The System: Marten Coltrane speakers, Lamm ML2.1 amplifiers, Jorma Prime speaker cable, HRS MXR equipment rack. Also Lamm L2 preamplifier, Audio Note CDT-Two and DAC 4.1x Balanced. Nordost and Shunyata cabling.

We mentioned how amazing this was sounding in our review of the Jorma ‘Prime’ interconnects.

What does does amazing mean?

Here is what amazing means:

The Coltrane speakers are so freakin revealing… The Jorma Prime cables are slightly more forward than their No. 1 and even the Valhalla, and this new effect was already taking hold. Now, with HRS’s MXR rack [we set it up yesterday, much more on this later ] in place of the Acoustic Dreams, the system sound is even more ‘present’.

We kind of take it for a given that the Coltrane speakers are a little laid back - given the highest quality, completely neutral components up front. But maybe not…

Witb these two new, admittedly over the top, additions to the system… the sound is much more of a engulfing, in the room type of experience.

Our good Canadian friend, Dave H., [you there Dave? Missed you in Monteal] used to talk about how he wanted the sound to come to him, to not have to focus on listening to what was being played, to have the sound ‘take control’ [my words] as it were.

The system was already subtley sinister in the way it would sneak up on a person and make one stop mid sentence, whether one wanted to or not, as the music Took Control.

But now, …

It is hard to move, much more hard to get up.

It is like ‘if I miss this next note, my life will have been worthless and empty’… ‘I must hear this next note!’

I think this house is going to be much more quiet now… because if we start playing any music, we aren’t going to get ANYTHING done.

[Though I am much more disclipined than Neli, and this system is on the same floor as her office. She, she is doomed. So if you can’t get her on the tele as easily as you could before today, you’ll know exactly why!]

And the new Audio Note CDT-Three transport just arrived. We are doomed!

The shootout:

In one corner, weighing in at a slim $4K: the Nordost Valhalla interconnect

In another: the Stealth INDRA interconnect, at a nice $5700.

And the challenger: the Jorma Design Prime interconnect at a healthy $7K

First, the Valhalla.

The Valhalla is an amazingly competent interconnect. The sound is presented in a straight-forward, honest manner. Nothing artifical, no additives, musical without being overbearing.

Then, the Stealth INDRA.

The purity. The transparency. It was like this interconnect was made for the Emm Labs digital front end. Better separation, better soundstage depth, more harmonic color, more life than the Valhalla. Yummy.

Finally, the contender, the Jorma Prime.

Oh.

“Not bad. I think I actually like the Jorma better on this track than the INDRA!”

Track after track. It was the same observations over and over.

And when we switched back to the INDRA for a bit, it became very easy to understand much of the quality of the differences:

As the INDRA is to the Valhalla, so the Prime is to the INDRA.

More harmonic color. Not just that but more shades of harmonic color. Much more resolution, more bass, better separation, deeper soundstage. And some things I noticed right away, before the cables were even broken in: better integration of the music presentation into a single whole and just amazingly wonderful articulation of voices.

The human voice is so rich and full of subtle meanings - a richnes which requires the system to reproduce the most minute variations in harmonics, inter-vowel and consonant emphasis, and precise breath variations - all necessary to form and communicate the exact emotion of the singer.

It all becomes so… much… more… intimate. Like the singer is sharing something so very, very personal - do they really want us to know this about them? We have never even met!

To somewhat exaggerate:

If the Valhalla is a Black & White movie, and the INDRA is a color movie, on standard TVs, then the Prime is a technicolor HD movie on a giant HD TV.

We are really picky around here: many very expensive amplifiers, CD players, speakers… and cables, are nice in some way but have deleterious side-effects that detract from overall listening experience. Here, we strive to make every piece carry its own weight - to be as clean and perfect and wonderful as is technologically possible today.

The cables we like best are those without bloat, without artificial flavors, without preferences for this frequency (typically the bass) or that (typically the midrange), very capable of carrying the signal in its entirety from the sources to the speakers preserving those subtle, but so very critical Fundumental Music Elements like micro-dynamics, inner detail, presense, true-warmth - able to communicate the VAST amounts of information of a complex musical passage, crunched down into a split-second, without becoming sonic mud.

Well, now you have a better idea of what we mean when we say we like these Jorma Prime cables - both the speaker and the interconnect.

Personally, I am somewhat shocked. Really didn’t really epxect to like them so much, to be able to find some fault….

