Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

Featured photo from BestHiFi. Continued from High-end Audio Munich 2014 – JV and Magico Ultimate III speakers.

There are a lot of nuggets in JV’s  High-end Audio Munich 2014 show report beyond the ‘controversy’ with the Magico Ultimate III speakers.

Let’s start with the last comment. Amir’s comment about the how ‘TAS as a business’ has impacted JV’s show reports over time.

First, there is the impact of time pressure.

I’ve felt it. I bet most show reporters feel it. The pressure to post about the show during or, at the latest, the next day or two after the show. All of us except PartTimeAudiophile and AVShowrooms anyway. PartTimeAudiophile posts about one or two rooms per day for months, and makes it work for them. AVshowrooms scrambles to put them up on YouTube as soon as they are able, but seems to avoid the general panic that the rest of us experience.

When one looks at the web traffic coming into a show-report website by people wanting to see information about a show, there is a sharp spike, peaking about 6 to 8 hours before the show ends, and dropping off to a very small percentage 3 or 4 days after a show.

If a show reporter wants to cater to this surge of people, then he or she has to give them what they are looking for. One must post a show report very quickly and for reports that have a ‘best of show’, there is not time to talk about anything but best of show rooms, a few the contenders, and maybe, about the rooms that everyone expected to be contenders but stumbled.

This means a lot is left out, because show reports take time to write, take time to document with photos, and take forever to double and triple check that one didn’t accidentally say anything that could be misinterpreted or say something that is just, you know, a really, REALLY stupid thing to say.

Ergo, we get JV’s show reports lately that do not talk about very many rooms. So he necessarily has to leave some rooms out. Maybe leave out rooms that many might think of as the best rooms.

Second, there is the impact of the marketplace.

Who is interested in this gear? How many are they? Is the gear available for purchase? Is the manufacturer ‘real’: i.e. the idea is to calculate the ability of a company to weather a few financial storms, to be able to have more than one or two customers a year,  and to continue to support its customers over several years.

JV says about these Wold von Langa ‘Salon’ speakers:

While the [Wolf von Langa] Salon is too rara an avis for me ever to review, it was certainly a strong contender for Top 5 Systems in München

I had to look this up. It means ‘rare bird’. We’ve seen a few people buy these ‘rare bird’, one-or-two of a kind items lately, and talked about it why people do this. I like the way JV mentions them, that they performed quite well, but keeps them out of the ‘best of show’ list which is tantamount to a serious recommendation, of a sort.

So JV picked Zellaton, Raidho, Rockport, Kharma, and the small Avantgarde

Zellaton, Raidho and Rockport are all very similar. Dynamic. Punchy. Neutral. The Zellaton being only somewhat more musical and laid back.

Kharma is an old JV favorite, though I would think it is more of a ‘as you like it’ flavor musicality than anything else he likes.

The new Avantgarde speaker is just cool and fun to look at and think about. It is quite a bit less expensive, and at least a nod in the direction of the new dominance of the top end by horns [though I do not think the Zero One really is very much of a horn – but it ‘kind’ of is one. Sort of.].

This is a very well-balanced, if cautious, best of show list. Nothing here is outrageously priced when you look at the $500K+ speakers that one had to choose from at this show.

Excluding Zellaton, these brands have been seen here in the U.S. and Canada at shows for over 10 years.

Other cool mofo systems not on JV’s top Five Best Of Show list 

OK, let’s start with the ‘Elephant in the Room’: the big Living Voice Vox Olympians speaker system on Kondo electronics. Amir liked this system a lot, as did several other people who responded to JV’s report.

It would be my strong guess that the Magico Ultmate III system was the popular favorite, with this Living Voice and Kondo room second, and the dynamic tower speakers like Raidho and Rockport and several others, who otherwise would normally have been in second place, dividing the vote for third.

Seems like the rooms at the ‘other Munich high fidelity audio show‘, happening across the way, don’t get a lot of press.

Now why does this seem so sadly familiar? *sigh*

JV seemed purposely circumspect.

I think some of this is based on his emotional and, excuse me, not well-reasoned, hostility toward horns:

“I went to the Münchner Philharmonic on Wednesday night, before the show, to hear the Rachmaninoff Paganini Variations (and the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet), and I don’t know how the orchestra may have sounded from your seat on stage, but it sounded absolutely nothing like the Magico Ultimates from mine in the concert hall. (Nor, for that matter, did it sound anything like the Living Voices.)”

and

“I’ve had this same argument many, many times before with horn aficionados, who are so enamored of the things that horns get right (and they DO get certain important things more right than other transducers, particularly dynamics) that they not only dismiss every other kind of speaker as wanting, but are also perfectly willing to overlook the many things that horns can and do get wrong. All I can say is that Zellatons and Raidhos and Rockports (and, for that matter, dynamic-driver Magicos and ‘stats like the beamy, dynamically limited Quad 57s) sound like music to me”

Maybe I am missing something, but I know of any inherent limitations to horn speakers, and in fact they converge into dynamic-driver speakers as the ‘horn’ morphs into a ‘front baffle’.

