The entire article is over at the verge
Essentially, smartphones are replacing ipods, zunes and other dedicated mobile music devices, even though Astell & Kern is still doing quite well. (at least for the present).
Another notch in the Streaming Music gun as it takes down competing technologies…
[I’ve been thinking about a series of posts about how few audiophiles actually care about good sound.
It is certainly an ephemeral concept – and it is certainly hard to use written or spoken language to talk about in any kind of precise manner. So it is not too much of a surprise to find most of what passes for discussion, albeit coached in audiophile-ese, is not about the sound.
And it is not a surprise, that given the dearth and inability to talk about good sound – that the gear and systems people buy have little relation to what they would be buying if it was generally known what good sound actually was and how a person could go about getting it.
Finally, I think this is a real problem for the industry if it ever wants to make inroads to selling to the General Public. Unless the GP can be convinced that geeking out buying extremely expensive gear just because it is oh my gee whiz cool, or incessant arguing about nothings on forums which takes the place of pride and passion in our little hobby, is worth the price of admission i.e. dedicating a few years of all your spare time learning ill-defined audiophile-ese – then our little slice of heaven is just going to get smaller and smaller.
This is if you agree that M. and J. Q. Public generally just want good sound in their living room – and why wouldn’t they? – without a lot of fuss and bother.]
By some strange, wonderful and curious happenstance certain speakers work much better with certain amps than with other amps. This fact is largely, almost entirely, ignored by pundit and audiophile alike.
People pretty much pick amps for their speakers and speakers for their amps at, what is for all intents and purposes, random. They certainly do not pick them, these marriages of amp and speaker, these trysts, based on the quality of the resulting sound.
[Some manufacturers, to get around people putting random amplifiers on their speakers, often to horrific effect, offer their own line of amplifiers. Makes it easier for everyone. Although these are rarely optimal with respect to the actual sound quality they can set the bar tolerably high.]
This is not like human marriages where the couple has a chance to actually fall in love later in their marriage. This marriage of amp and speaker, if they do not love each other at first listen, they ain’t ever going to get the deed done. It is unchanging and final: it is like playing Russian Roulette with $10K bills and the gun is pointed at your ears.
In this game, people typically pick a cool lookin’ or hot or well-reviewed speaker and pair it with a cool lookin’ or hot or well-reviewed amp. Has to sound good, too, right?
Anyway it certainly is fun to experiment. Krell on Quad anyone?
It is awesomely fun, especially if you have a lot of time and money [and who doesn’t? ;-}]. But don’t kid yourself that it is about the sound.
Who cares if it is not about the sound? About how good it sounds? Does it really matter? Not everybody has to be a purist, right?
I think not many audiophiles really, truly care at all… but that the General Public does! The one thing high-end audio is supposed to do, Sound Good, is what the General Public may, if they so dare, poke around our neighborhood looking for.
But instead it is like going to an auto dealership and all you can find is people putting old Chevy engines in Toyota Camrys and talking about how cool it all is.
Yep.
Cool. Fun. But not about the sound [ala Performance].
OK. Best speaker amp combos in History [these are somewhat limited by what we are familiar with here at the Fed as well as what exhibitors like to bring to shows. We used to tour dealerships to hear different systems, but most of the systems kind of sucked a bit and misrepresented what we now know was possible with the gear].
Shows and exhibitor’s tendency to just pair this thing with that – much more random even than audiophiles, allows one to hear a lot of strange and not so strange combinations of gear.
* Kharma speakers on Tenor amps [yes, Tenor amps had a tendency to blow up their tubes and take a speaker driver with them. But otherwise the combo was… awesome]
* Wilson speakers on Lamm amps [no, we do not include the other ‘marketing-driven’ marriages that Wilson has set up on this list].
* Magico speakers on Luxman amps [has real potential. Need to hear this again in a different system to confirm. But exhibitors are too clueless about magical pairings like this that we are unlikely to hear it again].
* SoundLab speakers on Wavac amps [Need to hear this again in a different system and/or room to confirm. No, this does not mean that SoundLab speakers will sound amazing with any random tube amp you care to put on them. They might – but you can’t tell until it is heard a few times and in the context of other similar systems].
And in the Wayback Machine….
* Acapella Violon speakers on discontinued Edge amps [with discontinued Jorma Design No. 1 cables. Hey, this worked. As much as I try and pull apart the sound it is still really good in so many aspects.]
* Crosby modified Quad 63’s driven by Richard Lee’s modified Spectral DMC10/ mono DMA50’s ( that is the original marginally stable DMA50 not the later more stable version).
* Jadis JA30 driving the smaller Magnepans
* Levinson HQD driven by ML2
Others? I know I am missing some. Feel free to post your comments about others – but please don’t just post some system you liked when you haven’t heard a bunch of other systems that are quite similar to your choice but which sound very inferior to your choice. When you hear a system with the same speaker and cables but lots of different amps – and that one amp stood out head and shoulders above the others? That system just kicked rear end up and down the frequency spectrum? Then you got something special!
