by Michael

Acoustic Zen Crescendo Mk. II Speakers on Triode Corp electronics

It is funny [or not] when I read the better show reports and how they report on these rooms setup by Acoustic Zen and Triode Corp at all these shows. They point out something like that they heard a slight issue with the sound of a part of one of the tracks they played here. Ah, then this, they imply, can’t be best of show then.

What this really says to the perceptive reader who reads a lot of these things and thinks to themselves a little bit is that, hey, these rooms are such reliable performers, and it is so boring to keep awarding them the accolades they deserve, that they will dig deep down and find something [anything!] wrong so they do not have to put them somewhere on the BOS list yet again. The Lamm rooms experience this same thing.

Show reporters get so bored with seeing the same things each show [most of the gear, the setups, the people… it is all 98% the same from show to show] that they need to mix it up once in awhile and pick someone else as BOS, someone else to talk and rave about. And heaven forbid that they bore the readers [equals less traffic equals less ad revenue] by talking about the same old boring rooms that sound good, that perform well, each show after show after show.

And the speakers are only $18K? And the electronics are actually fairly reasonably priced?? BO-ring. Can’t get any more boring than this. Show reports got to be exciting wiiiild stuff, man…

They played music here. It sounded like music. It did nothing egregiously wrong and got a lot just right. It was immensely enjoyable. Like freaking always.

Well, I guess [and after all I am kind of a show reporter too…] I am also a wee tiny bit bored :-).

Yah, you know, each show it is the same… I can’t ever afford to spend a lot of time here [and this is what sucks about being a show reporter who actually goes to all the rooms (otherwise you have prejudged the show before you even arrive! Having decided what is best by the choice of what rooms you omit even visiting)]. You know I have to go and check out all those other rooms…

*sigh*

[This is a excerpt of a post made during CES 2014. We are doing some of these in order to modernize the website a little].

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 by Michael

CES 2014: EMM Labs MTRX Amplifier

These amps really drove the poop out of the speakers. Yep, poop ALL over the floor. You could hear exactly what the amps were trying to get the speakers to do, and whether the speakers were capable of doing it or not. Do not think ‘yet another big mofo solid-state amp’. Those other solid-state amps sound wimpy and weak and are probably in need of a flu shot. There really is that big of a difference – this is not one of those subtle audiophile-ish things.

The tone here is very Meitneresque: tuneful and clear sounding and not at all solid-state-ish, although it is certainly not tube-ish either. It is kind of like you always thought solid-state amps were supposed to sound, before you learned that the vast majority of them are stereotypically harsh, lean, uneven, aggressive and unpleasant to listen to.

These amps seriously change the landscape and set a new bar for performance, much like their CDSA CD player did several years ago, sounding better at $10K than the $60K top player at the time. At $130K these 1500 watters arn’t cheap, but there is finally [finally!] a solid-state amp commensurate with the extreme high quality of the bevy of hard-to-drive statement speakers from Magico, YG Acoustics and, more recently, Marten [not to mention Sonus Faber, Venture, Avalon, etc. Lots of hard-to-drive speakers out there that have never been driven well]. Word to the wise: Once you hear these on your favorite speakers, whether at a friends house or dealership, you are going to feel really silly [or perhaps some other emotion :-/] for having bought one of those other mega amps. Just sayin’.

[This is an excerpt from a previous post posted last January. We’re trying to modernize and make posts like this available to other parts of the website].

 

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 by Michael

The Acapella Experience

These last few months with the Acapella Atlas speakers have been quite different from what we have been used to.

Easy open dynamic sound with modest resolution versus what we had previously: over-the-top resolution with modest dynamics [we were only able to get world class dynamics when pairing the Audio Note Gaku-On amp and Nordost Odin cable with the Coltrane Supreme speakers. And I mean this was real dynamics, not the typical artificial dynamics of solid-state].

