Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

Audio Federation High-Fidelity Audio Blog
 by Michael

Newport 2014. Perfect8, BAlabo, Bergmann


The Perfect8 speakers driven by a BAlabo stereo amp with Zanden digital and Bergmann turntable as source were in a very large room at the Atrium show hotel.

They had some problems here with the cartridge setup and the sound was either combing from the centerpoint between the speakers or heavily weighted towards the left side. Neli told me that she stopped by here on the last day and the turntable-fronted system sounded much, much better.

However, when I got there a few hours before closing they were playing digital, I think from the laptop, and the sound was nothing to write home about – overly polite and missing dynamics – and I did not have the energy to ask them to play an LP just for me.


Perfect8 speakers and BAlabo srtereo amplifier


The BAlabo stereo amplifier


The equipment rack for this room.


The Bergmann turntable


The rear of the Perfect8 speaker


Closeup view of the Perfect8 speaker from the top down.


The protoptye Perfect8 speaker crossover


Perfect8 desktop speakers.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Newport 2014 / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

Newport Beach 2014. Acoustic Zen and Questyle


Acoustic Zen Crescendo II speakers ($18K) driven by Questyle R200 wireless amplifiers and Raysonic CD player.

This was the first room I visited as I started touring the show with my big honking canon camera instead of my nice little light phone camera.

Acoustic Zen usually shows with Triode Corp electronics, but they are ‘taking a break’ in order to show that each sounds quite good without the other [we have photos of the Triode Corp room as well].

One of the more modest systems at the show, the total being in the low $20K’s.

The speakers were bi-amped with two Questyle R200 amps per speaker, each amp costing about $800.

The Questyle amplifiers were connected to the Raysonic CD player, not with cables but by the Questyle wireless transmitter.

The sound was quite good and dynamic, and only rarely and at high volumes could you tell that this was a solidstate system, and a very inexpensive one at that.

This system had exceptional imaging and I think we can say it was the best at the show in this regard [I think I can safely say this because it is rare that I get ‘startled’ by the imaging – but in this room I was. It is not for very note and every instrument, but often enough that it is frequent and noticeable]. Someone I respect heard this system the day after the show at the factory in San Diego, and unprompted said the same thing about the imaging… so if you are ever in San Diego…you can hear for yourself.


Here you see the Crescendo II speaker and the two Questyle amps.


The amps are cinched down because the power cords weigh more than they do and would otherwise tip the amps and pull them off the platform.


As you can see, no interconnect connecting the amps to the CD player, because it is wireless.


The CD player and the Questyle transmitter


The Raysonic CD player


The Questyle T2 Transmitter sending the CD player signal to the amps.


Static display of more Questyle gear.

in Acoustic Zen / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Newport 2014 / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

Newport THE Show 2014 Show Report overview

A tale of two hotels


The main hotel – the Hilton, with about 85 rooms


The ‘overflow’ hotel next door, with about 40 rooms

Who woulda thunk it? An upbeat high-end audio show.

Although this show is shrinking year to year, as are all the shows we attend and reputedly all the shows we hear about except Munich, the energy here is amazingly normal. About 30 to 40% women, a few kids, and no doom and gloom subtext. Not to minimize the real problems the industry has, but it is great to take a break from reality and just share our fascination with the high-end with other like-minded people, even if they aren’t audiophiles.

Show goers as often as not thanked the exhibitor… they had smiles on their faces, some of them… there were quite a few women, either unaccompanied or actively engaged, as opposed to often looking miserably bored by their significant other’s ridiculous hobby, like at other shows….

It was wonderfully refreshing, and not a little bit shocking.

Maybe having the auto show [about 12 to 15 very cool, very high-end cars] helped bring in the right kind of upbeat people. The cigars part of the show was just one table, and looked kind of lonely [see below for photo].

So, all you other show organizers, the bar has been set [a few years ago, in fact]. Try co-hosting with a car show, or a watch show, or wine-tasting, of whatever. Or try something else. Just try something.

And, as it is now hailing here on June 5 in Boulder, CO, it is nice that the weather didn’t suck at the show, either.