At the price, only incrementally more than some of the excellent competition, the interconnects ARE a real bargain.

The speaker cables are also really, really wonderful. The Coltane / Lamm ML2.1 system is just a-m-a-z-i-n-g right now. But even us here at Audio Federation experience price shock every so often. To deal with this personal, psychological block, I have convinced myself that the interconnects, at one third the cost, give the system some of the same wonderfull improvements as the speaker cables. And they do.

But I’d hate to hear what both of these cables in the same system would sound like.

No, really.

Wait. Not hate. Make that fear.

I keep telling Neli not to try it.

And if she tries it, I do not want to hear it. Or about it.

Why?

Count it up: we have 4(!) systems here.

Fair warning. Once you hear these, you will be spending lots and lots of time figuring out how to get them, and keep them, in your system. I know we are, ….dammit.

Finally performed the definitive shootout between the interconnects last night:

Nordost Valhalla vrs. Stealth INDRA vrs. Jorma Prime.

When we first got the Prime they were not broken in - a somewhat foward and compressed midrange, and in general the sound came through with a weird, non-flat frequency response. After waiting 3 or 4 days for them to relax, and only hearing minor improvements (exactly as if they were still breaking in), they got put on the Nordost Vidar cable burner for a week or so.

Then we had a marital dispute about the direction the cables were supposed to be used in: should the Bybee purifier go towards the receiving end or the source end? Mike, the Magnificent, (me! insert chest thumping here) thought that they should go towards the receiving end because that is how the Bybees in the speaker cables are oriented. Neli, the wife of Mike the magnificent, remembered Jorma telling her that they went the other way - and somehow during the tests of directionality somebody (not Mike the Magnificent) confused what was towards the receivnig end and what was away from it … well, let’s just say that this week it isn’t I who is the butt of all the jokes around here…

‘Course, this post won’t earn me any points….

Well, it is only fair. last week it was me providing the humor… but I insist it could happen to anybody. You be the judge. The marriage you save could be mine….

In the Audio Aero Capitole player, I looked inside, saw there wasn’t a CD, and put on Ashkenazy’s Rachmanonov.

I pressed play, but different music started playing. Really different.

What did I do to fix this?

I looked inside and saw, yes, the Rachmananov CD was plainly visible. Check.

Then, well…

I pressed STOP, then pressed PLAY again, of course.

This should fix it right?

I mean, when your CD player starts playing something entirely different from what you put in it, this works for you, right?

OK, this was happening during an audition for a nice couple from Rhode Island. So there was an attentive audience for this show I was putting on…

Finally, the Neli of the house came over and took off the Rachmananov CD ….

… and then took off the completely black (exactly the same black as the inside of the top loading Capitole drawer by the way) De Mat that was…. on top of the CD that was underneath the Rachmanonov CD…!

Ha, ha. Very funny.

No I wasn’t trying to play two CDs at once. Yes, I do look inside the player before I just stick a CD in it. No, I wasn’t trying to invent another tweek by stacking CDs in order to improve the sound. No, it wasn’t even a demonstration to show that the player would still play with two CDs and a DE Mat inside of it.

*sigh*

[The De MAT is a black rubbery thing that covers the top of a CD in top loaders to improve the performance of the laser - and thereby the sound - and it works]

Oh, anyway, now everybody has forgotten all about my little ‘incident’ - well, they had until they read this post, anyway.

**************

Back to the Jorma Design Prime interconnect.

It turns out that Mike and Jorma were right and Neli was wrong.

Hee hee hee ))))))

Next - what we heard at the shootout.

As a teaser, let’s just say that $7K for a one meter interconnect is looking like a helluva bargain.

I kid you not. The incremental cost for these cables above the other two brings a tremendous improvement in the listening experience.

Next - the details.

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.

She likes it!

Hey Mikey! She likes it!

Uh, yes, Neli likes the speaker cables. Mike likes them too.

After 10 days on the Nordost Vidar cable burner, the caveats I noticed when we first heard these cables, the tiniest bit of midrange leaness and compression, are… gone. As suspected, the cables just weren’t completely broken in yet.

The Jorma Prime cables break new ground in the resolution department. Nordost Valhalla cables are usually considered to have very high resolution. But, well, this is a whole new ballgame. Heck, it is a whole new season.

