by Michael

KHARMA OWNERS, KEEP THOSE LAMM AND TENOR AMPS!

It has come to our attention that a number of you Kharma speaker owners are selling your Tenor amps (both the 75’s and 300’s) and perhaps even, *gasp*, your Lamm amplifiers in exchange for other amps, most notably the little Kharma amps and darTZeel amps, both solid-state.

Now, far be it for us to get in the way of anyone’s expresion of audio nervosa, but… Why?

Why breakup one of the most synergistic combinations known to high-end audiophiledom?

The answer we hear most often is ‘well, the bass wasn’t as tight as it should be, or there wasn’t much detail, or the sound was muddy, etc.’.

But before any of the rest of you sell off your tube amps, often at a significant $$$ loss, ask yourself one thing: what are you doing to isolate vibration away from those oh so sensitive to vibration tubes? Do you have them on a decent amplifier stand, one commsurate with the amp and your investment in your system?

We see so many people disparaging tube amp sound only to find out that they are using little better than furniture underneath their amps. Those rave reviews you read about how Tenor and Lamm goes so well with Kharma speakers are with the amps on a good amplifier stand.

Jonathan Tinn of Blue Light Audio uses custom Silent Running Audio (SRA) platforms (all SRA platforms are custom) underneath the Tenors at CES and the Stereophile Shows. We use Harmonic Resolution Systems (HRS) Isolation Bases under our Lamm amplifiers (and, actually, just about everything else we pump music through) with amazing results.

Using a world-class amplifier stand for your world-class amplifiers makes a world of difference.

Otherwise, the amps will sound wonderfull, but nowhere near as tight and detailed as one might prefer after extended listening. One might wonder why they don’t just build the amps a little sturdier, so that we did not have to worry about them vibrating like Tom after Jerry wacks him another one – but they don’t, and they are not likely to anytime soon, either.

OK, ’nuff said. And we can assume you are all using world-class power cords already, so no need to go into that…right?

And you can ignore all this if you really want to get back into the component-a-month club.

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 by Michael

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ASCERTAINING THE ABSOLUTE QUALITY OF A COMPONENT

The logic goes like this: a component has to be part of a system in order to be heard, and also that every system system has flaws.

These system imperfections can:

* Cover up what the component does best

* Conceal flaws in the component.

* Be counter-balanced by the imperfections of the component (i.e. the component can cover up flaws in the system)

This why equipment reviews should be comparative, for example:

* component A sounds leaner than component B

* component A communicates more detail than component B

and even value judgments are OK here, for example:

* component A sounds less natural than component B

Even better would be to give some context:

* component A has better control of the bass than component B in my bass-resonance-rich listening room and with the X amplifier, which is under-damped is comparison to most amplifiers evaluated here, driving these same speakers.

And finally, and of course these kind of conclusions can be wrapped up in many pages of expository brilliance (no, I am not being catty, I wish I just had a couple o’ them drops of expository brilliance, or even just the time to read them)

* speaker A has better control of the bass than speaker B playing tracks 1, 2 and 3 on the CD that contains lots of information in the 60 – 100 Hz range produced by an electric bass in a studio environment, when driven by amplifier X, known to be under-damped in comparison with most amps, notably the X, Y and Z which audiophiles might be expected to also use with these speakers, in my bass-resonance-loving room of dimensions HxWxD, with interconnects known to less detailed than most, including the more often recommended C1 and C2 cables, which might themselves rob the bass of some detail and control, and with speaker cables that smear information in the time domain causing a lack of punch in comparison with all speaker cables evaluated here, ever….

This should make the obvious even more obvious, that the more perfect a system is, the less excuses and qualifications the description of a component’s sound in that system has to have.

Next: Why oh why do good systems seem to go spontaneously bad?

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