team up with the Marten Design Coltrane speakers. The EDGE Signature One worked really well, but some people just have to have a tube amp. The high-gain Audio Note Kegons work fantastic, but they work fantastic with everything and they cost $50K. The ML2.1 at $30K are a lot cheaper and have a nice synergy going - unexpected really. I originally poo poo’ed the idea of even trying the two together.

Our Sound Lab Ultimate 1 speakers sound way, WAY better than any U1 speakers that we have ever heard at shows, no matter how many accolades they get from reviewers and show attendees - but I feel we still have not hit upon the great amp for these speakers yet (but we did find great speaker cables for these speakers: the Pranawire Cosmos speaker cable).

Now we have to try lots of amps with the Kharma Mini Exquisite speakers. We expect the ML2.1, which sound so right with the smaller and harder to drive Kharma 3.2 speakers, will work very well on the Minis - but you never know these things until you try them.

That is part of what makes it so hard, finding these super-synergistic amp-speaker teams - each combination has to be tried and tested.

Oh, yeah, one more thing. Something that many, many people seem to ignore, at least the way I read things:

The associated equipment: source, preamplifier and cables, powercords, and rack - cannot suck… or you will never hear if the amp and speakers are performing beautifully.

Even a great team can’t overcome a plot, script and director who just really are not up to the task. Such a team will remain forever in obscurity.

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”.

We divided components and speakers into 7 or so basic sound groups in the Audiophiles Guide to the Galaxy (speakers, amps, preamps, cd players). These categories are:

Impressive
Enjoyable
Sweet
Sophisticated
Emotional
Natural
Real
Magical

This allowed us to both 1) include components and speakers that were not in our opinion the BEST allround components (like MBL), and 2) be more inclusive of other peoples tastes (like the vast numbers of people whose overwhelming priority is for impressiveness).

It is not clear if these categories are formed from:

1) The desires different people have for different types of sound during various stages of their maturity

2) The purposes of the designers when building their products

3) The purposes of the components that they just so happen to have irregardless of their designers intentions

4) The cosmologically fundamental goals of sound reproduction

5) Just a convenient yardstick to use in order to parsel things out so they are not all in one big messy pile

Not sure it matters one way or another.

But we use this methodology in our show reports as well as the Audiophile’s Guide - and some people have asked us to better define these categories. It is kind of a ‘you know it when you hear it’ kind of thing, but here goes anyway:

Impressive:

The most commonly desired category. [1] A big soundstage, powerfull bass, lots of macrodynamics. [2] Lots of midrange detail.

Enjoyable:

The most neglected category by the very high-end. [1] Competent sound (dynamics, frequency balance, soundstaging, timbre is not terrible). Nothing offensive.

Sweet:

Enjoyable plus something extra. [1] Timber and note envolopes altered to sound more like music does when the listener has consumed alcohol

Sophisticated:

Also enjoyable and pleasant [1] Exaggerated subtleties.

Emotional:

Often thought to be at the end of the high-end rainbow, but repeated experiences with blues and melancholy music pushes one to go farther. [1] The music pulls at the heart in the direction of the emotional content of the musicians’s message. This effect can be of varying strengths. [2] Leads to mood swings and to listening to more ‘fun’, lighthearted music than before.

Natural:

True timbe and note envelope development. [1] The subtleties of the sound is real. The correctness of the macrodynamics, level of detail, etc. is not necessary for this category

Real:

The ‘Absolute Sound’. Comparable to the real thing. The most often mistakenly heard category. [1] Able to suspend the listener’s sense of disbelief. Transparent - ability to ’see’ the stage and the musicians. [2] Sufficiently technically correct reproduction but only to the degree where it satisfies requirement [1].

Magical:

The voice of God. Contact with the Cosmic Consciousness. [1] Somethings occur inside the listener which are not typically associated with listening to music. The music becomes a pathway to experiencing things and ideas that are beyond the usual daydreams one has had before, and in fact, quite strange, but in a good way. [2] Rampant confusion and respect caused by [1]

It appears that Sweet and Sophisticated are subsets of Enjoyable and Natural a subset of Real. So maybe there are only 5 categories.

But wait!

We have been thinking of adding another category that has been kind of included in Magical. And that is “Messenger” or “Communicator”

Messenger:

That the sound is able to communicate not just the emotion, but the musicians state of mind, their intentions during playing the song, the intentions of the author of the piece, the particular skills of a particular musican playing a particular riff, etc. The sound is able to communicate the excitment and anticiaption and confusion of the audience.