On the Marten Design Coltrane speakers driven by the Lamm ML2.1 amplifiers, which are very high resolution themselves, what with ceramic drivers and a diamond tweeter, these speaker cables just shine. Shine a light on the music, is what.

OTL-like dynamics. Combined with the wonderful pacing this is just plain fun, happy, wow! to listen to.

Super-subtle voice intonations - where lots of the previously unheard nuances are freed, nuances that communicate more of the emotion and substance and individuality and humanity of the voices and instruments.

Voices? Even on day one the voices were enough to just grab you and throw you down in the nearest seat - or, depending on your personality, make you stand up and drench yourself in it all.

Transparency…

You remember how, the first time you heard a high-end system, you thought “Oh, so that is what was on that CD (or LP) this whole time?!!!”

Deep dish harmonics. Harmonic intent that was previously locked behind a dirty display case is now presented to the listener on a silver.. and gold… platter.

Separation, presence, … resolution.

Reso-f***ing-lution.

These cables were paired with the Marten Design Coltrane Supremes in the Swedish Statement room at CES, with their 2″ diamond midrange and 3/4″ diamond tweeter - No wonder we started hallucinating.

New ballgame? This is a whole new universe to explore.

OK. Whew! So, well, the cables are doing their part. Yep. Let’s just put a nice big check mark in that box….

Next!

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.

We got our TAS a few weeks ago and in it they had 30 pages dedicated to their CES 2006 show report.

Nice show report. So happy to see they put out such a wealth of impressions from CES. It was a complete lack of any such information that caused us to start our show reports way back when.

But, well, now we are addicted to shows so we aren’t going back to the sidelines, sorry - but it is good that a print mag is putting out more than just excerpts from show brochures for a change.

OK, idea for another BLOG post: “Varieties of hi-fi audio addictions - Feeding and care of”.

Jonathan Valin’s section in the TAS show report had some surprising simularities to our impressions, and more interestingly, some variances.

Room-by-room then:

Nola / Plinius
We didn’t take much notice of this room

VR-9 / darTZeel
Agree that they sounded better at the Denver show. Don’t thnik ’syrupy’ is the right word here, at all. Actually do not agree with any of the description here.

Calix
I thought the driver integration and localization problems he noticed were minor flaws in an overall natural, big, pure sound which was a little relaxing after some of the hifi-ish sound in the other rooms.

Wisdom Audio / Edge
Agree with the reticence. Disagree with the implication that the Edge was at fault.

TAD
Agree that it was not quite (duh!) as abrasive as their HE 2005 room. The rest is to say he doesn’t like this sound either, though he blames the speakers by showering compliments on the Pass Labs amps whereas I womder if the blame should really be shared between the two.

AAA Audio
Not sure which room this is

Lumen White / Ayon
Closed in and dark? A little, I guess. I heard a little timbre anomolie which really grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go, unfortunately.

Harbeth
Didn’t spend too much time in here

Hansen
Not much time in here either

Immedia
These were not playing any music when I was there

Ridley
Not sure which room this was

Fanfare International
Not sure which room this was, either

Zanden / Peak Consult
Agree with what he said, even with the ’slightly-more-hooded’ sound of the Peak Consult in comparison with the Kharma - though I would say ‘lots’ instead of ’slightly’.

Marten Design / EAR
Dark and bright at the same time? Say what? I guess this could mean the treble was a little forward and the midrange a little recessed? If so then I could see the EAR being described this way… I guess. The minor amount of these frequency bumps in that room I usually discount as part of the room (or the number of people in the room at the time of the listening session), …………unless he is talking about the first day…

Acoustic Precision (Venture / L:amm)
Spacious and detailed? I guess, but overwehelmed by a significant reticence and darkness that was obscuring the spaciousness and detail, IMHO.

Talon / Joule Electra
Peak in the midbass and glare in the upper mids? Yeah, and mostly the general lack of signs of life.

Nola Pegasus / ASR
Disagrees with HP and describes the overly-polite dynamic nature of the ASR. Exactly!

Burmester room
Say what? He likes this room and we just heard the deadness and lack of bloom and timbre that seemed a little off.

Coincident / Manley
All he says is that they were “coherent at loud levels”. Perhaps, but what about other attributes and at other listening levels. What a nice way to diss a room while being nice about it. We bow to the master (Neli says I should stop using words like ‘terrible’, so I am taking notes here . The problem here was that there was a lack of life (lack of micro-dynamics,real world richness of tone, subtle shades of timbre being lost, etc.)