Experientially, of course, in practice horn speaker manufacturers typically use drivers with less resolution than conventional box speaker manufacturers do – so, typically, horn speakers will not render subtleties as well as conventional box speakers.

These subtleties convey the mastery of the musicians and the emotions of the human voice better than true-to-life dynamics will…. in my experience … but, as to what sounds more REAL? Depending on where I sit in a concert hall, a lot of the subtleties are absorbed by the soft flesh and clothing of the audience, so, I would say that the big horns, when well built, setup and executed, whatever their flaws, sound more REAL, as it is the awesome dynamics of a live orchestra that is so over-powering and has been used to over-power delighted audiences for centuries. But as for what sounds more like MUSIC? I like having the high resolution subtleties. Well-designed horns can also deliver ‘enough’ resolution to match 99% of conventional speakers, and, assuming a lack of serious flaws sound more REAL and more like MUSIC than conventional speakers. But JV did not find the Magicos flawless [as we talked about last post] and apparently not the Living Voice either – which he did not share details about.

Look, we can all take a pretty good guess what the Living Voice and Kondo system sounded like. You take the Living Voice sound and you *** SMACK *** it together with the Kondo sound.

Doesn’t everybody do this in their heads all the time? If you don’t, you’re missing out on a lot of fun or, you know, maybe you like being sane.

Clement Perry’s Munich 2014 Report at Stereotimes

Just to be sure, I went to see what Clement Perry said about this system on his Stereotimes website.

The thing about Clement Perry is that he LOVES heart-centric sound and absolutely HATES mind-centric sound. We know this because he has given our room the worst, most horrible review that any person has ever given to any room at a show I have ever seen [Yep. sure did :-O]. Yet other years he would like our room quite a bit and get up and dance and go on and on about how great it sounded when we met in the hallways at the show…

We were like WTF? Was he, like:

a) taking his meds only at some shows and not others?

b) just plain nuts and one of those unstable kinds of guys you read about [hey, if you know Clement, this is something that has to be considered :-)],

c) or, finally we figured it out. Our  mind-centric systems [like the awesome system with Lamm ML3, HRS, Nordost Odin and Jorma Prime, on Marten Supreme I speakers]? Hates them. Our heart-centric systems? [Audio Note on mostly Audio Note]. LOVES them. Clement was one of the inspirations for coming up with this Heart vrs. Mind way of looking at personal preferences and high fidelity system design.

So anyway, in his report on the Living Voice and Kondo room at Munich, he liked it, as expected, as it is a heart-centric system [ you will notice that he didn’t go for these mind-centric systems that JV went for, but he is a little more mellow about rooms he doesn’t like these days 🙂 As are we all ;-)].

“The music reproduction was absolutely captivating with the music flowing through and into this space with an effortlessness that was among the best I have ever heard. For me, and strictly in terms of purity and poise, this was an extraordinary achievement in what is possible from a stereo system. “

Hmmm. Purity and Poise. Nice turn of phrase, but not quite an all out endorsement is it?

Let’s talk about how this is going to sound. I have never ‘got’ the Living Voice speakers and know there is something that people are hearing here but it is passing over my head *whoosh*.

But Kondo: for drug-like sound? on a scale from 1 to 10? It is, like, at 11.

And in this room, assuming they did not muck up the setup [which, you know, unfortunately happens in Kondo rooms sometimes], I would, myself, put this room solidly on the best of show list.

But dance to it? Tap your toe? Maybe, but it doesn’t have a whole lot that kind of energy, in my experience, and that might make both Clement, and JV, step away from talking about this as the Best… System… Ever.

In comparison, Audio Note U.K. does not score an 11 on the ‘drug-like music’ scale [Awwww…], but some of their gear gets up into the 9s [Yummy], and they convey much more the energy of the music, and at a higher resolution, to kind of balance out the drug-like fugue state with some more accessible drug-like party state. 😉 [I think I am pushing this metaphor far beyond the bounds of Pluto, but I enjoy it so much – such a fun and evocative metaphor].

Far be it from me to judge this room by the sound in these videos.

Well, not that far. 🙂

Interesting that the TYPE of flaws in this room show up on video sound much more readily than the TYPE of flaws in the Magico horn room. [If you don’t have decent speakers on your YouTube watching device, you need to get some].

