by Michael

Pursuing the ultimate sound for a single song…

… or band… or genre.

Or, for many people, a set of test tracks that they use over and over.

Whenever I get to catch the Grateful Dead Hour on the car radio, I think we should just make sure our system does great Grateful Dead. There are 1000s of live shows and a steadily growing catalog of official releases, so quite a body of work. The Dead, 24x7x365.25.

Neli actually did this in an earlier life and on a budget. Klipsh speakers and Adcom electronics. You can imagine how it does kind of approach concert like dynamics and volume. And when you are young [excepting this latest generation], the idea of playing a stereo at below concert-level volumes just seems… well, wrong.

I’ve often thought that our previous system, especially with the EMMLabs digital front end, was optimized for Dark Side of the Moon. It just presented that song in such a magical manner that worked on so many different levels: intellectual, emotional, hormonal, and practical audiophile levels. Yummy.

And many audiophiles try and optimize for Classical Music.

Before the Acapella Atlas speakers got here I was fixated on making Imagine Dragon’s Radioactive song sound as good as I could get it: My Imagine Dragons ‘Radioactive’ playlist.

I know this is wrong, intellectually, from a system designer / optimizer’s perspective. But there is still this really strong emotional need to make the system sound really good for My Music.

Which, you know, changes. But that is all to the good.

What this is not is having to ‘change what you like’ because nothing else sounds good on your system. So many audiophiles just play 4 piece jazz, or 3-piece Jazz plus female vocal. They act like this is their favorite music. Great music, sure. Enjoy it myself.

But seriously? I am sure there are closet Death Metal enthusiasts, for example, who are audiophiles, but they have been told to not optimize for Their Music so they go along with the small jazz program.

So, as we optimize the Atlas speakers, we try to just make them sound their best, of course.

But darned if I don’t stick in my favorite music a lot to see how IT sounds. 🙂

in Acapella / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Sounding Off 0 comments
 by Michael

Acapella Atlas speakers on a snowy morning

We finally bit the bullet and moved our rack back between the front speakers. It has been over 10 (12?) years since we have done this [usually the rack is over on the side of the room. Better soundstaging, typically, and more convenient.]

This allows us to experiment with short cables again [before, with the Coltrane Supreme speakers, we could swap out the meter or meter and a half cables between the crossover and the amp[s]. We’ve always found that the best way to hear what a cable is doing is [usually, some small signal cables notwithstanding] to put the cable between the amp and whatever is driving the amp.

It also allowed us to get rid of a balanced to single-ended CARDAS connector, since our long 10 meter run is balanced and the amps are single ended.

It just allows us more flexibility.

So we are now running a 100% ODIN system [except one pair of ELROD PC on the M9], with the EMMLabs XDS1 CD player driving the Audio M9 two box preamp and Audio Note 300B high-gain Kegon amplifiers.

We discussed putting our larger HRS MXR rack up front, but after a long period of indecision, I just alleyooped the SXR up front and here you see it.

A full report on Odin versus Acapella cables, and on all the different settings for the Atlas speakers and how the Kegons 18 watts likes each one [or not] is forth-coming.

[Amazing how easy it is to flash back to how the Acapella Triolon speakers sounded here and of course the Supremes and to compare and contrast. Fun too :-)]

in Acapella / Audio Note / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / HRS 2 comments