Eben / Rado
Not sure we heard this room

Sound Lab / EMM Labs / Parasound
“Gorgeous sounding? Best fullrange stat at CES?” Well, there were only two stats there that I remember, so I agree with this. But this dry sound with very little tone does NOT represent the way the Meitner or Sound Lab sound. Either 1) people are looking for something VERY different than we are when it comes to the sonics of electrostatic speakers or 2) people have never heard the way the Sound Labs can REALLY sound, like they do here with top notch amplification.

Artemis Labs
Too busy chatting to listen in this room. Mea Culpa.

Magico / Edge / CAT
He loved this room and I thought it was muddy and disorganized sounding. Timbre was the slightest bit off and the dynamics somewhat unbalanced and compressed. Hopefully people don’t just attribute great sound to a room just because the speakers do so well for their size (although the tempation is there and we feel its pull as well). I cannot understand why some reviewers are liking this room so much (most people at the show seem to like the other Magico room better, but even that I found… not bad but kind of so-so).

ARC / Wilson
Agree that this room pulled off a great sound with what we would consider… somewhat colorless… electronics and a difficult speaker.

Ascendo
Agree that the tonal color was good and everything else that was said about the room. So nice to hear them sound so much better after their terrible showing at HE 2005 (Oops, still using that T word, ain’t I?)

Avalon / Hovland
He isn’t a fan of the Eidolon Diamonds (but we are!) but he liked this room (but I didn’t). I thought the Hovland Radia had more life than these new Stratos amplifiers - which sounded dark and reticent to me at CES.

Peak Consult / WAVAC / Continuum
Ha! He was also dissapointed with the turntable / system in this room .So were we - or rather, it is a fine turntable, but not unlike many other fine turntables out there.

Magico / Rowland
Agree on the lack of life in this room.

Dali Megalines / McIntosh
He didn’t like the room much - and my impressions were that it was warm and muddy, enjoyable for people in recovery from a overly bright system, perhaps.

Ayre / JBL
Didn’t hear this room

Avantgarde Acoustic
Maybe he is comparing these to all other very, very efficient horn designs and so he likes them using that scorecard? Otherwise…impressive yes. Emotional? Enjoyable? Real? Natural? Not to these ears.

VR7
I think we missed this room

Genesis
He says “Too much tweet and woof”. Good description.

GTT Audio
He liked it. So did we.

MBL
He says it is “wow”. We agree. “That the midrange is realistic”. To our ears they take away some of the leading edges of the notes and reshape the note envelope in a kind of interesting way - along with an almost complete lack of micro-dynamics, That the “treble is without parallel”. We actually find it to not be very realistic either. He gives this the best of show. But without specifying what it is best at, one cannot tell if he thinks it is just doing ‘impressive’ better than all the other speakers are ‘doing impressive’, or better than all other speakers at doing their job in pursuit of their particular ‘purpose’, whether that be real, enjoyability, emotionality, naturalness or whatever. Or, and this can’t be it, that it is the best at doing EVERYTHING compared to all the other systems at the show.

Most likely it is, like our old Best Of Show, the system they would most like to have in their posession. And in this case it is also the system most like the system in his possession. [JV has an MBL-based system these days].

Well, that’s it. Hope it was fun for everyone. If not, well, hope we will do better next time.

‘Til then, then.

I really like the low-powered Lamm ML2.1 18 watt SET amps on the Marten Design Coltrane 89dB sensitive full-range speakers.

Coltrane speakers, ML2.1 amps, Lamm L2 preamp, Audio Note CDT2 and DAC 4.1x Balanced, Nordost Thor and Valhalla cables, Shunyata power cords

I really liked the Audio Aero Prestige 40 watt amps and the Audio Note Kegon 22 watt amps on the Coltranes before that.

No, they don’t generate that adrenaline rush of a really loud presentation with chest thumping bass.

The Coltranes can do this with the right amplification. And it is really fun. In a Homeresque Whoo Hoo! kind of way.

But the little tube amps on these speakers can hold me…..

SPELLBOUNDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

The little amps are able to grip the speakers pretty darn well. They also show off immense amounts of harmonic detail. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

But it is not about all this analytical crap at all.

It is all, everything, completely, about the fact that the …Sound… Grips… Me.

