CES 2012 – End of Day 1
Exiting the Venetian at the end of the first day of the show.
Too bad the blog is in reverse order like this.
Just imagine looking through all 40 rooms or so to this point and then entering this fantasy world of light and color and partying people [although we do have to transition to the outside by traversing the casino – another world not much related to reality].
Not sure whether to port the show up to this point to the Gallery / Database now, as planned, or continue on and fish the show report here on the blog. The blog is somewhat easier for humans and search engines to find.
I also feel burnout looming… looming… and I want to make sure to get at least one full version before that happens.
As I read other reports [OK, just Stereophile’s and JV’s (boy, what a mixed up report this is this year – from Marc Michelsonish (who must be on crack and listening to things from his villa on Pluto) room reviews to somewhat distressed angst over the Magico room – haven’t read the review but did read the comments – long story…)] I feel the temptation to post some kind of summary.
Summary: nothing was fantastic but a lot was very much worth listening to and investigating – and hardly any of them were the same as those that were interesting last year.
Hmmmm, for some reason that did not satisfy the itch. 🙂
OK, the interesting [in a good way] rooms this year were YG Acoustics/Tenor, YG Acoustics/Krell, Magico/Luxman(!), Venture(!)/Venture, Ktema/Air Tight(!), Von Schweikert(!)/Audio Power Labs, Kondo/Kondo, and… to a minor degree the big Magico/mystery amps room [only because despite the extreme problems with the sound here this was the only Magico system ever, from the Magico Mini onward, that sounded RELAXED and not stifled and constipated and under-powered. Big and open Magico has until now been an oxymoron] and to a lesser extent, the big Sonus Faber/? system [usually you pay more, a lot more, and get LESS colored, but there is no rule it has to be that way, now is there?]
I do really want to post summaries at the end of the report, and not in the middle, otherwise they will just get lost.
Hello,
I have heard Magico with Soulution and Devialet, the sound can be good, but not perfect
(many flaws left, especially in the bass department).
Is a speaker in the 150K$ range, can be only good or have to be perfect ?
Rgds
Bernard
Hi Bernard,
Depends on your listening background, but systems with speakers in that range should be ‘close to perfect’ and provide lots of room for you to ‘grow as an audiophile’. They should be so good in several areas such that you only get hints at their depths of quality – which it will take literally years of listening to understand and deeply appreciate.
Great amp/speaker combinations can do this – they provide a fertile ground for you to expand your appreciation of music, of musicianship, and of the art and beauty that is all around us.
Flaws… some flaws are ‘fixable’ and some are endemic to the system. Examples…
We’ve had people say our systems have too much resolution [they were used to dull sounding gear on dull sounding racks using dull sounding cables – or, conversely, their ears were so tired of their over bright system at home that any touch of resolution scared the bejeezus out of them] and too little resolution [they were used to the midrange detail ‘bite’ that many systems have that sounds like ‘detail’ – and when they didn’t hear the bite in our systems, they thought they weren’t hearing any details]
I would say you cannot have too much resolution – you can always do things to remove detail later but you can never add it.
Similarly bass – it is so room dependent, and depending on whether you want solid-state bass or natural / real sounding bass [if you listen to techno, then this is the same thing :-)], you can position the speakers differently in your room, add bass traps, spike the speakers, add better vibration control rack and platform support, etc. to at least mitigate bass problems, and even optimize it to a degree which is largely dependent on your room and, yes, somewhat on the bass rolloff characteristics of your speakers and the amp’s ability to control the speaker at those frequencies.
Of all things, this last, the inherent flaws in the bass of a speaker/amp combo, is the hardest to determine at a show or dealership. The room and the speaker position are such a large part of this. The best that I have been able to do is to try to understand the upper bass / low midbass characteristics as much as possible – is it tight and controlled? Or is it loosy goosy? Do notes start and stop when they are supposed to? Are they as loud as they should be? And, this is hard to hear but, are the middle of the notes controlled – can you hear them do things, have changes perhaps in tone as well as volume, in the middle of the mid-bass notes that reflects what sounds like things the musician is doing … Hear that guitarist moving that E string around a little after it was picked, or Yo-Yo Ma’s bow changing its orientation a few times while it is being pulled across a string…
This is kind of related to bass resolution, but it is more like resolution PLUS you can hear the muscles being used and the control the musician has over the pick/bow – how they are MASTERING their instrument – not just the tinkle tinkle of the details.
This is important, these more subtle control issues, because this allows you to hear, viscerally in some cases, the quality of the musicianship, what makes makes Yo-Yo Mah better than you or me [assuming you are not a concert musician] when we draw a bow across a bass. I am frequently amazed how much effort and experience goes into each note played by a great musician.
—–
More generally then, more serious issues, IMHO, you might want to listen to are tonality [harmonics also must be ‘true to life’, start and stop accurately, have resolution, etc.], as well as these same issues, that we talked about with respect to bass, in the other frequencies.
Haven’t heard the Devialet, I don’t think. But the Soulution on the Magico Q3 at CES was, and I’ll use Neli’s words, dull [notes running into each other, high noise floor, lack of control] and loud, no matter what the volume is [atonal, not enough resolution in the middle of the notes causing too much unnatural energy at a single frequency], irrresolute [that is the way she talks 🙂 not enough resolution to sound like instruments instead of note/noise generation], …
Maybe these exhibitors were just poor at setting up the system, maybe not.
But really wish I could have taken everybody from this room to the Luxman/Magico Q3 room and back again. It would at least make for a lot of interesting conversation [Please nolte, I am NOT a fan of Luxman, at all. But the system it was in sounded like an exemplar example of the Geeky fun tight punchy sound that seems to be the goal of Magico at these shows].
If you do not hear these problems then maybe the system you heard was setup correctly.
You know, a lot of people right off systems because the ‘soundstage was not very deep’, or the ‘imaging was not as good’ [see JV’s notes on the CES Venture room], or the ‘bass wasn’t impressive, or too overpowering’ when I think these are in large part fixable in practice [the bass] and some of which are totally an affectation of an audiophile who pays attention to the wrong things [:-) OK you guys, I am allowed to have my preferences raise their ugly head here once in awhile – I DO feel that too much attention is paid out there on imaging and soundstaging versus tonality and separation/control].
Hope this helps [and hope it doesn’t make things worse, but having this much fun really is hard work :-)]
Take care,
-Mike
Hi Mike,
Thank you for your comments, I think your knowledge
and your understanding about audio is well above the average,
but there is other problems (not easy to solve),
the room acoustic, and bad vibe cancellation.
Room acoustic can be cured by many accessories available
now day, i.e.: Tube traps, corner traps and so on…..
Components furniture and base can improve the sound,
but it remain one issue with speaker stray vibration, you can
increase the weight of the speaker, the internal damping of
the cabinet, add coupling spike to the floor, bad vibes are still
there, and get transmitted and radiated by the floor.
Since generally a floor is flexible and have a mass
law of physics will produce vibration modes, even a 100 tons
concrete slab can vibrate, this effect can be feel as an extra
‘infra boom’, that you will never hear in a concert hall, where
acoustic music is played.
May be one solution for this, is the push-push configuration
of the bass drivers (cancellation of the driver stray vibration)
Only few manufacturers use this technique
Rgds
Bernard