by Michael

System Two now has two racks

… and system Three has none.

Both RixRax equipment racks are now over on the second system. We wanted the added capability to compare two turntables, two phono stages, and the Audio Note Ongaku to the Kegon Balanced to the Kegon.


We put the Kehon Balanced amps on the Kharma Mini Exquisites.


The tops have been off so we can stare at the internal electronics for awhile 🙂 But the tops will be back on soon enough… 1) they take up a lot of room just laying around, 2) the safest place for the tops of the chassis is on the chassis, and 3) just to get the aesthetic effect of a system that does not have exposed tubes.


Since our Audio Note M9 Phono preamp is still to arrive, we are using the Audio Note M1 phono preamplifier to drive the Kegon Balanced. We also had the M1 on the Ongaku integrated for awhile, to get a feel for the sound of the M1 in the system that we are so very familiar with.

The M1 is a very nice pre and I, personally, want to keep it here forever. At the price it sells for on Audiogon sometimes, $700, it sounds more like a $5K to 10K pre – and it always surprises me.

All the low-end AN gear surprises me – I keep expecting a more discordant and harsh sound – like the low end of every other line of equipment. But nooooo, this has more harmonics and warmth than the top-of-the-line, which is more neutral and detailed and transparent and realistic.


The end of the rack is now ALFULLY close to the speaker. But we figure the trade-off is worth it – that we can configure some great sounding systems that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to hear.


The Audio Note Kegon Balanced on the Kharma loudspeakers.


The Audio Note Kegon Balanced. On first blush, the M1 pre + Kegon Balanced amps is very, very competitive with the Ongaku integrated amp.

I would say more neutral [OK, nothing has that 211 sound except 211-based tube amps and the Kegons are 300B-based amps] and more transparent – more separation …and solidity?

We’re still listening…


The Soundlab system without a rack looks pretty darn cool itself. The Audio Aero Prestige is sitting on a Rix Rax amp stand.


Yes, that is a Nordost ODIN between the Prestige and Edge Signature One amps.


The Ongaku is now in System Four in Listening Room Three (L3). We haven’t hooked it up yet – this is still a AN Oto integrated-driven system.

in Audio Aero / Audio Note / Edge / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Kharma / Rix Rax / Showroom 2 / Showroom 3 / Showroom 4 0 comments
 by Michael

News of the Week

The Audio Asylum Critics’ hangout had some gossip. I haven’t noticed HP’s marginalization at TAS – it seems like his copy grows and shrinks at random anyway. It does have a different feel than the ‘corporate’ [is that the right term? Rah rah. Lacking depth. etc.] feel of the rest of the magazine. But rumors of HP starting another magazine… he doesn’t seem hungry or interested enough in what is happening in audio anymore in my opinion… Theyalso mention in this thread that it is common knowledge? that TAS’s circulation numbers are falsified. Maybe so, but it certainly keeps getting fatter and Stereophile keeps getting skinnier… for whatever reasons it appears like TAS is doing better and better these days.

Checked out Dagogo for the first time in awhile. They seem to have a ton of reviews listed on the front page of cool looking stuff. For all you web developers out there, if your target demographic is older people, you need to use a large text font – because we are near as to be blind [although with the FireFox browser, ctrl + or ctrl mouse-scroll-button makes all the text larger – but I happened to visit using Internet Explorer, which I think a few people still use 🙂 …or is it 🙁 ].

The Marten [previously Marten Design, the guys who make our Coltrane Supreme loudspeakers. Yeah, them.] folks have just finished their new demonstration studio – the Marten Center. Extensive photos and commentary in Swedish is at the Swedish Euphonia AudioForum [anyone else noticing that Audiogon ad at the top of the page on that forum? Now that our country, and by inference everything in it, is worth half as much as it was 7 years ago, This is really a good time for Europeans to shop on this side of the pond for used gear.]


Notice how the bass towers are on the inside? Just like we had ours until about 3 days ago…

OK, we are NOT the Avantgarde news channel. For one, I can barely spell it. But here is the photo of the latest version of the Duo Mezzo:

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

(Re)Positioning the Coltrane Supremes

Well, we finally decided our experiment of having the bass towers INSIDE the main towers had gone on long enough.

The speakers were fairly easy to move, though both of us participated in a you push you pull fashion. The Black Diamond Racing Cone pucks slide pretty easily across the carpet – but, especially in the case of the heavier bass units, the relatively high friction of the plush wool carpet sometimes causes the cone feet fall off of the pucks and the speaker tips a little bit and Neli accuses me of reckless driving [it IS kind of dangerous when the towers are close to each other, we really, really (add more reallys as you see fit) wouldn’t want the two titans to tip one into the other!].

The main towers are about 6 inches closer together.

The original reason the main towers were positioned on the outside of the bass units was to try and get a wider sound stage than what we had before. And it worked.-
But over time we worried that we were loosing some coherence, solidity and stability in the imaging and soundstaging. It was really pretty darn goooood, don’t get me wrong, but we felt we had reached a limit as to what we could do. We want more, MORE!

So, the initial impressions? Well, we have more positioning to do… 🙂 BUT… the soundstage is perhaps even wider than before – so we are good to go on that front. But solidity etc. was perhaps a little worse than before.

Darn! The just-plopping-them-down-somewhere-near-where-we-thought-they-should-go technique failed us once again [you know, it DOES sometimes work, and, seriously, rolling the dice this way does lead to some discoveries about specific room-speaker interactions that the strict-placement methodologists would never discover].

Anyway, I am hopeful that having nothing between the main towers will improve imaging. Makes sense, right, because the bass towers were acting like some kind of really strangely configured equipment rack between the speakers that are generating all the music’s location cue frequencies.

However, that said, we sure are tempted to at least put SOME of the equipment on a rack between the speakers sometimes – so that [most likely the digital] part of the system can be cabled with pure, 100%, high-octane cables like the Jorma Design PRIME [who needs to imbibe anymore?], Audio Note PALLAS [who needs Carnegie Hall anymore?], and Nordost Odin [who needs components anymore?].

Well, I exaggerate [a little :-)], but hopefully have also communicated why we are tempted to put a rack up front sometime – the heck with imaging [well, the rack WOULD be pretty far back from the main towers …so its impact WOULD be really minor, right?].

But the 2nd-rack-in-the-center would probably be turntable less, and have us still run the turntable from the side of the room. Why? Because stepping over maps and around cables and power cords is annoying at best, and with turntables, it just makes putting on an LP more about tip-toeing through the equipment than ‘Oh! Let’s hear THIS!’. I guess CDs are just so Slam Bam Play that it is not quite as perverted of an experience. Maybe it is because everyone has their preferred position to stand in when putting on an LP, and we just feel more comfortable when a $30K (or $80K) amp is not bogarting in our fav-o-rite location. Anybody else feel that the usability of centrally located racks is a little less than desirable?

Anyway, time for the speaker location tweaking process – which usually takes awhile… argh.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Marten Design / Showroom 1 0 comments