by Michael

Been busy here lately…

With the mortgage finance crises and just a general malaise here in the states, February and March were some of our slowest months ever.

But April is making up for both of them and more. Lots of people wanting to hear things – and lots of people buying things. Which is good for us – but not so good for blogging… oops.

Let’s see. We’ve sold our venerable Soundlab Ultimate One electrostatic speakers. They’ve been here about 5 years and it was time for a change. Neli wants to replace them with the M1 – a slightly smaller and lighter weight model in the Soundlab line. The price / performance ratio for Soundlab speakers for those who like a audiophile-quality [yes, this requirement leaves most competitors out of the competition :-)] big, full range sound is not really being challenged out there as prices go through the roof on all import and many domestic speaker models.

We did a [somewhat lighthearted] shootout between the phono stage in the little Audio Note M1 preamplifier [$700 on the used market. A steal] and the Lamm LP2 phono preamplifier [about $7500 new] – but we botched it. We started with the M1 pre’s phono stage – the first time we had ever used it here. It sounded good, and very musical – but lacking some control and resolution, which was expected. Then we went over the the LP2, which sounded more transparent… but hmmmmmm…. not quite right. We investigated and …. Oh! Something was channeling vibrations to the tonearm through their wires [must be Neli’s fault :-)]. So a quick fix and… lo and behold… things sounded great as expected. But we started the shootout too late, and no one wanted to go back to try the M1 again [I *told* you guys that starting *after* we stuffed ourselves with Vietnamese food wasn’t going to make us super productive… ;-)].

We’ve done a number of shootouts between Harmonic Resolution System’s (HRS) vibration control and the leading competitors – and it weren’t pretty. Not sure if people want to hear about which brands they were and the details… We usually stay away from talking about the performance of brands we do not carry on this blog, except for those little show reports we do…. 🙂 … and then only in the context of the sounds of various rooms, as opposed to head-to-head shootouts where ain’t nobody can hide [don’t ask me why I talk like some pseudo backwoodsman sometimes… I just don’t know].

The Kegon Balanced amps continue to impress the poop out of me. During a lot of the auditions people are talking with Neli and this or that thing – and I just sit there listening to the KBs controlling the heck out of those Kharma Exquisite Mini speakers. It is something to hear if you are familiar with just how hard the Kharma’s are to whip into shape for all other tube amps. The way the notes just appear from ground zero, blossom in just this very exquisite [sic] way [and correct, natural, musical, organic way], and then are controlled all the way down to zero again. And not just the bass, but the midrange as well.

We are going to move the Kharma’s and Acoustic Zen’s Adagio speakers to where the SoundLabs used to sit while we decide on what to replace the U1’s with. Funny, having those big guys gone did not make me, anyway, feel that we got back a lot of room. Maybe because … I don’t know. Because we were always walking behind one of them and the other was off to a side where we never go in any case?

Prices of things from Europe are going through the roof. Audio Note is OK so far – the British pound has been stable at $2 per pound for awhile now. But everything else…..Whew! It ain’t pretty.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo 0 comments
 by Michael

ELROD power cords – with and without the Nordost ViDar

As people may (or may not, it has been awhile) remember – we have been trying to determine how effectatious, sonically, it is to burn in the ElRod power cords on the Nordost ViDar cable burn-in device.

The short and sweet is… not that much.

We tried this on the low-power ELROD EPS-2 Signature power cables. One was on the ViDar for 2 weeks or so. One wasn’t. For this test we put both in the system for two weeks and then compared them – trying them both on the Emm Labs CDSA player and both on the Audio Note CDT3 transport.

Neli heard no difference and I thought the un-vidar’ed power cord might have a wee little better separation and emotion… in both tests … but un-ViDar’ed cord was always tried after the other cord and maybe I was just settling into the song a little better? Perhaps. In any case, the differences are so subtle, compared to what we usually talk about on this blog, as to be insignificant.

Anyway, the conclusions we reached was that the ViDar, designed for low power interconnects and cables, on which the ViDar kicks tush – does not seem to have much effect on correspondingly high current power cords. At least not these cords on these components.

In fact, the taking off of the power cord, and letting its internal capacitors discharge for about 30 seconds during our swap in and outs during this test (as we rushed one upstairs and the other downstairs to quickly put them on the other system during this test – trying to keep them charged up] might have had more effect on the sound. Hard to tell.

So that is our next test for the ELRODs – charged versus un-charged. It takes about 3 – 7 days for the power cord’s capacitance to fully charge, so we will compare one that has been in the system for awhile versus one that has not. A test that does not allow us to go back and forth – i.e. to repeat the test except once every seven days. And it requires us to have a power cord just sitting around doing nothing – not something that we can afford here these days with all four systems fully operational.

But I guess we are doing it anyway.


The power cord with the ‘V’ tag Neli put on it to designated its ViDar’ed status. Otherwise things might get a wee bit confusing… now WHICH cord was that again?


The EPS-2 Signatures are about 1/2 the size of the high-powered ELRODs.


The cord on the back of the EMMLabs CDSA.


The Audio Note CDT-Three transport. It is not hooked up because…


… several of our HRS M3 Isolation Bases and Neli were out on audition during this photo shoot. So the HRS SXR and MXR racks were looking like Macy’s the day after Christmas [OK, yes, so I have been watching a lot of old movies lately].

in Elrod / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Nordost 0 comments
 by Michael

Montral Festival Son Image – FSI 2008 Show Gossip

The rumor is that show attendance was down from about 11,000 to 8,000 and the number of rooms down 20% year over year.

Considering that the Canada economy is doing well (oil, the Olympics, their dollar vis-a-vis what is left of ours) one can only think that it is those of us from the lower 50 states that decided to stay home this year.

It also augers perhaps a lean year at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest this fall.

As almost everyone now knows, the Kharmas did not get put out of action by a static electricity discharge as Stereophile reported, but were instead rendered inoperable by user piloting error [hmmmm.. so sound? Turn up the volume all the way. Still no sound? Oh, forgot to press play. Blam! Oh, hmmm… no sound]. No, I’m not saying who it was – but it wasn’t us, thankfully.

Other than that, nothing much to report from afar.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Show Reports 0 comments