We need about one of these a month, in various places throughout the country. So, CAS, you’re next! 🙂

Although at least one person (ML) thought the overall QUALITY of sound was not up to the not-so-lofty bar set by RMAF, After pondering for awhile I think I disagree, and that they are quite similar in the overall, approximate percentage of great rooms and the number of good rooms and the number of OK rooms. CES still tops the list in my view of the shows with the best sound.

We posted about 450 photos from the show on our instagram page [best viewed from your desktop computer or your instragram app], and in our facebook instragram tab. We posted photos, instantly, in real time, of all the rooms we saw [I think we missed only two at the entire show]. Also some photos of the exotic cars and atmosphere. We’ll work on the photographic quality for the next show, now that we know this works, but at least you get to see what was there and what it was like.

We are going to post here, on this blog, high-res photos and a few notes about a few rooms that we liked or thought were interesting. No best of shows, just ‘what happened at this show’s. These will be posted in the order that I visited them with the big camera.

Enjoy!

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Newport 2014 / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

Newport photos to be posted in REAL TIME, as they are taken

We are going to try something a little different with our Newport show report this year.

We are going to try and post the normal 500 to 1000 photos, in REAL TIME, as they are taken, on Instagram.

These will be lower resolution, but hopefully will give a more visceral feeling of ‘being at the show’.

No need to login to Instagram or anything:

http://instagram.com/audiofederation

Or, if you prefer, you can see the photos off of the instagram tab on our facebook page:

ihttp://facebook.com/audiofederation

This might be great or this might suck. Don’t say you haven’t been warned! 🙂

[We’ll be taking hi-res photos too, just not as many as we usually do.

When we first starting doing show reports, everybody, about 5(!) sites, was taking between 10 and 50 photos, and they were usually really small in width and height.

One year we posted over 1000 photos, very large ones, and most people really liked them [and were surprised at how fast they downloaded, since that was the main fear of large photos by show reporters back-in-the-day], though there were [valid] complaints about me not labeling what was in the photos most of the time :-).

Now there are dozens of sites with large show reports from Stereophile to PartTimeAudiophile [both of whom do really nice show reports]. They don’t do ALL of the rooms like we do and they don’t have monster-sized photos, but they have raised the bar enough that I wonder if we have created a monster. 🙂

Naw, no question. Definitely a monster.

So, we’ll try and put a little fun into things this time, a little spin on our approach to show report photograph taking, and just see what happens. 🙂

Kind of hope it doesn’t suck :-).

].

Now on with the show…

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Newport 2014 / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

THE Show Newport Beach 2014

Yes. We’re going. First time for us!

Newport Beach Audio Show

Neli will be in the Acapella room most of the time, while I will be wandering around listening and taking photos.

The Acapella room will feature:

Acapella Atlas speakers ($100K)
Acapella LaMusika integrated amplifier ($100K, $120K with phono stage)
Acapella cables ($fairly modest, less than Nordost Valhalla)
EMMlabs XDS1 CD / SACD player ($25K)
HRS SXR 2-shelf equipment rack ($~9K)
Nordost ODIN power cords ($11K each)

We will posting a live feed of, hopefully, many 100s of photos to our Audio Federation Instagram page 🙂

These will also appear at the same time in the first tab on our Audio Federation Facebook page

Hopefully we can get up to a photo every few minutes. I think much more like You Are There.

We will also be taking higher resolution photos and queuing them up for the blog here and Ultimist later.

in Acapella / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Newport 2014 / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

So you think you want an audiophile wife?

Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. But if you do, you will have to be up for stuff like:

1. She just will not be happy until you have her favorite $140K amplifier. Then the speakers that do it justice, of course. And, since you want these things too, you just might as well throw any kind of restraint out the front door. This is no longer a place where common sense is welcome.

