by Michael

Optimal Speaker / Amp Combinations in History

[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.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / How-to / Philosophy / Sounding Off 0 comments
 by Michael

Questions for Distributors to ask Manufacturers

We came up with a list. Trying to be exhaustive here, so please let us know of we missed something.

Some of these questions are a little delicate – but it is better to know the answers before hand, before misconceptions and unwarranted assumptions eventually get everyone’s knickers in a twist, isn’t it?

1. Does the manufacturer (M) sell directly to customers in this country?
2. If so, will they agree to pay the distributor (D) the amount over best export that they sell the products for?
3. How important do they see shows being?
4. How many shows per year do they want to show at ?
5. What type of systems do they want to show [percentages each for statement level systems, midline, and entry level]
6. Who staffs shows? [just the D, or does the M send staff / themselves]
7. Do they expect to sell things at shows?
8. If so, who gets the profits: how are they divided up between the exhibitor, the D, the M, and the local dealer[if any]?
9. Who pays for shows: Shipping? Fees?
10. Does the M plan to advertise: online? print? To what extent / frequency?
11 If so, who pays?
12. Is there a repair center in this country?
13. Who pays for repairs? Warranty? Off-warranty? Shipping? Parts? Labor?
14. How are prices determined? Does the D set them? Are they set by the M? Are they the same world-wide?
15. How was the line previously represented in this country?
a. Did they sell direct at discounts? Did they raise the price more than 10% above the price elsewhere in the world? [i.e. does the dealer population now hate this brand?]
b. Did they setup dealers? How many? What quality?
c. What did the M like about the previous D? Not like? Why did they let them go? How long were they distributor? What quality of distributor are they?
16. Does the M expect the dealer network to be expanded? How important is this? What quality of dealers do they want – does it matter? How many / year?
17. What are the targets for the top line revenue growth? YoY? In 5 years?
18. How long is the lead time for products? entry level? midlevel? statement level?
19. Is there a M rep here in the country we are supposed to work with?
20. Numbers: what were sales like last year? The previous year? Both worldwide and here.
21. What has been the best selling products? What does M want to be the best selling?
22. What kind of marketing has the M been doing? The previous D? Are any changes foreseen?

Suitability of Products

1. Does the general appearance of the products appeal to the typical buyer in this country. If not, will they appeal to any buyers at all in this country?
2. Is the performance competitive at the price?
3. How is the packaging? Will each product sold need to be re-boxed by the distributor to withstand the slings and arrows of our reportedly worse-in-world shippers?
4. How is the reliability?
a. Will each product need to be opened and tested before shipping to customer to prevent an above average rate of DOA sales?
b. Are there spurious failures in the field?
c. Are the products small enough to be shipped when the fail? Or will there have to be on-site repairs?
d. Is there at least one repair center in the country?
e. If so, do the people at the repair center know their stuff? Do they respond in reasonable time? Are they suitable pleasant to customers? Do they keep the product clean – or leave it a filthy mess?
5. How heavy/large are the products? Will they be a pain to warehouse? To send to and setup at shows?
6. Are the products UL / CE inspected?
7. Does the product ‘work well with others’ in actual systems that people may have? If an amp, can it drive real speakers? If a speaker, can it be driven by real amps?
8.

Hmmmm.. not all of these appear to be in the English language, but hopefully you get the gist.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / How-to / Philosophy 0 comments
 by Michael

HRS SXR double-wide equipment rack: changing the height (or adding a shelf)

The happy owner of a new HRS SXR equipment rack wanted to change the height of the first shelf of the rack, from 10 inches to 12 inches, so that he could put his Lamm ML2.1 amps on the bottom shelf.

So we ordered up some new posts and went over to swap out the 10″‘ers for the 12″‘ers. I brought my camera.

A lot of photos but this whole procedure only took about a half hour, though I did forget to time it… so I could be off by a bit [i.e. don’t feel bad if it takes you longer, and if you do it faster? The heck with you :-)].

These racks are like audiophile erector sets: you can, by screwing and unscrewing posts, make them taller, wider (single-wide, double-wide, triple-wide and on and on), add more shelves [we’ve only seen them go as high as 4 shelves, but…they go down to 1-shelf which is amp-stand height. In fact single-wide 1-shelf tall SXR racks are exactly that: amp stands. Everything is interchangeable, and everything is so tightly spec’d, it just all works, no matter what your assortment of pieces parts is].


We turned the rack upside down and removed the screw on spikes.


Next we remove the nuts that hold on the bottom shelf. Here we are using the wrench that comes with the SXR to loosen a nut.


Once they are loosened, once anything is loosened, the precision construction allows us to just use our fingers and spin the nuts up off of the post [this is actually quite fun, just make sure you slow down when the nut nears the top of the post so it doesn’t go flying :-)].


Next remove the special polymer washers. The polymer used by these washers appear to be similar to the polymers used in the feet of the HRS platforms and in the Nimbus Couplers [soft hockey-puck-like things that go under a component chassis to control nastiness-causing brightness-causing blumpy-bass-causing vibrations – it consistently works really really well unlike everything else we and our friends and customers have tried]


Lifting the bottom shelf off the upside-down SXR rack


No, it is not all that heavy, per se, but the tolerances are tight enough that you have to lift it STRAIGHT up.


Put the bottom shelf to one side…


Next is to remove the posts that connect the bottom shelves to the, in this case, top shelf of this two-self rack.


This orange doohickey wrench thing is a really cool thing:

1. It allows up to loosen the posts which are screwed on tighter than finger tight
2. It will not mar the posts in any way
3. It allows is to tighten the posts exactly the right amount, acting as a torque wrench [if you try and tighten the post too much, it will start to slip… i.e. the coefficient of friction of the rubbery material of the wrench is just perfect to allow us to tighten the posts p-e-r-f-e-c-t-l-y].

These are bigger than the wrench that was shipped with the early racks, and, along with the bright orange color you would think we would not possibly misplace it. Yeah, you would think that [we did find it but it took a minute of looking – and I do NOT remember it being underneath my chair that I spent most of this process lounging around in ;-)]


I went around and loosened all the posts. Here Neli was being fancy and unscrewing 2 at once.


All the posts have been removed.


These bolts sticking out of the shelf are the same as the bolts on the end of the posts. Everything works with everything else because of these kinds of consistencies and extreme attention to detail.


Screw the new [taller in this case] posts on the upside-down top shelf.


Next put a tiny amount of oil on the threads of the new posts so that everything goes together silky smooth [seems to work :-)]


All the posts have been screwed on.


The bottom shelf has been alley-ooped back on the rack…


After putting the polymer washers back on, we put the nuts back on with Neli then tightening the nuts with the special wrench [again, a lot of manly spinning of the nuts onto the posts like they were tops on strings or something. Great manly-man fun :-)]


After we screwed the spikes on to the posts.


Ta da!

Because the floor was actually flat here, unlike our built-by-guys-on-drugs mid-70s home, the rack was perfectly level and there was no need to adjust the spiked feet to level the rack.

Took about a half hour I think, with most of the time spent by Phil and I unwrapping the new posts and re-wrapping the old posts in packing material sufficient [forgot to take photos! :-(] to guard against…well….

You know, after WWIII and we are all dust and after the radioactive wastes cool down, our 6-eyed descendents will have some kick-ass equipment racks to play around with.

in Featured HRS Posts / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / How-to / HRS / In The Field 1 comments