So we listened and listened to the Atlas. Yeah, it was quite nice. With the Acapella Atlas being about 1/4 the price at only the relatively modest, if not measly, $100K we certainly didn’t expect it to sound *better*.

And it didn’t.

But this weird thing happened that has confused the issue some. For me anyway.

While Kevin was here a week or so ago, we decided to nudge the speakers around a bit. We wanted to try and see if we could position them better.

A word about our somewhat infamous 24 foot tall listening room that looks out on the Boulder / Denver metropolis.

Our house was built in 1975. In Boulder. With this fantastic view. Boulder. The mid 70s?

We just figure that the engineering was just a wee bit [OK, a LOT] pharmaceutically enhanced. None of the steps are the same distance apart. A lot are kind of tilted this way and that. Not only are the rooms not square, of course, but the angles of the octagons is quite random as is the length of the sides of the octagon. We could go on…

We find it to be one of charming things about the house, but…

The point being that one just can’t measure distances from the listener or the walls and make things [sound waves] all sync up nicely. So speaker setup is much more of an art, and would probably take a bit more of that pharmaceutically-enhanced engineering technique to get really perfect [if we must, we must. (one of the most wonderful things about ‘legalizing it’ is all the new jokes we can make, about seemingly everything and anything – like about, in this case, speaker setup! 🙂 )].

So, although Kevin was beer-driven, we tried to setup the speakers with the limited skill sets of the sober.

A lot of 1…2…3…. to move each speaker a quarter inch [the feet on the Atlas speakers are not spikes the way we have them setup, but still not easy to move on carpet either].

After maybe a half-dozen attempts at this a light from heaven shown down on my listening position. Which is to say the sound took a leap for the better.

“Uh, guys, this is sounding pretty good. Really good.”

Neli and Kevin were sitting closer, on the sofa, and I was sitting behind it in a chair. Took awhile to figure out that they weren’t hearing it as good as I was.

We eventually played with the position some more to get the sound more optimized for their listening position.[instead of just moving the couch back! Might as well been 420’d given the poor quality of our decision making that night. Doh!].

But I did get about two hours of listening to these speakers in what was one of those extremely rare optimally-setup-speaker anomalies.

This held me quite spell-bound and, although I tried to understand it the best I could, and to compare it to past ‘magical’ listening experiences, I fear I am not going to do a very well-reasoned decomposition of what was happening.

Was this particular experience unique to Acapella speakers? To horn speakers? Or can it happen with many speakers?

Don’t know but I have my suspicions that it is limited to very good horn speakers.

The experience was something like this:

It was like listening to music in a sound-pressurized room [which was not the case here, our room is open to the dining room / kitchen] combined with an intimate head-phone ‘voice right next to me’ experience [but without the artificiality of the headphone experience].

It was like the soundstage and imaging were irrelevant. All that ‘where is this and that particular sound coming from; where between the speakers? How far in front/behind the speakers? etc. [I know 100% Audio Note systems CAN be like this – though the experience this night was more startling. There was absolutely no pretense at an audiophilia experience here – just plain ‘experience’].

The soundwave collapsed in such a way that it provided a unified view of itself. Vocals were speaking directly, intimately, to me, Michael, not coming from across the room in a detached, impersonal yet well-reproduced manner [this is an effect I had noticed with the Acapella Triolons a way long time ago – but the effect this night was more intense].

It wasn’t head-in-a-vise, though it obviously did not extend to 3-feet in front of me and about a foot below to Neli and Kevin.

It was quite nice to just sit there and as they switched CDs I just could sit and listen, and as they forgot to change CDs I could just sit and listen. It was all very absorbing.

Anyway, we moved the speakers and lost the magic. Way better than when we started – and it was better for Kevin and Neli after the last move – but not the magic.

So was it as good an experience as that with the Marten Coltrane Supreme speakers?

It was just so different. Very different. Different parts of the brain were, are, stimulated. Kind of like comparing alcohol versus … something else. It will take a whole lot of experience with both and then perhaps flipping a coin…

 

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