Doesn’t this look empty?
Down these stairs…
.. into the 10ft rental truck that can make it up the driveway…
And into the room. At this point the Coltrane Supremes were out of their crates. Leif (of Marten) and Jorma (of Jorma Design) – we miss you guys! – were not here this year so it takes us hours instead of minutes for the crating and uncrating task 😉 Those guys are the like the pros at the Indianapolis 500 and we are like bumpkins in Model T’s… but we DO get there.
The new HRS SXR rack in a side by side, 3 shelf tall configuration.
A cartridge getting mounted in our hotel-turned-mad-scientists laboratory.
The room awaiting the start of the show… though most of yesterday we had so many friends stop by and help us listen to different speaker positions, cables, pink noise, Radiohead,… that it kind of all started yesterday.
The equipment rack…. yes we brought the Brinkmann Balance turntable, Laurence 🙂 Along with the Lamm LP2 phono stage, and Emm Labs CDSD Signature and DCC2 signature.
… going into the hard core addictive Audio Note Ongaku.
The configuration is … running the CDSD optiically into the DCC2, and the turntable thru 10 feoot Valhalla interconnect, the the DCC2 direct, no preamp into the Marten crossover, which is piped into the Ongaku. What this means is that volume is changed using both the Ongaku (which is an integrated) for the midrange and highs and the Marten box (active crossover and bass amp) for the bass. And the DCC2 is acting as a passive switching box as well as a DAC so we can remotely switch between the turntable input and the digital input.
Confused? You should be here. It don’t get less confusing here either – but it sounds great.
what this allows us to do is use short lengths of very good interconnect (Jorma Design ‘Prime’) for the digital as it goes from DAC to crossover to Ongaku, minimize the number of preamps (one for the upper frequencies and one for the bass), and still have the transport and turntable in the rear of the room and away from vibrations and distracting people with our long pauses between songs if we had walk up to the front to change a CD orLP (unless we want to change the volume. How much a pain this is with two volume controls in the front of the room like this we will soon find out).