The kinds of marriages we are listing here have gone up against many, many other combinations of similar gear and are far and away the best sounding combination.
It is the fact that everybody is not, each and every one of them, just using these known combinations of gear that really excel in the sounding good department that raised the WTF flag for me and inspired this post.
Its about time for our traditional microscopic sifting through the CES 2014 show report from JV. It is over at TAS:
JV’s $20K speakers on up.
Or is it.
This year JV says he is doing something different. He only reviewed a handful of rooms, what he feels were the best, and it is really unclear whether this is all there is of his show report or what.
After reading the report in depth I now think ‘this is it’ and that JV did not have a lot of time at the show, nor time to spend on the report.
Still, I find we are in broad agreement about many of the details of the sound in most of the rooms, but sometimes not so much about what the details signify in the bigger picture. For example, we both feel that the Magico S1 and S3 systems are sounding more musical than systems with most previous Magico speakers. But he sees this as a conscious move by Magico to make more forgiving speakers in order to reach a wider market, and I see it as [and sincerely hope that it is] just an improvement in efficiency of the speakers that allows for more musical amplifiers to be used with them.
Given the set of rooms that JV actually heard [with the proviso that we did not hear the big Focal speaker room], I think we would agree with his rankings except to put the Cessaro Chopin speaker room ahead of the MBL room.
We posted a four part CES 2014 show report with many rooms JV did not cover.
Focal Grande Utopia EM speakers on VAC electronics
We did not see nor hear this room. Must have made a mistake traversing the rooms – a lot of the signs look exactly the same… ? Kind of miffed about it. Let’s just move on…
MBL 111F speakers on their new midline Nobel Line electronics
JV thought this was the 3rd best of the show. It was OK, but compared to their top of the line gear they usually show with, I thought it was missing a little of that sparkle [air], some of the harmonic color [typically quite good for solid-state], and the micro-dynamics. The liveness was not quite there. Still good – still MBL – but a more reasonable sound at a more reasonable price.
Perfect8 Technologies’ $375k The Force speakers on VAC electronics and Walker turntable
JV thought this was one of the two best systems and goes into some detail about the sound. Note that his choice of the top two systems both had VAC electronics. I also have noticed that the price of VAC has gone up a bit since the last time we looked at their gear. It is no longer ‘reasonably priced’ [sorry if I misled people saying it was].
JV starts with saying that [paraphrasing] “….the Perfect8 speakers [and sometimes the Scaena speakers], are the only two speakers to ‘disappear’ – the Perfect8 also reliably disappearing in the bass….”
[Excuse me while I have a little bit of a WTF moment here…]
[OK. Thanks for your patience]
The speakers did disappear pretty nicely, we do agree on that.
JV again: “Even the great Focals, and they were great, sounded more like “box speakers” than this astounding ribbon/cone system”.
Well, considering that these Perfect8 speakers are not box speakers, it will of course be true that all box speakers will sound more like box speakers than they do [unfortunately, big speakers like the Focal, Wilson, Rockport, etc. who lay on the cabinet thickness in the attempt to make them ‘more better’ fail especially badly at not sounding like box speakers. Kharma and Von Schweikert do better. Open baffle hybrids like the Nola also do well. And, of course, the speakers using aluminum and carbon fiber do particularly well at not sounding like box speakers – even though they all, you know, actually ARE box speakers.
He just goes on to say that he really enjoyed the sound without any further detailed analysis. Our opinion is detailed in Part I of our show report already posted. The short and sweet, is that the overall sound was just a little too wishy washy in the mids and discontinuous in the soundstage and other tiny little things that would just niggle us to death.
Kharma Elegance dB11-s speakers on Kharma electronics
JV … “so-called Elegance Line”. Made me laugh. I so relate to the waste of valuable brain cells required to keep up with all the manufacturer product category names and their incessant changes.
JV: Historically, Kharma speakers… ” leaned toward the analytical side. Super-detailed, super-fast, to some listeners they seemed to gain their phenomenal speed and resolution at the price of naturally rich timbre (particularly in the bass and the all-important power range). In this regard, they were reminiscent of certain early Magico loudspeakers (or, more properly, vice versa).”
Analytical? Yeah kind of [also read this as ‘transparent to upstream gear’]. So that is why we all put tube gear on them [he mentioned the need for rich timbre?]. Typically Lamm and Tenor. Match made in heaven and some of the great amp / speaker pairings in history. Seriously, do you want your ‘musicality’ to be built into the speaker, and you are kind of ‘stuck’ with that sound for as long as you have that speaker? or do you want your speaker to be transparent to upstream gear so that you can have a variety of sounds for your system, depending on upstream gear? Just askin’.
