Engstrom & Engstrom on Marten Coltrane 2 Nordost Odin cabling. I was familiar with enough of the equipment here to get a good reading on both the Coltrane 2 speakers and the Lars amps. More details later, but I am impressed with both the ability of the amps [think AN Kegon without that wonderful harmonic bounty, AN Kegon Balanced without that ability to grip the speaker’s every move – these are all 300B amps, but quite different from each other in several important ways] and the improvements the Coltrane 2 has made over the Coltrane 1 [more ease, more natural separation during complex passages, and expanding the ability to render multiple complex subtle melodies down an octave or two]
Perfect8 was disappointing this year. Bright, congested and difficulty with complex passages. Not all problems could be blamed on the laptop source. Whereas last year there was a glimmer of something interesting here – this year there was not.
[UPDATE: tagged along with a friend who spent a long time in here on the last morning playing familiar CDs. The laptop was, in fact, responsible for many of the overtly negative issues. There is still some smearing of the notes, lack of bloom [midi-dynamics a little muted], and noticeable lack of harmonic detail in the bass – most of which might easily be attributed to the upstream components. These are once again interesting speakers – their challenge is to match the uber resolution of the ribbons with the unfortunately lesser resolution of the midrange drivers, and of the much lesser resolution bass drivers – and do it in such a way that it is seemless. This is where the speakers succeed or fail. And the upstream components can also either help or hinder this integration.]
Kondo showed with their new prototype field coil system speakers – an interesting approach to [more about this later] drug-like sound on more simple compositions – but there was a strange lack of realism on classical – quick piano strikes for instance. Not sure what was causing this…