But, in real life, I would have stayed in the Magico room for mere seconds [or more likely, way off to the side taking photos and out of the main thrust of the 100dB sound field. Ouch. Sorry, but I have enough with the LOUD with Neli at the controls :-)] but would have spent a SIGNIFICANT percentage of my free time in this, the Living Voice / Kondo room.

Besides Clement Perry and Jonathan Valin, I know of no one who writes a report about the sound at these shows in a more-or-less measured manner with known sonic preferences.

All I can say is, we better get our butts to Munich in 2015!

 

Finally getting to the High-end Audio Munich 2014 show. Shows you how far behind we are. 🙂

We’re just catching up here after some health issues cascaded into the Newport Show cascading into our website having to be moved and updated into… well, here we are now. Whew!

Anyway, while reading [Jonathan Valin] JV’s High-end Audio Munich 2014 show report, and the responses to it, and the report about his subsequent visit to Magico to hear their Ultimate III horn-loaded loudspeaker, I felt…

“Hey! Let’s chime in”.

We’ve reviewed many of JV’s show reports in the past, where we have heard what he has heard, read what he has to say, and posted our own two-cents on the matter.

Based on several of these I think we know where JV is coming from, when we will likely agree with him and when he likely exaggerates, and what his overall sonic preferences are [very, I would say overly, neutral sounding, similar to, but not as extreme as, JA and Mike Fremer] .

 The Magico Ultimate III horn speaker at Munich

We’ll start off with the controversial Magico room.

JV says: “The Ultimate III had gross horn-like colorations in the room it was ensconced in at the MOC–to wit (and to repeat), cupped-hands coloration, aggressively projected midband, zero image focus, slightly discontinuous bass, and an overall P.A.-like presentation that made many acoustic instruments sound as if they’d been electronically reprocessed (particularly evident on piano and voice)”

I strongly believe this is JV’s honest opinion and it is very probable that we would have had the same opinions, but with the caveats and clarifications below.

If you’ve read a number of JV’s past reports, you know he isn’t very fond of horn speakers. They really have to ‘prove themselves’ to be ‘unhorn-like’ in all ways. I think he recently [this year or last] actually liked a horn speaker, but over the years, he has disliked horn speakers that we have found perfectly acceptable – that is their trade-off of increased, much more life-like dynamics in exchange for a little loss of resolution X and a little discontinuousness Y with the slower conventional bass drivers works just fine and stays within the bounds of ‘sounding like music’. At least to our brand of very picky ears they do, anyway..

As for ‘X’: One might expect the SYSTEM in the Magico room to be of less resolution than other rooms because the Pass Labs First Watt amp is very pure sounding, but a little low on resolution [I’m not familiar with the Pass Labs preamp here]. The source here, the EMM Labs TSDX and DAC2, we are of course glad to see these in this system, as it would be hard to find something better. Not sure what cables they used here.

As for ‘Y’, the Magico horns go down to 120Hz, where the conventional woofers kick in to provide the bass down to 20Hz, which is freaking low. Integration is still an issue, unfortunately, especially if one wants to avoid just going the route of just making the woofers have a lot of [often too much] punch to please the basslover in all of us, like several much beloved and very successful speakers do as they mate their bevy of different technologies to conventional bass drivers. Others try to go for the gold. Acapella, for instance, reduces the efficiency of their horns somewhat, and increase the efficiency of the conventional woofers somewhat, in order to make the two technologies sound all-of-a-piece. Not sure but I think Magico uses DSP to mate their horns to their conventional woofers, which should also work quite well it seems to me.

Anyway, JV’s comments, point by point:

* cupped-hands coloration: just know that this would have had to have been perfect, in this room, for JV to have given it a pass in this respect.

* aggressively projected midband: So this meant that there was not enough air, not enough mid-range resolution, and not enough bass. As for the bass, I saw that Alon was there in Fremer’s walk-through video, and I have observed over the years that he likes to play with the frequency response of his show systems to minimize bass overhang – often resulting in too little bass for many people [we actually agree with this approach, but our rooms at shows also get dinged for having a little less bass than what people hear in other rooms]. Not sure why there was a problem with the ‘air’ / high-frequencies – many cables roll off the highs to make most systems sound ‘not bright’ – but don’t know if that was the case here. The midrange resolution is going to be down a little bit due to the amp being the First Watt – especially at loud volumes which some people say was up to 100db. 

* zero image focus: again, a problem in the high frequencies, 5000hz and above most likely. Maybe those walls absorb high-frequencies? They look weird to my U.S.-centric eyes.

* slightly discontinuous bass: we talked a little bit about this [ ‘Y’ ] above. Hard to say much about this – rooms at shows? bass? Hardly ever a good match.