It looks like we will have to add a Messenger category. Not sure if this is a property of a component or really of a system as a whole, though.

OK. Anyway - this is how we look at the sounds of various components and hopefully this will help people better understand how we evaluate these things.

Oh, and then there are components and speakers that embody combinations of the above…. like our new Mini Exquisites’s [And many other fine products as well, of course… ]

Some sound tastes BAD. This kind of sound is discussed often and widely.

Some sound tastes sweet.

Some has a strong taste - and many people (usually males) who like strong sound do not care what it actually tastes like, just that it is stong.

But, after one has learned to cook up a good system that tastes pretty good, what is left?

Nourishment.

Without nourishment, no matter how good the sound tastes, one is eventually left with an empty feeling. Over time, this empty feeling grows and grows. This feeling that SOMETHING IS MISSING.

Eventually one (’s passion) may up and die without all the essential ingredients necessary for a healthy sonic existance.

Can we come up with the X basic sound groups necessary for a healthy sound system?

Perhaps our Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy speaker, amp, digital and preamp tables might be a starting place:

Impressive, Enjoyable, Emotional, Natural, Sweet, Real, and Magical.

A healthy system should have a appropriate percentage of all these sound groups.

Perhaps that percentage changes over time, as one ages, and/or as one grows to be more of a sonic connoisseur .

I do think there is indeed a real sensitivity as one matures to the absence of, or an imbalance of some sort, with one or more the basic sound groups in a system. A system can taste… great, but….. it has too little protein, or too much, or it has too much fat, or too much salt, or too much…

Can there be too much enjoyability? or real? or natural? or magic?

Seems like the problem is usually with too little of one or more of the sound groups with respect to the other groups…

We are like Goldilocks, the key is balance.

Or maybe.. the Coneheads.

Perhaps the goal, in a well-balanced diet of course, is to be a Soundhead - ‘consuming mass quantities’ of ALL of the sonic food groups?

To MAXIMIZE each and every key ingredient of the sound as much as possible….?

Just asking…

A number of things are going on here behind the scenes.

The last month was one of our best months ever . Thank you, everybody, very much. We apprecitate your business and support.

We also anticipate being able to announce a major addition or two here any time now. Yes, it may involve speakers.

And the website, hopefully our internet guests (you!) enjoy our presentation of an audiophile’s-ear-view and audiophile’s-eye-view of ‘high technology in service of the music lover’. And hopefully it helps make worthy buying decisions.

We use a multidisciplinary approach using high quality digital photography guided by a couple of very passionate audiophiles (aka us), decades of professional software and HCI design research, combined with the near ubiquity of relatively high-bandwidth connectivity and relatively inexpensive large computer monitors.

The Audio Federation Home page on the new DELL 30007 FPW 30″ monitor.

A tremendous amount of effort is expended to make our webpages load as fast as possible, while keeping the quality of the site and content, and the resolution and size of the photos, at, hopefully, Oh-My-Gawd levels.

To this end we continue to update the website, adding gallery pages for many of the lines we carry (and some that we don’t), expanding the high-gloss Catalog, enhancing the magazine-style Price Lists, and growing the Recommended Systems review pages. It is not as good as actually hearing what something sounds like, but at least we will get to show you what it really looks like in addition to, succinctly, describing what it really sounds like.

Well, we try hard, anyway.

The Audio Federation Recommended Systems Page on the DELL 30″ monitor.

Enjoy!

Now, I should preface this by admitting that I do not know everything there is to know about video. But I do know some things; I read the trade magazines and forums and scope out various video technologies every so often, so I think my points will be valid, to some extent anyway.

This post was inspired by a casual thought I had that video technologies were objectively better at doing their job than audio technologies. That videophiles didn’t seem to have all these wars over how close XYZ technology was to being objectively real as opposed to being subjectively ’somewhat like reality’.

But is this really true?

The idea here is to compare video technology to audio technology in terms of how close they are to reproducing the ‘real thing’.

Both technologies have products that are ‘warm’ (Pioneer Elite, some CRT projectors and I think LCOS as well).

Both technologies have products that are overly detailed (Mitsubishi, some might say DLP as well).

But in the audio world people often build systems for the types of music they like (rock & roll, classical, jazz all have different system profiles and only the best systems can do all genres well), but I am unaware of people designing their video systems to best display specific genres; say sci-fi movies, or love stories, or horror movies. Is this because video technologies all reproduce subject matter objectively so well, that they are way beyond this need to tailor the technology to the subject matter type?

