by Michael

Where we pore over JV's CES 2014 show report

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? 😉

in CES 2014 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Kharma 0 comments
 by Michael

CES 2014: SoundLab and WAVAC

There have been some interesting comments, by Myles Astor for one, on this system. I want to respond.

Some background.

We were SoundLab dealers for 6 or 7 years before we amicably went our own ways about 5 years ago. We have no relationship to WAVAC; not having a lot of success when we auditioned them and hear them at shows. We have no intention to start relationships anew as we are too freaking busy to tie our shoes it seems these days.

We are all about the sound. As we become more and more familiar with this industry [12 years now as dealer, importer, publisher, etailer, and curmudgeon (me!)], we have come to realize that we are in the minority. Most opinions you will hear are not based on sound but rather based on brand strength, advertising expenditures, appearance, technology, history, friendships, business relationships, storyline and/or the social aspects of the hobby. Not saying this is terrible but it does make for a wide range of opinions and performance characteristics out there.

We do not like a lot of the sound at shows. But when we do we feel it is important to speak up. Among all the loser sounds someone did a good job. Truly amazing [he says sardonically]. They should be roundly and publicly applauded in our opinion.

Our perspective on SoundLab is from the point of view of an ex-dealer who at one time wanted to sell a boatload of them to people because they really are an excellent sounding single driver speaker for seriously not a lot of money in today’s marketplace.

Typically people try to put inferior sounding [even if perhaps well-designed] solid-state amps on these speakers. These kinds of amps fail even more miserably at reproducing music on SoundLab speakers than they do on box speakers because the SoundLabs, and electrostatics in general, are so revealing. The SoundLabs are very revealing of just the types of flaws that that typically abound in these kinds of amps: overly aggressive note attacks [or artificially rolled-off attacks] and overly quick decays, leaving little time for the notes themselves. Combined with these kind of amps characteristic leanness, this makes the presentation harmonically barren and a difficult listening experience for the unconverted.

We tried many, many amps, from about $5K to $140K, on these speakers. If we were to pick a winner based on these experiments that is currently available and reasonably priced we would pick the Sanders amp. No relationship to this guy either except that he lives [last we heard] somewhere up in the woods about 50 or 60 miles south of us.

The MSB amps, seemingly one of the better solid-state amps out there, which were on the SoundLabs upstairs on floor 4 is a good example. All the details were there. And maybe the imaging and soundstage depth was excellent. I don’t know because it did not sound like music. There wasn’t the rushing swell of the notes and hypnotic decay that we get from real music. There wasn’t the harmonic content that real music has. Because of the way the notes are deformed by the amps, there is not that continuousness, no natural flow of one note to another, that like you would hear when you hit two notes on a musical instrument one after the other. It fundamentally just isn’t as engaging as a music reproduction should be, and sounds more like a very high end tinny-sounding radio.

Fine I guess if you are going to put them in a mancave and treat them as some sort of laboratory experiment [what can I say, electrostatic and panel speakers are cool. Single drivers are cool. Box-coloration-free sound is cool].

Getting tubes to work well on the SoundLabs has been the holy grail – its is all about getting these awesome speakers to sound more like real music [we first heard and picked up the SoundLab line at the Tuscany at THE Show 2002, when they were on those inexpensive powerhouse of a tube amp – called…. anybody? We forget the name of these. The brand folded soon thereafter. Ah. I remember. Wolcott I think they were called]. But most tube amps hated being put on these speakers. It.. was.. often… very… scary.

This has been the state [albeit slightly exaggerated] of the SoundLab speaker universe.

But the factory has been slowly but steadily improving the efficiency and design of the speakers, from even before we went our separate ways, and now we have the Majestic 945PX [or 845PX, but looks like the 9’s to us].

Before we talk about potential problems lets talk about what was right about the sound of the WAVAC-powered SoundLab system at THE Show 2014.

