Michael, Author at Audio Federation

May 23, 2019 by Michael

Back from Munich

[pictured: Hermann Winters of Acapella and Neli of Audio Federation in the Acapella showroom]

But on the way back I caught an “airplane cold”. Bad enough that Neli enforced a 10 foot distance between the diseased one and herself until she left to jet down to Houston [where she gets to compare the Acapella Sphaeron Excalibur speakers we just heard in Germany with the smaller but similar looking Triolon Excalibur speakers, among other tasks like setting up an HRS rack and in general being the life of the party].

So now I sit here staring at 2600 photos and 70 videos and about the same number of 24 bit 96kHz recordings of Munich High-end 2019, Audio Note and Acapella factories, and try figure out how to get these up on the internet in a some kind of organized manner.

First I need to add more memory to my 16GB DELL, because video editing takes mucho memory, and Lightroom in any case likes to grab all the memory and open every single photo it can find on my disk not free any memory for like a day(!) anyway. And before that I want to thoroughly backup the DELL, but memory sticks / thumb drives were so slow, so had to get a nice cheap 2TB drive. Etc. Etc. Etc. can’t wait for AI to get here so computers can take care of their own damn selves.

And can’t wait until the show video+photo post-processing pipeline is all worked out. Steep learning-curve alert for this audiophile.

I want our videos to be quite different than AVShowrooms’s approach – and it may take some time to get them just right. AVShowrooms has a professional “friendly reviewer” approach that works well for them, but I want to go more for an OMFG “extreme enthusiasts visit Wonderland” kind of approach.

Stay tuned

May 16, 2019May 18, 2019 by Michael

Mike and Neli went on a little audio adventure

Mike and Neli went on a little audio adventure to visit Audio Note in the U.K., the Munich High-end 2019 show, and the Acapella Audio arts factory where we listened to the Sphaeron Excalibur speakers (pictured) for most of the day.

Details galore forthcoming after sleep and uploading and sifting through several thousand photos, 100s of videos and many recordings of various systems in 24×96 hi-res audio.

April 30, 2019 by Michael

Acapella Sphäron Excalibur – The holy grail of high-end audio loudspeakers

Acapella Audio Arts has upped the bar significantly with their new statement-level loudspeaker, the Spharon Excalibur:

Frequency range: 15 Hz to 40K Hz.

4 x 18 inch woofers per channel

Sensitivity: 103-107 dB / 1 W / 1 m

Impedance: 8 ohms.

Over 2500 pounds. Each.

1 x ION plasma tweeter per channel

From $620,000 a pair. Active version available for additional cost.

The specifications really do tell the story here. Very big. Very efficient. And, given the Acapella brand sound, it will sound like music, and not a high-school science-day project or mad scientist’s laboratory experiment gone bad.

Don’t believe it? Stop by the store in Duisburg Germany and hear for yourself.

That is exactly what the German Lite Lifestyle technology magazine did.

They go into quite some detail – it is a long article, but in German.

We translated the first paragraph to English below [you haven’t experienced life until you and your spouse attempt to translate the same bit of text together, let me tell you…].

Without further ado…

Acapella Sphäron Excalibur – The answer to all questions

What is the maximum amount of effort that we can put towards achieving the high-end ideal of pure, natural and undistorted playback of sound? How far can we go in pursuit of precision, vividness and coherence? An answer to these questions can be heard in Duisburg, where Acapella Audio Arts, renowned manufacturer of horn loudspeakers, has their rarely built Sphäron Excalibur on display. We seized the opportunity to listen to this magnum opus, and are happy to share our insights.

Audiophile power: The massive Sphäron Excalibur is 2.40 metres tall and occupies nearly 1.7 square metres. This loudspeaker system is finished in black acrylic cabinets with red horns.

Does anyone really need this level of performance? At the pinnacle of high-end audio, that is the wrong question. Here, one aims for a higher goal. One aspires to experience unprecedented quality. One strives for the maximum achievable performance, constrained only by the limits of known science and available technology. One ignores costs, number of materials and market analysis in order to gain new know-how at the leading edge of sonic reproduction. This is the driving force for Acapella co-founder Alfred Rudolph. After building the sensational Sphäron, the ultimate horn speaker system of that time, he asked: “Can it be done better? Will I be able to improve it further? Or, more poetically: “Can I, as in the Arthurian saga, pull this sword from the stone?” And so the Sphäron Excalibur was born.

More here.

in Featured Acapella Posts / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo 0 comments