… the loudspeaker / amplifier pair. [OK, yes, this is really the two most important components…:-]

Like Laurel and Hardy. Abbot and Costello. Arnold and his body…

You get this pair right and the supporting cast: sources, preamplifier, cables etc. can be customized to fit individual taste… or used to optimize, highlight, support the amplifier / loudspeaker team.

OK. Fine.

The kicker here is that good teams are hard to find. Really hard.

And without a team such as this, the results are almost always boring at best, distressing at their worst. [Martin and Lewis both went on to make good movies without each other, IMHO, so there are exceptions…:-]

This is why we are so happy, exuberant even, about how well the Lamm ML2.1 amps team up with the Marten Design Coltrane speakers. The EDGE Signature One worked really well, but some people just have to have a tube amp. The high-gain Audio Note Kegons work fantastic, but they work fantastic with everything and they cost $50K. The ML2.1 at $30K are a lot cheaper and have a nice synergy going – unexpected really. I originally poo poo’ed the idea of even trying the two together.

Our Sound Lab Ultimate 1 speakers sound way, WAY better than any U1 speakers that we have ever heard at shows, no matter how many accolades they get from reviewers and show attendees – but I feel we still have not hit upon the great amp for these speakers yet (but we did find great speaker cables for these speakers: the Pranawire Cosmos speaker cable).

Now we have to try lots of amps with the Kharma Mini Exquisite speakers. We expect the ML2.1, which sound so right with the smaller and harder to drive Kharma 3.2 speakers, will work very well on the Minis – but you never know these things until you try them.

That is part of what makes it so hard, finding these super-synergistic amp-speaker teams – each combination has to be tried and tested.

Oh, yeah, one more thing. Something that many, many people seem to ignore, at least the way I read things:

The associated equipment: source, preamplifier and cables, powercords, and rack – cannot suck… or you will never hear if the amp and speakers are performing beautifully.

Even a great team can’t overcome a plot, script and director who just really are not up to the task. Such a team will remain forever in obscurity.

We divided components and speakers into 7 or so basic sound groups in the Audiophiles Guide to the Galaxy (speakers, amps, preamps, cd players). These categories are:

Impressive
Enjoyable
Sweet
Sophisticated
Emotional
Natural
Real
Magical

This allowed us to both 1) include components and speakers that were not in our opinion the BEST allround components (like MBL), and 2) be more inclusive of other peoples tastes (like the vast numbers of people whose overwhelming priority is for impressiveness).

It is not clear if these categories are formed from:

1) The desires different people have for different types of sound during various stages of their maturity

2) The purposes of the designers when building their products

3) The purposes of the components that they just so happen to have irregardless of their designers intentions

4) The cosmologically fundamental goals of sound reproduction

5) Just a convenient yardstick to use in order to parsel things out so they are not all in one big messy pile

Not sure it matters one way or another.

But we use this methodology in our show reports as well as the Audiophile’s Guide – and some people have asked us to better define these categories. It is kind of a ‘you know it when you hear it’ kind of thing, but here goes anyway:

Impressive:

The most commonly desired category. [1] A big soundstage, powerfull bass, lots of macrodynamics. [2] Lots of midrange detail.

Enjoyable:

The most neglected category by the very high-end. [1] Competent sound (dynamics, frequency balance, soundstaging, timbre is not terrible). Nothing offensive.

Sweet:

Enjoyable plus something extra. [1] Timber and note envolopes altered to sound more like music does when the listener has consumed alcohol

Sophisticated:

Also enjoyable and pleasant [1] Exaggerated subtleties.

Emotional:

Often thought to be at the end of the high-end rainbow, but repeated experiences with blues and melancholy music pushes one to go farther. [1] The music pulls at the heart in the direction of the emotional content of the musicians’s message. This effect can be of varying strengths. [2] Leads to mood swings and to listening to more ‘fun’, lighthearted music than before.

Natural:

True timbe and note envelope development. [1] The subtleties of the sound is real. The correctness of the macrodynamics, level of detail, etc. is not necessary for this category

Real:

The ‘Absolute Sound’. Comparable to the real thing. The most often mistakenly heard category. [1] Able to suspend the listener’s sense of disbelief. Transparent – ability to ‘see’ the stage and the musicians. [2] Sufficiently technically correct reproduction but only to the degree where it satisfies requirement [1].

Magical:

The voice of God. Contact with the Cosmic Consciousness. [1] Somethings occur inside the listener which are not typically associated with listening to music. The music becomes a pathway to experiencing things and ideas that are beyond the usual daydreams one has had before, and in fact, quite strange, but in a good way. [2] Rampant confusion and respect caused by [1]

It appears that Sweet and Sophisticated are subsets of Enjoyable and Natural a subset of Real. So maybe there are only 5 categories.

But wait!

We have been thinking of adding another category that has been kind of included in Magical. And that is “Messenger” or “Communicator”

Messenger:

That the sound is able to communicate not just the emotion, but the musicians state of mind, their intentions during playing the song, the intentions of the author of the piece, the particular skills of a particular musican playing a particular riff, etc. The sound is able to communicate the excitment and anticiaption and confusion of the audience.

It looks like we will have to add a Messenger category. Not sure if this is a property of a component or really of a system as a whole, though.

OK. Anyway – this is how we look at the sounds of various components and hopefully this will help people better understand how we evaluate these things.

Oh, and then there are components and speakers that embody combinations of the above…. like our new Mini Exquisites’s 🙂 [And many other fine products as well, of course… :-)]