by Michael

The Best the Acoustic Zen Adagios will ever sound

We had somebody come by who wanted to hear the Adagio loudspeakers in a larger room… and it was easiest to bring them upstairs…

.. and put them on the Audio Note Ongaku integrated amplifier…

… driven by the Emmlabs CDSA single-box CD / SACD player.

After we got over the initial shock of how much efficnet these speakers were than the Audio Note speakers they replaced…

They sounded pretty darn good!

We know some system builders like to put cheap amps on expensive speakers… well, this is the other side of that coin.

And in this case I think it worked better, as there weren’t any nasties… mostly just limitations on dynamics, mostly midi- and micro-dynamics, and various subtlties that we in the high part of the fi like to have along with our music.

in Acoustic Zen / Audio Note / Emm Labs / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo 0 comments
 by Michael

THE main system: Audio Note, Nordost, Rix Rax and Emmlabs

These speakers, this system, actually does fill up the room with sound. It is amazing.

Not quite the easy open bass the Triolon bass towers had- but few systems have THAT large of a sound.

But the bass goes down on both this and the previous system to about the same frequency, and with about the same resolution… so there ARE similaritities.

And here, the soundstage is a more reasonable 6 or 7 feet tall, instead of 20 feet – so it is, as always, about tradeoffs. And at about 1/4 the price… we are happy with this being the primary system… for awhile.

I will have to take more photos of the Ongaku on the Rix Rax outpost amp stand. It was just a kind of accident that this got set up this way – the HRS going out on a local audition this week – but this looks really … farout man.

The two are about the same size and it is as if were made for each other. And Neli polished up both of them, which doesn’t hurt the visuals either.

Sonically… we are playing with power cords and have a $2 OEM cord on the Ongaku to establish a frame-of-reference… so can’t say anything yet.

in Audio Note / Emm Labs / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Nordost / Rix Rax 3 comments
 by Michael

EMM Labs CDSA still breaking in…

Still breaking in. WordPress lost my first post on this. So let’s try again, although somewhat worse for wear … 🙂

We have a somewhat interesting setup here – but right out of the box, the CDSA sounded pretty good, albeit in a constipated and compressed sort of way.

That is the CDSA on the bottom shelf. It is running, using the Shunyata (P)ython Helix Vx power cord into the never-before-used-as-far-as-we-can-remember analog inputs on the DCC2, connected to each other with an Audio Note SPX interconnect.

[After losing my post a second time, it has become obvious that the word p-y-t-h-o-n causes WordPress fits, as it is also the name of a computer language that WP must be screening out. Stupid BDS.].

All this is run into the Audio Note Ongaku integrated amplifier, bypassing the DCC2 built-in preamp. The wonderful sound of this amp is probably helping a bit with the breakin blues… 🙂

If I were to describe the sound at this point, it would be that the sound of the CDSA, in this un-optimized setup, is slightly more dynamic and controlled, and a little less smooth, than its bigger brother, although at this point the decay is too aggressive. Still with the purity and truth of the Meitner company-sound. And once again, although the sound of the CDSA appears in this Silly Setup ™ to have quite a bit of detail – any comparision with the competition would leave egg on their components from the perspective of anyone who values Real over Impressive Deluges of Detail.

The CDSA appears to be definitively NOT inferior to the DCC2 SE and CDSD SE combo – and can be thought of as more like the combo minus the built-in Switchman-quality preamp and analog and digital inputs. In a single-box.At half the price.

in Emm Labs / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo 5 comments