I wonder….

Though they advertise that some of the new LCD display technologies are like ‘looking out a window’, they have not fooled a single person as far as I know (the 102 inch flat panel at CES was really amazing, but it wasn’t REAL. It wasn’t capable of fooling someone). But I have read of several audio demonstrations where people were easily fooled into thinking that the sound came from real musicans and not the stereo system behind the curtain which was really generating the sound.

Are our ears just more easily fooled?

Or is audio just inherently easier to reproduce?

I think that when the day comes that videophiles are arguing about video technologies that fool people into thinking, say, a persons face is real - but fool them in different ways - well, I imagine that day is still a goodly distance in the future.

Will they someday determine that enlarging the red pixels a little and shrinking the blue will make horror movies scarier?

So we audiophiles should be happy (yeah, right) that we have got it pretty darn good. We can reproduce the sound of a guitar, some singers, and most percussion so that it fools people, even people who are skilled listeners.

Not too shabby.

Well, it DOES take a system - otherwise no music comes out of them speakers.

And building a great sounding system takes time. It is not something everyone has the patience for, or the skill for, or desire for, or the time for.

I was remonded of this when a commercial came on TV for some, what I presume to be special in some way, brake pads. Yes, I am sure there are lots of people who shop the Auto Parts store and like to install custom brake pads on their automobile.

But I am not one of them. And I think the vast majority of people are like me.

So where does that put the ordinary person who does not want to put together a system a component at a time anymore than they want to put together a car a brake pad at a time?

We’ve talked about the system approach before, on both our Classic Systems page as well as our old Turnkey Systems page.

There are actually very few systems that really sound great - and they take awhile to find - but there are some. And most can be tailored a little bit one way or the other to suit the type of sound to suit the buyer (do you want all-season or performance tires, do you want a sunroof, do you want a nav or a dvd player, …).

To this end we are creating a Recommended Systems section that will list the systems we set up here that we think are killer in some way or another - and we will try to categorize the system’s sonic goals in the same way as was done in the Audiophile’s Guide’s sections on speakers, amps, CD players and preamps.

We are just starting the construction of the Recommended Systems pages - so if anyone has any ideas on how they would like to see the systems arranged or what information they would like to see about each system - please let us know!

Thanks, and Enjoy!

P.S. Oh, so it looks like Sonic Flare also mentioned selling complete systems this week as well. This meme must be getting around. Good.

… over in somebody ELSE’S system.

Repeat after me:

There is no perfect speaker.

There is no perfect amplifier.

There is no perfect…

It is the components that one Hasn’t heard that are the most incidious at making us doubters, making us wonder if THEY perhaps are the *** U-L-T-I-M-A-T-E *** COMPONENT.

Some of the Jones’ components are good, most are just OK, just like all components once you actually get to hear them for yourself.

It is the one’s we haven’t heard, where we wonder “maybeTHAT box has EVERYTHING… sophistication AND magic AND impressiveness!”, that are the most insidious, making us doubt everything we have learned up until now.

Truth: There are very, very few components that really ARE significantly greener than the rest. Most are just… different. Hey, at least half are actually worse than average .

However, it is the actual hearing one of these 8th wonders of the world that REALLY gets us hooked, dooms us to keep looking, always looking, across the street to see if the grass really IS greener over there.

It is our job here, our responsibility, tough life that we have, to scout around the 1000s of speakers, 1000s of amps, and cables and cd players, and preamps and powercords and determine which are truly special and which are just …nice.

Unlike most dealers we actually do not care if they ’sell well’ - if they are really great sounding we will make the effort ourselves to help build their brand and get the word out there.

Unlike most reviewers we do not have to find a great component each and every month.

Unlike most reviewers (and most dealers who seem to rely more on the big bamboozle - yes, I just had to put bamboozle in somewhere; bamboozle is just too fun of a word to leave out of any good Blog for too awfully long ) we actually care about how the components really sound because we play them here for very picky people who will spend some of their hard-earned to take what they are hearing home with them if they really like what they hear (and can afford what they hear).

We take this responsibility to heart - some components are really pretty good so there is no real need to replace them with the hot new brand X, the grass often really isn’t greener (it just the low angle you are looking at it from that makes it look greener ) - save a few bucks.

OK, three smiley faces is all I allocate myself for each post (not really, but I bet you wish it were true) so I had better be…

…outa here.