by Michael

RMAF 2007 Photos

We will be taking photos, we hope, during the show.


The (currently empty) main page of the show report is showing our room this year. Hey, why not? I never seem to get a chance to take a photo of the hotel itself from the outside, with the mountains in the background – which would be my first choice. Maybe this year I’ll get outside? With the camera?

Only other show report I could find was EnjoyTheMusic. Hmmmmm…..

Supposed to be 130 room this year compared to 100 last year. Let’s hope people come. But it’ll be fun in any case. And lifting all this gear up and down the stairs, and setup at the show, is great exercise – Neli and I are always a lot skinnier when we get back from these things. 🙂

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / RMAF 2007 / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

Our Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2007 System

… is shaping up…

We are now running the Emmlabs CDSD transport through 10m long optical cables to the DCC2 DAC/Pre into the Marten Coltrane Supremes Crossover/ Bass amp into the Audio Note Ongaku and finally to the Marten Supreme speakers.

The key is that the cables are all Jorma Design Prime and one Stealth INDRA interconnect. Less cable, better cable, sound.

Now. This sounds better. But is REALLY sounds better running the DAC direct to the Marten box, not going through the DCC2’s preamp.

When I say ‘really sounds better’, it is both somewhat subtle and somewhat not subtle at all. There is an energy that was present without the extra preamp in the loop that was amazingly hypnotic… but it is hard to hear this when just listening to frequencies and dynamics and other audiophile-type attributes. I guess that is why we call it magic.

Anyway, without the preamp, to change the volume requires changing the main tower volume on the Ongaku and the bass volume on the Marten box. We are running with unity gain into the Marten box, but the bass volume knob works really well. Neli think this is too weird for a show. I think it is no weirder than having two knobs, one for each (left and right) channel, We just have a top and bottom channel instead.

But is is a pain to walk up to the front in a large room like we have at RMAF and adjust the volume all the time, along with syncing up the bass volume to the midrange volume – so it is unclear if we will use the optimized setup at the show (and we want to support use of a turntable as well). But when we get back… This is just too good to pass up.

………and then perhaps swapping out the INDRA for more Jorma ‘Prime’ cable, or Nordost ODIN, or Audio Notes new SOTTO …. How much fun! 🙂

in Audio Note / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Jorma Design / Marten Design / Nordost / RMAF 2007 0 comments
 by Michael

Bad Sounding TVs

We purchased a LG 20 inch LCD TV to replace our old Sony 13 inch CRT that got lightninged. [Firefox thinks lightninged is a real word, cool].

The picture is really pretty good – and I watch it from about 2 – 3 feet away, as it is on my desk to keep me company during those long hours on the computer.

But the sound sucks. SUCKS. It is so tinny, and frequency limited. It is pit-eeee-full.

And it has no stereo output jacks either. Oops. Usually I remember to check for this but, well, age takes its toll.

So anyway, I decided to use a trick I used in College, and take the output from thbe headphone jack and run that into the stereo (such as it is, a Lexicon DC-1 that is still working, amazingly enough – our MC-1 spontaneously died, the POS, POS defined as the repairs costing as much as a used one, about 10% of the orig $6500 price, plus upgrades like $100s to ‘fix’ DTS, which never worked in the first place – running into self power Yamahahaha speakers, througb Nordost Quatro Fil interconnect that I bought way back before we started Audio Federation, off of alt.rec.audiomarketplace or something).

And, lo, this jack to get the audio from the computer to the stereo happened to be lying on my desk – my desk is very cluttered with such things.

Works great. BETTER than the audio straight out of the Sony Blu-ray BDP-S1 player, (IT has stereo out), in fact. Not much better, but hey, it is WAY better than the sound coming out of the microscopic speakers in this LCD TV.

Whew! It was really driving me nuts.

And, yes, that is the last episode of the Season 1 DVD of Heroes on the TV there. Thanks, Steve for recommending it. It was great!

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