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January 31, 2006 by Michael

Where No Low Powered Amps Have Gone Before

I really like the low-powered Lamm ML2.1 18 watt SET amps on the Marten Design Coltrane 89dB sensitive full-range speakers.

Coltrane speakers, ML2.1 amps, Lamm L2 preamp, Audio Note CDT2 and DAC 4.1x Balanced, Nordost Thor and Valhalla cables, Shunyata power cords

I really liked the Audio Aero Prestige 40 watt amps and the Audio Note Kegon 22 watt amps on the Coltranes before that.

No, they don’t generate that adrenaline rush of a really loud presentation with chest thumping bass.

The Coltranes can do this with the right amplification. And it is really fun. In a Homeresque Whoo Hoo! kind of way.

But the little tube amps on these speakers can hold me…..

SPELLBOUNDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

The little amps are able to grip the speakers pretty darn well. They also show off immense amounts of harmonic detail. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

But it is not about all this analytical crap at all.

It is all, everything, completely, about the fact that the …Sound… Grips… Me.

Yeah, It helps that the speaker has a very high resolution, a speaker with all ceramic drivers and diamond tweeters has a tendency to do this. It helps that the speakers are full range, so that whatever bass the amps put out, the listener gets to hear. And they put out a lot of bass – make no mistake – but it is analog bass, like bass in the real world, and not electronic bass (which some ever larger percentage of our music these days likes to use and here is where the little tube amps on hard to drive speakers really do take a back seat to solidstate amps).

But this is not about how the speaker or system sounds.

It is not.

This is about how the sounds affects the listener.

In the end why should I care about the sound, beyond a certain minimum standard, any more than I care about the minute contruction details of the chair I sit in, or the the type of weaving and glue the carpet underneath my feat uses? What we CARE about REALLY is how comfortable the chair is; about how pleasant the carpet is to look at and feel underneath our feet.

What if all reviews and all show reports paid attention to nothing except how the sounds …made …them …feel.

I bet the Stereophile list of Class A components would look a lot different than they do now.

January 27, 2006 by Michael

The Cogent True-to-life Horn Speakers at CES 2006

Still thinking about these speakers and what their impact is going to be, both on me personally, and on our industry and audiophiles in general.

Although the speakers had numerous problems (speakers did not dissapear in any way, horn resonances and reflections along with buzzing and dullness in the subwoofer and no real highs to speak of) they did some things so very, very well that it makes me wonder…

These speakers were one of the very few (two?) horn speakers that do not have offensive, to me, horn colorations. They reproduced transients in their target frequency range effortlessly. These kind of REALISTIC (not overly exaggerated, not compressed and muffled) transient details we have heard only with the best speakers: Marten Design Coltranes, Kharma Midi Grandes (with the Tenors), and the Acapellas can do this – usually requiring very careful amplifier pairing and it comes off not quite as effortlessly – often with more of a ‘the speaker is gripped really hard by the amp’ sound. The SPACE aorund the microdynamics was awesome. The timbre was very, very rich. The sound was very big and open (somewhat an artifact of the nearfield listening position).

So, did you notice that I am describing sounds and not music? Nothing about whether a piano sounds like a piano, whether sounds were properly positioned and imaged in a realistic soundstage (it was not too bad, as Radiohead Amnesiac played back well and that first track stresses this exact thing, amoung others….:-)), whether the dynamics was balanced between the quiet sections and the loud, etc. etc. etc. Whether these are done well, poorly, or excellently, I cannot answer given the extreme nearfield listening position and because I was, addmittedly, hypnotized by other aspects of the sound at the time of listening.

A Mythical Commercial-Quality Speaker Built Using Cogent Hardware and Designs

Will audiophiles like and buy such speakers? Their ease of drivability with even modest sized amps and their kick-ass dynamics seems to be a win win situation. The problems as I see it are the lows, the highs, and the appearance.

The lows at CES were produced by a very large folded horn subwoofer. This configuration will just not be acceptable to most people. So integration with a common standalone subwoofer would be required. It would also be great if the Cogent speaker went down to 30 Hz. so that the speaker could stand-on-its-own without requiring a subwoofer but this may be impossible while still keeping the rest of the frequencies pristine.