Newish Kharma speakers are designed for solid-state gear [specifically theirs, naturally] . One of the most musical solid-state driven amp / speaker pairings you can buy.
Like early Magico??? Sorry, JV, I just can’t quite get there…. this is so bizarre and we’ll have think about what exactly he means by this.
JV: “particularly in the bass and power range…” Wish we knew what the ‘power range’ was. The frequencies with ‘punch’? The ‘punchables?’
OK, we agree with much of what he said here about the sound…. though I am personally at a loss as to what exactly to attribute the change to.
JV: “…has gained much, much richer tone color (particularly in the bass and power range) at no apparent cost in resolution of transient speed.”
This room has certainly gained all this with respect to last year’s system at THE Show. Looks to be about the same upstream gear [Sorry. Just in one of those slacker moods].
JV: “(without much of the bite in the treble that I still hear, depending on source, from all beryllium tweeters)”
🙂 You go, JV. Big dark secret… *exposed*. So many people love these tweeters with some kind of misplaced obnoxious emotional fury. They are just tweeters with problems like most other tweeters, you guys. More than their share, I think, sometimes.
Magico S3 speakers on Vitus electronics
JV: “Its new speakers, the Q7 in particular, have a warmer overall balance, bespeaking richer, denser, more natural color in the power range (which is, IMO, one of the chief keys to a loudspeaker’s appeal)”
This is not my sense of what is going on at all. They are first and foremost much easier to drive than the previous Magico speakers for the most part. Reportedly, the Lamm ML3 at 32 Thor-blessed watts drive these speakers. If we [and we did] call those previous speakers soulless, it was not because the lacked ‘natural color’ or were ‘lean’. It was because a) they were so hard to drive that the notes were flattened out [anti-bloom] with attenuated attack and decays that made it artificial and boring sounding and b) the hugemongous amps required to drive the speakers were by their nature cold and – well, they had issues.
So, making the speakers more efficient would, by itself, result in the same differences JV attributes to a conscious decision on the part of Magico to make their speakers ‘more appealing’. I hope they did not make the speakers, essentially ‘sweeter’, because, well, we like speakers that are transparent to upstream components, not ones that walk all over the signal with their own sound.
JV: “the S3 actually took this kinder, gentler Magico balance a step further, without losing much of Magico’s trademark low-level resolution or transient speed. ”
I’d like to hear the S3 on a different system before I can really place these sonically in the Magico speaker family – but I think that JV is right that Magico took a step further, but that it was too big of a ‘step further’. Missing too much of the eager midi-dynamics and inner-detail that the S1 would have had in the same room, that was my impression of the sound in this room.
JV: “Soulution’s new $65k 711 stereo amp and $55k 725 preamp made my ears water and my hands shake with lust”
Hmmmmmmmmmm…..
Soulution’s signature sound has not changed re: these new components, at least from what I heard.
JV goes on to talk a tiny bit about several rooms.
$40k Cessaro Chopin two-way front-loaded horn loudspeakers on Electra-Fidelity A3-500 300B amplifiers
JV: “were as void of horn colorations and as “of a piece” as any horn speaker I’ve heard”
If this is all he gets out of listening to horn speakers, trying to hear horniness and integration issues, then he is missing out on a f-load of what goes into making a good sounding music reproduction. Much better dynamic envelopes of the notes and a natural excitingness that other designs can usually only look at in envy. Hello?
We liked this sound quite a bit as seen in our show report a few posts back. If you want to talk about integration issues [i.e. “of a piece”], then lets talk about JV’s choices for 1st and 2nd best of show this year. No? We could go on but I think you see how JV’s pre-conceptions about horn speakers kind of prevents him from writing as adroitly about them as he does about other kinds of speakers.
YG Acoustics’ superb new $45k Hailey speakers
JV: ” a little compression on hard transients at very loud levels aside, were in the running for Best of Show”.
I heard lots of compression on everything. Something was wrong here, and looking forward to hearing these at the next shows.
$100k Zellaton References speakers
[I had no idea they were this much. I had assumed… something much less].
JV: ” …despite a little lightness in the bottom octaves, managed to dig out more detail …”
I just thought they were more musical and transparent than expected, but had been evaluating them with respect to an expected price of around $20K. Oops.
Did you notice that JV did not say anything about the two SoundLab rooms, the two Lamm rooms, the Acapella room, nor the Marten room? Did he, uh, just figure that Mike & Neli were going to cover those rooms [even though we have not been dealers for SoundLab for years and have been quiescent about Acapella ]?
Highly conspiracy-thinking-ish there Mike…. [… or… is… it? :-)]
Anybody else still getting sticker shock at each and every one of these shows? Holy Great Recession Batman. There’s some weird jujus going on in dealership land, too, and can’t help but think what the high-end audio industry does best is embarrass itself with respect to the general public.
OK. Well… on to the next show. Which is, like, tomorrow right? 😉