We were thre about 5 hours before closing. In this particular room I only heard the digital. I was walking around half the time and in the sweet spot several rows back the other half. Neli [I think she heard the analog], and sat out of the sweet spot [yes, yes, I usually am smart enough to sit off center as well, but I just wanted to luxuriate and get the full impact of the SoundLabs finally sounding wonderful].

* First, there were harmonics. Not overly done but enough so the brain did not have to spend a lot of cycles adding in harmonics that it knew were AWOL in the sound of your typical SoundLab speaker on solid-state amp sound. This meant the brain could relax a little bit and listen and enjoy the music more. It was rich, colorful and nuanced. The best we have heard from a WAVAC amp BTW.

* Second, there was excellent control of the notes. This meant that a) the attack and decay were much more lifelike, more round and finessed, like real notes, than what we had heard previously on the SoundLabs [and, better, in fact than the vast majority of the rooms at the show]. It also meant that the notes had more authority; they were more solid and substantial.

* Third, there was excellent separation. Separate notes stayed separate [as much as can be expected given the sources. We heard relatively complex music, but not, unfortunately, full on orchestral music].

These 3 characteristics by themselves put this room in the top sounding rooms at the show. These characteristics, combined with a reasonable frequency spread and reasonably linear response to frequency and dynamics, is what turns sound into music. Quite rare for systems to be this good [whether at shows, in dealerships or in people’s homes].

OK. So I posted that I liked this room on WhatsBestForum [I know, silly me]. Myles Astor responded with a embarrassingly negative [hey, been there done that] expansion of his negative comments that he posted in his show report on Positive Feedback:

“Did nothing for me. If your head wasn’t clamped in a vise, the imaging sucked and the instruments were stuck to the panels. Not to mention there was zero, read nada depth. SS was two dimensional. Also what happened to the upper octaves?”

Even if the things he implied by these general accusations were true, it would STILL be in the top sounds at the show [though I somehow missed the big Focal room and the Estelon room was locked the few times I went by there – doh! thank goodness it is anatomically difficult to kick oneself – both rooms which were in his top 3 rooms].

Let’s look at these one by one:

1. Head-in-a-vise. These are curved panels, not flat, so there is not inherent head-in-a-vise issues like the flat panel speakers out there [considering most people listen to their systems alone and in the sweet spot, this is usually not a problem. I listen with my wife … sometimes 🙂 …. so head-in-a-vise does not work for us].

I am not sure how wide the sweet spot was. I would guess about 6 feet side in a large room like this. Just guessing. These speakers have 30 degrees of curvature. If you want a wider sweet spot you can order your speakers with 45 degrees of curvature.

When I was walking around I certainly did not hear any instruments being stuck to the speakers or LRC [left, right, center] effects. This does have a tendency to annoy me as well, so, yeah, don’t want this kind of behavior.

2. Soundstage depth. Have to admit we are not soundstage depth junkies, although a lot of our friends are 🙂 As long as we can get a realistic soundstage with room for musicians and instruments to be more or less correctly sized [smaller speakers obviously have problems, as do close-miced instruments and voices] we are good. Yes, of course, we want deeper soundstages for orchestras and music like Radiohead [which plays with the depth of notes all of the time to wonderful and fun effect].

3. Upper octaves missing. I think MylesBAstor is pointing out that the part of the Soundlab panel that generates high frequencies is above ear level. These were taller SoundLabs [7 feet?]. We get a lot of our directional cues from these frequencies, and this is probably the root cause of at least some, if not most, of the issues Myles had in points #1 and #2.

In my photos of the SoundLab speaker base, the lows are at +0, mids at +0 and Brilliance at Max. This is good. But this is a huge room [see added photo]. In-room response will be much flatter in a smaller room with more reinforcement of the highs [and lows] depending on the liveness of your room. What we did here at the store a lot, because some of our rooms are also relatively big [but not this big!] is tilt the speaker, which normally tilts up a little, so that it tilts down a little, pointing the entire speaker to the level of the listener’s ears.