* made many acoustic instruments sound as if they’d been electronically reprocessed. Yikes. There are a lot of speakers out there that change the sound of instruments enough that it is hard to tell what they originally were. We probably all have a few on our ‘favorite speakers list’ [including JV.  And we won’t go down the list of speakers, or amps, that do this]. But it would not seem to be a inherent problem with the design of the Magico Ultimate III Horn to me.

JV hints that he thinks it is the DSP [digital signal processing] in the Magico horns. He may be right, but it is a newish technology and it is going to take the blame for a lot of sonic problems in the next decade or so, which it may or not be the cause of.

JV’s Visit to the Magico Factory to hear their Ultimate III horn speaker again. 

Here is the write-up: MAGICO ULTIMATE III HORN-LOADED LOUDSPEAKER

Makes sense that Magico would try and prove to JV that it was a show anomaly and not the speakers responsible for the problems he heard. Makes sense that JV would go when invited.

I do think JV was under some pressure to say nicer things about the speakers here. But we can still learn something from what he wrote.

Essentially, he still found it ‘digital sounding’ and still blamed the speaker’s DSP ‘crossover’.

First, all systems that use a digital source are ‘digital sounding’. Some more so. Some less. JV likes many of these systems, and is more forgiving of ‘digital sound’ than we are – so this must be REALLY annoyingly digital sounding.

Second, these speakers at 114dB sensitive are like a electron microscope on the upstream components [not so dissimilar to a diamond midrange].

It really matters what the rest of the stuff in the system is.

[I wish everybody paid more attention to this. Yeah, you can just search and replace ‘speaker’ with ‘system’ in your head while reading their stuff. But still….]

I like the design of the Magico system in Munich [but at a lower volume. Wouldn’t be as impressive, maybe, but I try and be kind to my ears. I like them. A lot.] – and hate the one in their factory showroom. We like the Magico speakers well enough, but for many of their demonstration systems, we wouldn’t want to hear them with any speaker.

So, what JV heard as ‘digital sounding’ could just be the usual garbage that a lot of gear puts in the signal that most systems cover up [often through overly-forgiving speakers or dull-sounding cable], and many people cannot hear or just think “That’s just the way that really high-resolution expensive gear sounds”.

What would we do?

1. Point the speakers straight ahead so no one is getting blasted by the full force of the center of the horn mouth. Many speakers, including box speakers with any kind of solid front baffle, generate a peak in mid range energy if you listen to them straight on. I know some disagree, but I do not like the ‘public address system’ effect very much at all.

2. Don’t play it so loud.

3. OK. Yes. One should put an excellent-sounding tube amp on these [you knew I was going here? Sure ya did ;-)]; along with cables that preserve the resolution, the bass, and the highs; and a decent source.

Disagree with Romy that the Lamm ML3’s 30 watts would be mostly wasted; the idea is that more watts are always better if one does not have to sacrifice quality to get them – the added bandwidth on transients IS audible and to be preferred. A little 2A3 amp might be nice as well.

Now… on to the media part of the presentation.

AVShowrooms has the best video of this room at Munich I have found, and they recorded the room during sections of several songs:

After listening to a lot of these show videos now – you CAN hear a lot about the sound. It is all about comparing with other show videos and what THEY sound like. Here you can hear the purity and the ability to keep up with small and large dynamic swings very, very well. You can also hear the slight lack of [artificial? But now commonplace] resolution and … well, I’ll have to listen to it some more.

HifiClube has a few videos as well: Magico Ultimate III at Munich 2014. Here you will hear that, yes, they did play disgustingly audiophile crap here at least some of the time. Can’t tell poop about the speakers with these kinds of songs, IMO.

MY-HIEND had the best photos we could find of this room [and many others :-)]: MY-HIEND High-end Audio Munich Show 2014

Look how toed in these speakers are. Look how live the room is. Think maybe that is a lot of energy coming right at the listeners? Like maybe this poor guy in the back in the suit… he should move off to one side.

 

The EMM Labs and Pass Labs front end. Looks they were using [Magico’s] digital source as well. Hmmmm….

 

The photo of JV’s visit to the Magico factory. Notice how much LESS toed in these speakers are. Much better, in our opinion [though probably would toed them out a little more]

So. Obviously a statement loudspeaker. Looking at how it is designed, and at setup, and at upstream components, and a couple of good reviews by a reviewer you understand, one can start to get a feel for what the speaker can do and not do.

For example, no matter how expensive a speaker is, it will NOT ALWAYS sound great- it is still going to be sensitive to environment / room, setup, and the hi-fi system it finds itself in.

Then again, it is going to sound a heckuva lot better than just about everything else on the planet once you get it all setup optimally and happy happy.