No, not us.

Well, yeah, I guess we are finicky too… But this is about finicky audio systems.

I’ve heard a recent $200K system sound like my old $3K (Adcom / ADS / Toshiba first generation CD player) system when a different transport was introduced into it. Slow, atonal, washed out, muddy, etc.

I’ve heard a different but similar system brought to its knees with an unbroken-in powercord was introduced on the DAC. Bright, glaring, headache-inducing.

I could go on, and you know that I do, sometimes, do go on. But I will spare us.

So, what does this mean that highly tuned systems can be detuned so easily?

1. That systems are highly dependent on each and every piece of equipment and cabling to sound their most optimally very best

2. That there is some level of instability involved in system configuration

3. that system optimization may be quite similar to optimzations in other fields, that there are locally maximum configurations and that to get from one to the other one will likely be ‘detuning’ the system along the way. That similar to Simulated Annealing optimization techniques, many people more or less randomize their system configuration and then let it settle, after which they test to see if the system is better than it was before. Unfortunately, I think this ends up to more of a Random Walk for many people – who use faulty scoring to determine what ‘best’ is, as well as what to ‘heat up’ to get to the next better configuration. [For those of you in Math, Engineering, Operations Research or Computer Science – this will all be wonderfully illuminating, humorous, and not really very useful as far as I can tell… at least not right out of the box].

4. That many people (aka reviewers) who seem to put random pieces of unbroken in equipment in their system – and like it – have very strange and chaotic interpretations of ‘better’ [unless this peice of equipment is either WAY better than the piece it is replacing OR the piece it was replacing wasn’t broken-in either and theis new one just sounds bad in a different way that is Oh Such A Relief because the old one was driving them crazy].

OK, Summer is over. It is cold here (55 degrees F here Saturday afternoon). It is getting dark around 7:30-8:00. Time to go back inside with a good sack of CDs/LPs/?s. [AKA the Blog will get updated more often]

Sounds strange, I know.

But when we have people up hear[sic] for auditions – we learn about the kind of sound they are looking for.

This kind of lets us listen through the lens of their personal preferences.

We could go on and on about preferences – most audiophiles seem to have them.

And most non-audiophiles don’t.

Besides the ‘does it play loud and have a lot of bass’ that non-audiophile men seem to look for first – their overriding concern is ‘does it sound good’? The problem these folks have is they have to judge if it ‘sounds good’ in comparison to other things they have heard, usually in the screetch-and-thump stores they know of- and so their life soon sucks, sound-system-wise.

But at least they are looking for something that sounds good, something that lights that fire of musical involvement, as opposed to a set of audiophile criteria gathered through years of reading and debating that are labeled ‘personal preferences’ but are perhaps have more to do with personal history than what we are really going to like, in the end.

For example, most people look for a new sound that is either very similar to the one they are used to, just ‘better’ in some specific attribute that they have decided that they now ‘need’ .. [Maybe for good reasons]

…….or something that is completely opposite from what they are used to – because they are sick of it ….or now just plain hate it. [Also, maybe for good reasons]

We used to do this. Cost us a lot of money, …..and grief, too. [Sonus Faber Electa monitors -> Dunlavy SC4 6 foot tall monsters -> better Sonus Faber Extrema monitors -> Acapella Campaniles 8-foot tall hybrids.]

[Of course, people might just think we now cheat and get one of everything… :-]

We just needed to listen…. with our ears and not with our eyes (what people write and say, like …this… blog), nor with our brain (the technical specs and what some people SAY the technical specs should be and the technologies used and what people SAY the technologies should be ….)

But hey, it is not just us. French wines cost more because…. everybody… ‘knows’… that… French.. wines… are…. better…. Right? Who needs to taste the stuff anymore? It has already been decided, said and done, for wine connoisseurs .

But me? I want to taste the stuff – see for myself.

So, to help us out here, please send samples to:

Yeah Right,
One Dry Mouth Road,
Boulder, CO

This confuses the hooey out of some people in the industry – especially those who are salespeople who are only mildly interested in audio.

“What?!?!? You mention brands of audio equipment on your website that you don’t even sell?” “You tell people that there are pieces of equipment that you don’t sell that they should consider buying? Are you nuts??!!”

Ignoring the literal interpretation of nuts for the sake of argument…

We are not here to push equipment on people. We don’t do the lie, cheat, cajole, threaten, intimidate, techno-babble rag to make people buy something. We don’t like it when it gets done to us, and we bet our customers don’t like it when it gets done to them either.

We ARE here to help people build systems that they love and that they can grow with.

Sometimes this takes awhile – everybody has a different word for, say, detal, and everyone thinks transparency means something different from what everyone else thinks it means. It would be kind of funny if it weren’t so tragic.

But eventually we do determine what each person’s personal preferences are, and make recommendations about how they can get where they want to go, either step-by-step, component-by-component, or as a compleete system upgrade.

And, yes, we have to admit it, we do indeed carry some of the world’s most consistantly state-of-the-art equipment – each of our components provide a sound that is the best-in-category solution to several different types of sonic preferences – and which have little, if any, deliterious …side-effects.

But we don’t carry everything.

It a customer wants bottom end slam, and that is all they want – and they don’t care about any … side-effects… then we would probably recommend a Krell or VTL amplifier – they are some of the very best at this in our opinion. No we don’t carry these lines and never will – too many people (including us!) want something more than just slam. [And besides, on a near-perfect vibration-controlled system, the Lamm ML2.1 or high-gain Audio Note Kegon will provide as much slam, in a much more realistic manner, on many if not most loudspeakers – that is for all kinds of bass except that originally generated by the muscians using electronics for, say, techno – which we love but it is only one genre we love of many].

What are our preferences?

Our personal preferences, as always, are that we want everything. From Impressive to Magic. Lots and lots of everything.

We run our systems, when they are tuned just for our ears, with very low-profile tires, close-to-the-metal, red-lining the performance so that it is as real as possible without being too neutral sounding, as much slam as possible without overloading the room or causing an unbalanced presentation, as much detail as possible without the midrange calling undue attention to itself, etc., etc., etc., etc.

Neli feels like we may be leaving too many people behind, as we continue to optimize the systems as we try more and more pieces from all over the world that increase the performance a little bit more here and a little bit more over there….

However, I think that people want somebody who is going the same way they are (no, not to the loony bin, we are all already there! :-)) and want someone they can talk to about what each of these optimizations do so that they can decide which one is right for themselves at this time – and which ones might be right next month, or next year.

In any case, this will hopefully give our readers an idea of WHY we have the Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Show Reports that talk about the sound and don’t just gawk at the pretty things, and this Blog that talks about the different purposes of different systems and components and how each of us wants a different balance and therefore different components – and the rest of our ever-evolving ever-expanding Audio Federation website.

And hopefully this will give our readers an idea of why WE are here.