That said we did not have any problems with the directional cues or ‘higher octaves’ in this room. Probably because this is a ‘show’.

Excepting , you know, the ENIGMAcoustics super tweeter rooms, most rooms at the show weren’t showing off a heckuva lot of air.

So many rooms add damping and power conditioning to purposely roll off the treble as much as possible at shows. It is so easy for things to sound bright and harsh and for listeners. Listeners have a heightened sensititivity to those frequencies because they are tired, because they are listening so intently, and probably for lots of other reasons.

——————————————————————————-

Anyway, great sounding room. And this is why we thought it was in the top 2 or 3 rooms this year. Raises the bar for both SoundLab and WAVAC at future shows [just sayin’… :-)]. One of our original goals [which have evolved since then] for our dealership was to present the best of the 3 major speaker technologies for our visitor’s listening pleasure: cone drivers in boxes, panels (typically electrostatic), and horns. With this system the panel has caught up to the other two technologies. May the competition continue.

in CES 2014 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Soundlab 0 comments
 by Michael

CES 2014: Marten Coltrane Supreme II – Most Interestings of Show (part five)


Marten Coltrane Supreme II speakers on Pass Labs amps and MSB digital

Yeah. Spacey room treatments.

These speakers, and the pen-ultimate Momentos, reflect a new direction for Marten. The original Coltrane Supreme speakers, and their Coltrane speakers as well [we think both the original and V2], were, as I have often described, a tabula-rasa. A blank canvas. They played whatever signal you sent them. Which was cool, because we could put umpteen billion dollar expensive extremely high-quality gear on them and actually get to hear the gear. Other speakers have their own sound, to some smaller or larger degree, and you didn’t really get to hear the gear. Not fully.

Let’s take a step back. Hearing your gear, when it is a extremely well made relatively low-power 211-tube based amp, or GM70, or 300B, or what have you, is an experience akin to the most ecstatic moments we can experience in this life. All those subtle layers and layers of inner dynamics and harmonic transitions and all riding on top of a musical carrier signal that just steals your sorry ass away from this troubled world and into something a whole lot better.

The speakers had their own unique performance characteristics, like all gear, but really very, very little sound of their own.

OK. Hearing your awesome gear. Got it?

Now what happens when someone puts a not so wonderfully awesome amp / front-end on these same speakers? Well you hear that too. And who gets the blame for the resulting not-so-pleasant sound? Is it the inferior gear? Nooooo. It is the speakers.

Look at the reviews of these speakers. Same thing. They hear their [sorry, but…] woefully sucky gear on the speakers and then report on what they hear.

Are they idiots? Maybe, but it is not like anyone but us has been writing about this [and who pays attention to little ole us? Sure, we actually do have 10s of thousands of readers – but in the end it is just the ravings of a couple of nutty audiophiles against the realities of an anti-audiophile world]. We ourselves kind of stumbled upon this by accident, years ago. We just kept putting better and better stuff on the speakers and we kept hearing deeper and deeper into the sound [No, sorry, this is rarely if ever the case. Most speakers provide diminishing returns as you put better and better gear on them. See the room review below of the Lamm ML3 on the Verity Lohengrin speakers as just one example].

Now the factory just wants to sell speakers. They do not care about Mike and Neli [and a few of you out there] and whether we are experiencing musical ecstasy or not. In fact, I am willing to bet you that none of them, except perhaps [maybe] the designer [who is one of the best speaker designers in the world, but…], even know what these original speakers do. All these people trying to sell these speakers, they put mid-fi junk on them and think they are hearing what they do. Nope. They are just hearing their mid-fi POS junk.

So what does the factory do? They make the speakers more forgiving so that people putting inferior grade gear on them do not go home unhappy. A side effect of this is that the speakers are harder to drive. Remember all those cool, ultra-high-quality single-ended tube amps that you could use with the original Supremes, with the powered bass? No longer gonna happen.