2. She insists on playing her music too loud and your music not loud enough

3. She makes you move and twirl very heavy very delicate very expensive gear – this is no job for someone who is not extremely fit and willing to sacrifice major body parts in the pursuit of “Let’s try this. No, wait. That.” Wait for it… wait for… it… “No, let’s try this again”

4. Someone who as often as not will be hogging the sweet spot [ever try to fit two people into one sweet spot? Oops. that is a point for the next section]

5. Someone who will go on and on about the poor sound quality of your priceless, PRICELESS bootlegs while she listens to singers who could not find middle ‘C’ if, if, no matter how hard they try, over several decades of effort.

So, an audiophile wife? Really?

But, in the interest of full disclosure *sigh* there are one or two good things one might enjoy about an audiophile wife:

1. She will change the cables while you space out thinking about who knows what. This makes for fuss free, hands off, shoot outs. Oh, and try not to tell her to ‘hurry up’ too many times during a single listening session.

2. She will talk to you about audio. Over breakfast. Lunch. At 3 in the morning [which can be not so good if you are trying to sleep, but if that is the case you can just use one of the commonly known 64,000 ways of quickly ending a conversation with a spouse. That usually works fine. But be sure you remember to DUCK!]

3. She won’t complain about you spending money on audio. Unless she thinks it is something that sucks then OMG you will NEVER hear the end of it, and OMG you must not love her very much if you thought it OK to subject her to listening to THAT POS in HER listeningroom. Oh, and start practicing your DUCK!ing skills.

4. She looks WAY better than all your audiophile mates. I personally see no downside to this. It is, admittedly, a pretty low bar.

5. She will share that ‘rush’ with you when, making a change to the system, things sound WAY better than it ever has before. Sharing this with someone really close to you… kind of hard to beat.

6. [yes, there was a 6. :-)]

Yeah. Hmmmmm…. OK. Guess I’m keeping her.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Humor 0 comments
 by Michael

Spotify at 10 million paying subscribers

Commentary by David Sidebottom, Future Source

Consumer spend on global music subscription services such as Spotify and Deezer was estimated to be just under $2 billion in 2013
There is still significant potential for the market to grow:

Music subscriptions accounted for just 10% of the total music market spend last year, equivalent to around 25% of the digital music market

This is expected to exceed $5 billion in 2017, equivalent to 30% of global music market spend

In comparison, spend on online video subscription services such as Netflix last year was almost $5 billion

In Sweden, music streaming accounted for around 70% of total market spend in 2013, up from around 20% in 2010

Many consumers are moving away from ownership towards an access model, for both music and video

Total “pay per download” e.g. track and album downloads from services such as iTunes, declined in the USA last year, significantly down in Sweden and stabilizing in the UK.

Some consumers are changing their behaviour and this is impacting ownership, although most music buyers are still in the transition somewhere between buying CDs, buying digital tracks and albums – with the final step paying for a streaming subscription service such as Spotify

Paid-for streaming subscriptions are increasingly driven by in-home wireless audio products, such as wireless speakers (e.g. Sonos) and integrated Hi-Fi with airplay, Bluetooth and the like

Global shipments of wireless home audio products grew by over 100% in 2013 to reach 27 million units.

Futuresource’s latest Living With Digital consumer research indicates that owners of such devices are 2.5 times more likely to pay for a digital music subscription compared to the overall population

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / News 0 comments
 by Michael

The Acapella Experience

These last few months with the Acapella Atlas speakers have been quite different from what we have been used to.

Easy open dynamic sound with modest resolution versus what we had previously: over-the-top resolution with modest dynamics [we were only able to get world class dynamics when pairing the Audio Note Gaku-On amp and Nordost Odin cable with the Coltrane Supreme speakers. And I mean this was real dynamics, not the typical artificial dynamics of solid-state].

So we listened and listened to the Atlas. Yeah, it was quite nice. With the Acapella Atlas being about 1/4 the price at only the relatively modest, if not measly, $100K we certainly didn’t expect it to sound *better*.

And it didn’t.

But this weird thing happened that has confused the issue some. For me anyway.

While Kevin was here a week or so ago, we decided to nudge the speakers around a bit. We wanted to try and see if we could position them better.

A word about our somewhat infamous 24 foot tall listening room that looks out on the Boulder / Denver metropolis.

