Showroom 3 – Acoustic Zen Adagio loudspeakers…
… also breaking in.
Showroom (show area) 3 now has thge Soundlab Ultimate 1 electrostatic loudspeakers as permanent residents and the Acoustic Zen Adagio as guests.
Neli tells me there are a number of people who want to hear the Adagio’s in a larger room, so here they are for now. We still have to fuss with the positioning… and they might even end up against the long wall where we can, because they are front ported, try putting them from very close to the wall to out in the middle of the room.
The Soundlab U1 really, really sounds nice in this system. Yeah, it is an expensive front end – let’s see, about $130K for a $32K speaker – but it makes that system sound quality on a par with some of the best systems we have heard, bar none. Not just in coherence and detail, which the Soundlabs always have, but involvement and suspense and emotionalty and naturalness. Magic? Can’t tell yet, with the show and all this breaking in we haven’t got a chance to just live with it for any length of time yet. It was the introduction of the M10 that really put this over the top.. and we found this out by accident, if you will remember, when we were just trying to break in the M10 at high gain (volumes) and so put it on the hard-to-drive Soundlabs.
The equipment rack for Showroom 3. We have the Emmlabs CDSD SE transport in front, Edge Signature One amps behind it, and on the HRS MXR equipment rack the Audio Note M10 preamp and its two large Galahad power supplies and the Emmlabs DCC2 SE DAC. Lots of Shunyata Anaconda power cords, Jorma Design No. 1 speaker cable, and Nordost Valhalla interconnects – and I think we have a Jorma ‘Prime’ interconnect in here too.
The equipment rack for Showroom 3. One of the Galahad power supplies is on the top whelf – it was the only way we could get 4 things on the MXR rack given that one of those things HAD to be the M10 (for the reasons of curiosity and because we didn’t want to have to step over those big boys every time we wanted to put a CD in the transport).
[No, your eyes do not deceive you, the Edge amps are indeed on the floor. One, they do not sound so bad there, this is not the first time they have visited the carpet. Second, we really do not have enough HRS M3 Isolation Bases to go around – we know we need them, we know we want them, we know we will get them, but for right now… it is on the carpet they go]
As far as how the Adagios are sounding at this point in their breakin process…. see next post.