So the sound in this room at CES 2014 was hard sounding and smeared, with not enough resolution, in the upper midrange [etc. let’s call it screechy] and fundamentally unenjoyable. As one might expect. But the point here, which is hopefully more clear after all the above background information, is that it wasn’t as screechy and unenjoyable as it should have been.

You could still hear the quality of the speakers through all that mismanagement of the musical signal. But this is like a 600 watt amp we got here. These puppies require Power [minimum 50 watts. The previous version had an active (2000 watt powered) bass and was easy to drive].

For many, perhaps most, of you this will be a welcome change. It will be easier to get a listenable sound, yet completely accurate with extreme high-resolution, with these speakers using your average everyday gear out there.

But what if you, like us, are going for the ultimate sound experiences? The reason we like to use smaller tube amps is because so many of the larger amps, both tube and solid-state, have had so many music-obliterating mind-numbing headache-inducing issues [i.e. they suck] that it has been easiest to ‘just say no’.

Now, we might able to say ‘yes’. After listening and listening and from all we have heard the 1500 watt EmmLabs MTRX amp is significantly different from (read: better than) their high-powered brethren. In fact they are starting to change the whole way we look at power-hungry speakers [and they are quite a bit less expensive than the Gaku-on and slightly less than the ML3. Less expensive is good, yes it is]. People going for the gold can now just put the MTRX on the speakers and drive the poop out of them. With these speakers this would be a truly powerful, accurate, no-nonsense-allowed musical reproduction. The sound’ll no doubt be excellent [not screechy nor unlistenable at all :-)]. But otherworldly? Maybe…. [hope so!].

Because of this change of focus, the Martens are now part of a different market segment. The Supreme I was part of a rarefied and august group of easy to drive ultra-high-end speakers, some a little too forgiving, perhaps, but with not that much sound of their own: the Acapellas, the big Wilsons, perhaps the Magico Q7, and perhaps a few others [there are conflicting reports].

The Coltrane Supreme II (and Momentos but not the Coltrane II), on the other hand, are up against many more, a few dozen or so, other statement speakers that are also somewhat forgiving, a little less [some might say ruthlessly, some might say perfectly] revealing, and a little hard to drive, each with their OWN sound [read coloration] that each person must decide is a ‘good’ sound or a ‘not so good’ sound: The Kharmas, Magicos (except perhaps the Q7), YG Acoustics, Perfect8, Avalon, Focal, Genesis, Tidal, … And many others.

What the Supreme II has going for it is higher resolution [that diamond midrange thing along with all those Accuton drivers] that is more musically true, more linear and accurate than the competition [Leif does innovative things with crossovers that keeps things sounding like music and not some mad scientist’s concoction, while still keeping true to the input signal], This all contributes to the enjoyment of the music, as opposed to just artificially calling attention to itself [look at me! look at me! i.e. it goes way beyond the basic Impressiveness which is all that the vast majority of statement speakers have to offer. Impressiveness, you know, is really cool – who doesn’t love that big, BIG sound! – but sometimes a person wants more than that].

[neli: We do hope to hear the Coltrane Supreme II with different gear, gear that is more to our taste [and more suitable for $500K speakers IMHO (mike)], in early summer [if our customer, Encinitas Jim is up for it]. At that point, the speakers also should be more fully broken in, and hence we should be better able to assess their performance compared to the original Supremes, and also to their current competition.]

So, yeah, enough about the sound. The Supreme II is 2 boxes versus the Supreme I’s 5 boxes [although we never had a problem positioning the 4 towers, perhaps others did]. The look is also quite different: there are no grills over the drivers on the front of the Supreme II. The new Accuton cell technology drivers look cool [what can I say? They do]. They are also fatter, kind of like the Coltrane II in that way….

Can’t wait to hear them again…. 🙂

in CES 2014 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Marten Design 0 comments