The highs were absent; as I understand it everything above 10K Hz was left to the listener’s imagination. One of the numerous super tweeters, for example the Corona plasma tweeeter, could, however, be paired with the Cogent horns to provide the necessary high frequencies.

The appearance, which is already quite good and certainly better than all of the GOTO and ALE horns I could find on the net, is still not as livingroom friendly as most people would probably prefer. But a little work on the paint job, using a composite material instead of wood for the construction, a nice veneer, and perhaps adding a little curvature to both strengthen the horn to minimize resonances and to minimize those reflections of sounds off of the room back to the horn and then back to the listener’s ears.

So here we then have a speaker that uses 3 different technologies, each the best at reproducing music in its frequency range. Integrating these different technologies into a seemless whole will take work and genius. Sound familiar?

These will also be expensive. Figure a minimum of $50K for the horns (it costs $32K for the drivers alone), $5K for the subwoofer, and $5K for a super-tweeter. $60K is expensive – and a speaker this expensive will probably require a dealer network, so add some on top of the $60K for that.

So, the answer to my question – will this be really popular with audiophiles, is I do not know (I know, all this and I cop out at the end. The real answer is yes, for some audiophiles, yes. But Wilson Audio does not need to get too worried yet). There are a lot of weird speakers out there in the $60K to $100K range – with a lot less potential than this one.

Further reading on the Cogent horn speakers at CES:
Audio Asylum

in CES 2006 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Popular / Show Reports 1 comments

January 23, 2006 by Michael

A funny thing happened on planet Abraxas

The first track on Santana’s Abraxus, “Singing Winds, Crying Beasts”, is one of our test tracks.

This track has revealed some supposedly top-flight systems to be incapable of managing the etheral ‘sound angels’ flying in and out and around the soundstage.

While listening to the Marten Design Coltrane Supremes I was struck with the a very interesting, some might say bizarre, 3D impression of some of the notes in this song. Now, this happens to me a lot when I am falling asleep, Jazz and Classical music seems to not be ‘heard’ anymore but instead transformed into moving, interlocking 3D soundscapes that I fly around in.

Hey, those white coated fellas can just stay where they are, thank you anyway.

But in the Marten Design room at CES, I was awake! I mean it WAS the last day of the show and all, but seriously….

O.K. First I will describe what I usually see when I hear the sounds, in this case, the tiny bells that kind of fade in and out at various places in the soundstage during this song, while listening to the Acapella Audio Arts Triolon Excalibur speakers.

What I see is this:

It is right after a fresh snow, and it is very cold so the snow is not sticking to itself or anything else, it is very fluffy but not so fluffy that it does not have a good ratio of water to size. The sun has come out and is shining on a large number of very tall pine trees. A gentle breeze comes up and sends a number of snow flakes dancing, as they are wont to do, in all directions: up down swirling bouncing gliding…As some of the 100s of flakes hit the rays of the sun that are penetrating through the bows of the trees, the flakes ‘light up’, temporarily, in a prismatic flash of dozens of pure colors alternating with pure white snowflakeshine, before they are again returned to invisiblity as they reenter the shadows to be replaced by a 100 others. These flakes are small, about 1/2 inch or smaller.

These sparkling, flashing swirling colors popping in and out of existance is what I ‘see’ when hearing these bells. This more or less seems like a normal kind of thing to ‘see’, to me, and corresponds pretty well to the ‘type’ of the sound. To me.

But. The Coltrane Supremes….

What I ‘saw’ was weird, man.

What I saw were these aluminum things shaped like Cheeto corn chips, in kind of an unpolished silver metal color varying between 1/2 and about 2 inches long and about, I guess, 1/8 inch thick. They kind of faded into existance, moved a little bit closer then a little bit away from me, rotating a perhaps up to 45% during this time period, before they faded out again. There was a gentle diffuse white light playing on these ‘bell chips’.

I cannot let myself beleive that the resolution was so good in that room that I was ‘seeing’ the sides of the bells as the overall sound outlined their shapes as it bounced off them and into the microphone. I mean, SACD has a lot of detail, but this is crazy.

Anyway, I wonder if other people sometimes see music as ‘things’.

And I also wonder if sometimes they also experience visual musical shapes that sometimes come unbidden and are shockingly different from what they normally ‘see’. While they are awake.

in CES 2006 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Marten Design / Popular / Show Reports 5 comments

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