by Michael

Audio Federation Rm 557 pt. 2

Marten, Audio Note, Emm Labs at RMAF

Marten Coltrane speakers, Audio Note Ongaku integrated amp, EMM Labs XDS1 CD  / SACD player, Jorma Prime speaker cables [and sometimes integrconnect) and Nordost Odin interconnect and power cords, Elrod power cord, HRS amp stands.

SOUND

The sound was very high resolution, very clean, very harmonically rich and very pure.

OK.

Done with the ‘very’ies. But keep them in mind because they do describe and define the core of this system’s sound.

The sound was filling the room and we had good room pressurization going on. The bass was present and fairly well-dampened and we did not have significant problems with room nodes. The sound was quite musical, if not quite riveting [by Wednesday it would have been riveting :-)]. Frequency response and dynamics were even-handed top to bottom [a little less authority on the bottom, this is a relatively small speaker], a natural amount of micro-dynamics, a natural amount of separation [notes perfectly separated but still part of the whole]….

This system handled complex music just about as well as it handled simple notes – there was no sense of added confusion as the music transitioned from simple harmonies into complex harmonies [complex passages in better recordings do resolve better, however].

Similarly, the high resolution and harmonic detail – and our willingness to play opera attacted a number of people with their opera CDs. The voices, instead of sounding shrill as they often do when there is not enough resolution or harmonic color – were wonderfully involving and hypnotizing.

I talked about playing rock and roll in the last post, and I could now talk about how each component [and we always include cables and cords in these discussion as if they were components] handles its responsibilties in the musical chain – but because each component did its job so very well, I think it might be hard for everybody to believe that each component is really as important as every other component. So we will move on to the next post [Uh, I am writing this section last, sorry] where it will become obvious what happens when a piece or two does NOT do its job.

ISSUES

I promised to talk about the 3 1/2 days of breakin of the Marten ‘Coltrane’ speakers.

The LACK of being broken in had several clearly audible signatures:

1. Brightness and sibilance in the treble (the occurrence of this was reduced to about half, say, by the 3rd day)

2. A stiff, unrelaxed sound, all-too-quick decays, ‘cold’ kind of sound (this was much improved by the 3rd day – but this is an asymptotic kind of break in, taking months to get to 95% and always getting better and better the more it is played)

3. A rare ‘tizz’ in the low treble that sounds like a metal bee got caught in the speaker (this was gone by the 3rd day. Whew!)

4. Exaggerated percussive transients that makes things like symbols and drum whacks etc. more prominent than normal (here this is caused by #2, above [which happens for all speakers] but #4 is somewhat more prominent on ceramic driver speakers. Again, the longer the speaker is played, the more natural this becomes) [this aberration is very prominent on several horn speakers (not Acapella BTW) and never seems to go away (or maybe, of the dozens of different versions of these speakers – I have never heard a broken-in pair)]

What did we do? What we did (besides fret and worry) was to

1) play an ocean waves disc at night, and the louder we played it at night the more it seemed to have improved by morning.

2) play Whos Next quite loud. Later Aerosmith Toys in the Attic. These [I think both were the SACDS versions] have lots of detail – revelatory for me, like the 1st time hearing the SACD version of the Moody Blues albums. Lots of energy in the treble – helped the speakers get to the next plateau

3) Tried to keep the volume down to a reasonable level. This was almost impossible [we tried to do the Lamm room thing, keeping things mellow, but I guess our hearts just weren’t in it]. We invite everybody to play their own CDs, and most want to hear them at a specific volume: loud. We rarely went past 4 [which was quite loud], out of 10, on the Ongaku – this system CAN go LOUD.

Mike Latvis did convince innocent ole me 🙂 to turn the volume up to 5.5 on Bela Fleck (track 4 on the CD) and the bass on that track was pretty darn impressive [not sure how else to describe it] at that volume. Let’s just say that the Ongaku drove those [89dB] speakers to very high SPL, controlling each note perfectly from birth to death, without straining.

4) We pointed the speakers down at the seated listeners. It was determined early on that this helped reduce the negative effects of un-broken in tweeters. Usually this hardly matters and we point the speakers midway between a standing person’s ears and a seated person’s ears [more or less]

5) Worry and fret.

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Like I said in the previous post, we were happy with the result. However, this happiness is somewhat the result of coming to a realization about how stupid and foolish we were to expect miracles from a more-or-less brand new speaker – and being relieved that we were able to navigate the treacherous waters of un-broken-in-hood lane and come out the other side alive.

SETUP:

After much advice and after many different positions we finally placed the speakers about 2.5 feet from the front walls and facing almost perfectly straight ahead.

The 2.5 feet was Neli’s idea. I thought that they should go closer to the front wall, Martens like that, but the draperies were absorbing way too much energy and generating a dull confused presentation. We pulled them out another 1/2 inch on Saturday morning – the breaking in was loosening up the speakers and causing it to interact negatively again with the drapes [maybe. But it did sound better after that 1/2 inch move].