Yeah, It helps that the speaker has a very high resolution, a speaker with all ceramic drivers and diamond tweeters has a tendency to do this. It helps that the speakers are full range, so that whatever bass the amps put out, the listener gets to hear. And they put out a lot of bass - make no mistake - but it is analog bass, like bass in the real world, and not electronic bass (which some ever larger percentage of our music these days likes to use and here is where the little tube amps on hard to drive speakers really do take a back seat to solidstate amps).

But this is not about how the speaker or system sounds.

It is not.

This is about how the sounds affects the listener.

In the end why should I care about the sound, beyond a certain minimum standard, any more than I care about the minute contruction details of the chair I sit in, or the the type of weaving and glue the carpet underneath my feat uses? What we CARE about REALLY is how comfortable the chair is; about how pleasant the carpet is to look at and feel underneath our feet.

What if all reviews and all show reports paid attention to nothing except how the sounds …made …them …feel.

I bet the Stereophile list of Class A components would look a lot different than they do now.

Still thinking about these speakers and what their impact is going to be, both on me personally, and on our industry and audiophiles in general.

Although the speakers had numerous problems (speakers did not dissapear in any way, horn resonances and reflections along with buzzing and dullness in the subwoofer and no real highs to speak of) they did some things so very, very well that it makes me wonder…

These speakers were one of the very few (two?) horn speakers that do not have offensive, to me, horn colorations. They reproduced transients in their target frequency range effortlessly. These kind of REALISTIC (not overly exaggerated, not compressed and muffled) transient details we have heard only with the best speakers: Marten Design Coltranes, Kharma Midi Grandes (with the Tenors), and the Acapellas can do this - usually requiring very careful amplifier pairing and it comes off not quite as effortlessly - often with more of a ‘the speaker is gripped really hard by the amp’ sound. The SPACE aorund the microdynamics was awesome. The timbre was very, very rich. The sound was very big and open (somewhat an artifact of the nearfield listening position).

So, did you notice that I am describing sounds and not music? Nothing about whether a piano sounds like a piano, whether sounds were properly positioned and imaged in a realistic soundstage (it was not too bad, as Radiohead Amnesiac played back well and that first track stresses this exact thing, amoung others….:-)), whether the dynamics was balanced between the quiet sections and the loud, etc. etc. etc. Whether these are done well, poorly, or excellently, I cannot answer given the extreme nearfield listening position and because I was, addmittedly, hypnotized by other aspects of the sound at the time of listening.

A Mythical Commercial-Quality Speaker Built Using Cogent Hardware and Designs

Will audiophiles like and buy such speakers? Their ease of drivability with even modest sized amps and their kick-ass dynamics seems to be a win win situation. The problems as I see it are the lows, the highs, and the appearance.

The lows at CES were produced by a very large folded horn subwoofer. This configuration will just not be acceptable to most people. So integration with a common standalone subwoofer would be required. It would also be great if the Cogent speaker went down to 30 Hz. so that the speaker could stand-on-its-own without requiring a subwoofer but this may be impossible while still keeping the rest of the frequencies pristine.

The highs were absent; as I understand it everything above 10K Hz was left to the listener’s imagination. One of the numerous super tweeters, for example the Corona plasma tweeeter, could, however, be paired with the Cogent horns to provide the necessary high frequencies.

The appearance, which is already quite good and certainly better than all of the GOTO and ALE horns I could find on the net, is still not as livingroom friendly as most people would probably prefer. But a little work on the paint job, using a composite material instead of wood for the construction, a nice veneer, and perhaps adding a little curvature to both strengthen the horn to minimize resonances and to minimize those reflections of sounds off of the room back to the horn and then back to the listener’s ears.

So here we then have a speaker that uses 3 different technologies, each the best at reproducing music in its frequency range. Integrating these different technologies into a seemless whole will take work and genius. Sound familiar?

These will also be expensive. Figure a minimum of $50K for the horns (it costs $32K for the drivers alone), $5K for the subwoofer, and $5K for a super-tweeter. $60K is expensive - and a speaker this expensive will probably require a dealer network, so add some on top of the $60K for that.

So, the answer to my question - will this be really popular with audiophiles, is I do not know (I know, all this and I cop out at the end. The real answer is yes, for some audiophiles, yes. But Wilson Audio does not need to get too worried yet). There are a lot of weird speakers out there in the $60K to $100K range - with a lot less potential than this one.

Further reading on the Cogent horn speakers at CES:
Audio Asylum

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.