Our house was built in 1975. In Boulder. With this fantastic view. Boulder. The mid 70s?

We just figure that the engineering was just a wee bit [OK, a LOT] pharmaceutically enhanced. None of the steps are the same distance apart. A lot are kind of tilted this way and that. Not only are the rooms not square, of course, but the angles of the octagons is quite random as is the length of the sides of the octagon. We could go on…

We find it to be one of charming things about the house, but…

The point being that one just can’t measure distances from the listener or the walls and make things [sound waves] all sync up nicely. So speaker setup is much more of an art, and would probably take a bit more of that pharmaceutically-enhanced engineering technique to get really perfect [if we must, we must. (one of the most wonderful things about ‘legalizing it’ is all the new jokes we can make, about seemingly everything and anything – like about, in this case, speaker setup! 🙂 )].

So, although Kevin was beer-driven, we tried to setup the speakers with the limited skill sets of the sober.

A lot of 1…2…3…. to move each speaker a quarter inch [the feet on the Atlas speakers are not spikes the way we have them setup, but still not easy to move on carpet either].

After maybe a half-dozen attempts at this a light from heaven shown down on my listening position. Which is to say the sound took a leap for the better.

“Uh, guys, this is sounding pretty good. Really good.”

Neli and Kevin were sitting closer, on the sofa, and I was sitting behind it in a chair. Took awhile to figure out that they weren’t hearing it as good as I was.

We eventually played with the position some more to get the sound more optimized for their listening position.[instead of just moving the couch back! Might as well been 420’d given the poor quality of our decision making that night. Doh!].

But I did get about two hours of listening to these speakers in what was one of those extremely rare optimally-setup-speaker anomalies.

This held me quite spell-bound and, although I tried to understand it the best I could, and to compare it to past ‘magical’ listening experiences, I fear I am not going to do a very well-reasoned decomposition of what was happening.

Was this particular experience unique to Acapella speakers? To horn speakers? Or can it happen with many speakers?

Don’t know but I have my suspicions that it is limited to very good horn speakers.

The experience was something like this:

It was like listening to music in a sound-pressurized room [which was not the case here, our room is open to the dining room / kitchen] combined with an intimate head-phone ‘voice right next to me’ experience [but without the artificiality of the headphone experience].

It was like the soundstage and imaging were irrelevant. All that ‘where is this and that particular sound coming from; where between the speakers? How far in front/behind the speakers? etc. [I know 100% Audio Note systems CAN be like this – though the experience this night was more startling. There was absolutely no pretense at an audiophilia experience here – just plain ‘experience’].

The soundwave collapsed in such a way that it provided a unified view of itself. Vocals were speaking directly, intimately, to me, Michael, not coming from across the room in a detached, impersonal yet well-reproduced manner [this is an effect I had noticed with the Acapella Triolons a way long time ago – but the effect this night was more intense].

It wasn’t head-in-a-vise, though it obviously did not extend to 3-feet in front of me and about a foot below to Neli and Kevin.

It was quite nice to just sit there and as they switched CDs I just could sit and listen, and as they forgot to change CDs I could just sit and listen. It was all very absorbing.

Anyway, we moved the speakers and lost the magic. Way better than when we started – and it was better for Kevin and Neli after the last move – but not the magic.

So was it as good an experience as that with the Marten Coltrane Supreme speakers?

It was just so different. Very different. Different parts of the brain were, are, stimulated. Kind of like comparing alcohol versus … something else. It will take a whole lot of experience with both and then perhaps flipping a coin…

 

in Acapella / Featured Acapella Posts / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo 0 comments
 by Michael

Neil Young direct-to-disc demo on Jimmy Fallon Monday (tomorrow) night

With Jack White. Supposed to record direct to disc live on the show on a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth

The news I have been able to find doesn’t mention this demonstration, the losers, but Fallon talked about it Friday night.

NME: Neil Young on Jimmy Fallon

Pretty cool if it actually happens.

Neil is promoting his ‘A Letter Home’ album

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / News 0 comments