The straight ahead idea was mine, sort of. Somebody pointed out that the soundstage was still kind of narrow, and I remembered how we used to set these speakers up straight ahead sometimes. The final test was to sit in the chairs left and right of center, in the front row, which were almost directly in front of one of the speakers, and see if there was a soundstage – see if whether the speaker right in front of us would disappear or not. It did.

We put the paper posters on both sides of the room at the 1st reflection point (for most seats) and that added about 5% more clarity to the separation etc.

The 13x19feet room is much easier to setup than the big 19×30? [I think the audiofest website is wrong] rooms. Optimally I would like a 16 x 25 room, I think, for shows. Easy to setup and fill with music but with a lot of seating.

in Audio Note / Elrod / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Jorma Design / Marten Design / Nordost / RMAF 2010 / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

Marten Coltrane Supremes part II

After the last post, it has come to our attention that some people still do not know what the $295K Coltrane Supreme speakers are.

Nor what we mean by competent, nor by capable.

First, we do not use the word ‘best’, because by ‘best’ most people mean that the speakers work and that someone – with likely limited experience in the high-end, corruptible ethics, or whose vocabulary is limited to about 10 words – somewhere, likes the speakers sound better than the sound of other things they have heard and so they grunt out ‘best’ or ‘blows me away’.

By COMPETENT we mean they do the thing speakers are supposed to do… i.e. convert the electronic signal they are given into sound in a way that is actually faithful to the signal they are given.

No, most speakers DO NOT do this. They try to make impressive sound in response to a signal, whether that signal is impressive or not. They try to be enjoyable, or engaging, or coherent, or dynamic – both to 1) compensate for the anticipated problems the manufacturers anticipate their speakers will have to deal with vis-a-vis upstream components, and 2) to cater to the natural desires of humans to enjoy / brag about / talk about overly emphasized aspects of music (and of life in general) [i.e. people do not mind, for awhile, something that is too sweet, too dynamic, to detailed, too big breasted… but it will get old and it is almost certainly fake].

An example of competency? Well two actually.

First, the 2.5 inch diamond midrange handles all frequencies between 1200 and 8000 Hz. So in a large sense, the Supremes are able to achieve the coherence, imaging and soundstage of a single-driver speaker, using the best [conventional] driver known to man or woman.

Second, the active bass is powered by a [included] 2000 watt / channel solid-state amp. Compared to other speakers with powered subwoofers [big Von Schweikerts, YG Acoustics, etc], and closest competition price-wise [Focal Grande Utopia FE, Acapella, Kharma Grand Exquisites] the two dedicated towers of 6 10inch high-resolution ceramic woofers, with phase and volume control to adjust to the room] has the ability to render DETAILED bass. Yes, it can sound impressive when your teenage son’s friends come over – but, and this is what is amazing, it can also sound real. Like real instruments. Or rather, it just reproduces the electronic signal it is given by the upstream components. It will sound natural on jazz, and tight and electronic on Techno and ethereal on classical movements recorded in large halls.

Yes, some people want that BOOM boom big boom box sound with marginal detail or structure for the bass frequencies on every track of every kind of music. And the speakers above try to do the best they know how within the limitations imposed by the speaker’s design [and certainly, people put the most gawdawful amps on them that exacerbates this, esp. at shows]. But for people who want a little more, who have the wherewithal and desire, you can choose to have a competent speaker that allows the music to sound like music, even below 100Hz.

By CAPABLE we mean that the sound coming out the speaker is not only influenced by upstream components [most are, though some, still sold as high-end audio speakers, are not] but the sound is almost completely determined by the upstream components. Capable is really 1) having no [little] sound of its own and 2) having no [minimal] limitations on what kind of signal it can reproduce.

An example of capable is the ability to render decay properly [as determined by the input signal]. With the latest Emm Labs players (XDS1, TSD1/DAC2) and Nordost ODIN cable (and top flight components) the background is so black, and there is so much control over the signal, that the decays in each note are almost orgasmic. If you have ever strummed a REALLY good acoustic guitar, or hit a key on a really good piano, you know about decay. These are the kinds of instruments musicians are using, why aren’t you hearing it on your system? It is one of the most delicate aspects of a note, and one most audiophiles have had to ignore. For many years we blamed the source media, but we were wrong.

The point is that most speakers are incapable of rendering this kind of decay [which, by the way, the $60K Coltranes can also do].

Maybe this, and the 100s of things we do not have time to talk about, like inner harmonic detail and color, evenness of treatment of all kinds of dynamics from 20Hz up, etc. that we have heard with everything from the Lamm ML3 and Audio Note On-Gaku and Kegon Balanced, to Edge NL Reference amps] is not important to you, personally. Maybe you like to put ketchup on everything you eat. Me, I like to taste the actual food [music]… but then again Neli puts hotsauce on everything that is green.

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Sure, we all enjoy speakers that are cheaper or have lots of flaws here and there – often because of a few individual strengths which we treasure. Most of us even enjoy our measly car stereos to some extent. That is not the point. The point is if you want the ability to stop worrying about how your speakers are Mucking up the sound of all this great gear you have, and want to worry instead about how there are people in this world that have way way more LPs than you do, then these speakers can do that for you.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Marten Design 0 comments