Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

Audio Federation High-Fidelity Audio Blog
 by Michael

Comparing High-end Audio to Photography

I think we can see some of the problems with defining the Absolute Sound by comparing Music Reproduction with Photography.

Both have something real they are trying to reproduce by technical means. Both involve some aspects of art and aspects of science.

I think it makes sense for this metaphor [or is it an analogy?] to compare a digital image file with a CD [essentially a digital music file].

Now lets consider Photoshop 🙂

You bring the image in and correct for any color issues that your camera has. You correct for inadequate lighting. You correct for lens aberrations because you were too close to, or at an angle to, your subject.

Then you can do some fancy layering filters to make the subject look more 3D. To make the colors more evident. To hide some of the grain in the original image….

You do all this because you KNOW what the subject [say it is a face] looks like. You know about flesh colors and that the head is a 3D thing. You want to bring out the [Einsteinian] sparkle in their eyes that you know is there. The affect their laugh lines have on people in real life, etc.

The point is two fold:

1. All this touching up is to make this technical artifact look more like the Real Thing. It flies in the face of ideological pundants that say “You MUST NOT Tinker With the Flaws in the Material”. Or “digital images just are going to look bad so don’t you do anything to make it look more real / better”.

Those pundants are silly, right? And so I think that the things people do to their high-end audio system are likewise OK if they bring out more of what reality is all about: 3D, rhythm, harmonics, etc.

2. The Real Thing is hard to define. Just how 3D is that face you saw last [imaging] ? Just how evident WERE those crinkles [dynamics] ? and those color blotches [harmonic color] ? And could you really see each hair on their head if you had the desire [and temerity to be OK with looking a little wacky while peering intently at someone’s hear follicles] to actually look at it and focus your attention trying to see each hair [detail and resolution].

So deciding whether something is the Absolute Sound or not is difficult if not impossible [another recent post on this topic posted about how all the room issues at any real Absolute Sound recitals making sure that no one has ever heard the Absolute Sound in all of history ;-)] .

* Often, the Absolute Sound these days has become an ideological pursuit and has more to do with the technology and brands used and the means [looking at things like THD and progeny] by which sound is reproduced, whereas the Real Thing is a musical event, where being ‘like the Real Thing’ means that you create a musical event that is both musical(!) and in several important [to humans, not to some clunky measuring device] ways very closely resembles the Real Thing.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy / Sounding Off 0 comments
 by Michael

The better it sounds the less Real it is…?

This attitude annoys me.
Many people believe “The better it sounds the less Real it is”.

Another say to say this: “The better a system is, the worse it sounds”.

That the ‘Absolute Sound’ produced by a audio reproduction systems [aka hifi] should usually sound aggressive and unpleasant and, conversely, if the music produced by a sound system is enjoyable and engaging – it must not be the Absolute Sound, it must not really be sounding like the real thing.

This sentiment has been a commonly held doctrine since solid-state mugged audio in the 60s, and wildly expounded and pontificated upon [albeit implicitly] since digital smashed into audio in the 80s.

It has two underlying extremely pessimistic assumptions:

1. that the current state of high-end audio reproduction is so poor, that if it actually attempts to be accurate, it will of course sound unpleasant most of the time, and

2. that the quality of the source material is so poor, that even were the reproduction to be flawless, the sound would not often be all that pleasant to listen to

There are many, many people who believe this, people in important positions in our industry, and they are a very vocal group. In a large sense, they are the ones who, after selling this idea to themselves to explain all the horrible sounding gear that passed for ‘the best’ for so many years – they then proceeded to sell it to everyone else.

This is not just “Krell on Wilson”, that was only a symptom. This is JV’s snidely comments about ‘As You Like It’ systems that actually [can you imagine?] sound good. This has even impacted JA and Mike Fremer, as one looks at their choice of systems over the years. [HP has been less infected, IMHO]

What does it do to an industry when the most prominent figures think that, by-and-large, the goal of the products produced by that industry should NOT be enjoyable? Maybe it does to that industry the same thing that, uh, has happened to ours?

Seriously, if we somehow just sent all the press, dealers and manufacturers who think this way to Tahiti for 5 years and only presented and sold systems that actually sounded good [and, I would argue, actually sounded like music], it would be [I hypothesize] the start of another Golden Age for our hobby.

[in the next post, we will talk about how it is perhaps the misshapen and gnarled misinterpretation of the Absolute Sound that has kept the industry in this cul-de-sac, sonically if not economically]

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy / Sounding Off 0 comments
 by Michael

CD/SACD Player Shootout: EMM Labs XDS1 versus Esoteric K-01

In this corner, weighing in at about 200 lbs [well, that is what it FEELS like – leaning over to get this on a rack is no feat for the timid. Neli was able to do it, but not without a few remarks :-)], but really at 68.4 lbs, the Esoteric K-01. And in the other corner, at 37.5 lbs, the EMM Labs XDS1.

We have been dealers for EMM Labs for about 7 years, if I remember correctly. We would like to be dealers for Esoteric someday, when we expand our operations, [in the not too terribly distant future we are fervently hoping!].

That said, the shootout did not reveal any serious surprises that a skeptical reading through the current voluminous content on the web does not already point out.

The system was for this shootout was:

Hansen Prince speakers
Lamm ML2.1 amps
ARC Ref 5 preamp
Nordost Odin speaker and interconnect
Elrod Statement Silver power cords on pre and amps
Bybee power distributor
Harmonic Resolution Systems SXR equipment rack, M3x platforms and Nimbus
Jorma Design Prime (single-ended) interconnect on the CD players
First Synergistic Hologram D then Nordost Odin power cords on the CD players


A photo of the Esoteric K-01 remote


A photo of the Esoteric K-01 remote


A photo of the EMM Labs XDS1 remote (we forgot to bring it to the shootout [it’s always something], so this is a photo from this morning)


Here are Neli and P. configuring the Esoteric K-01 to generate output on the single-ended outputs. We also tried both the 4X oversampling and DSD filters [I thought the DSD filter was more digital sounding, Neli and P. thought it had more resolution and liked it better]. Previous tests had shown little difference in performance between balanced (XLR) and single-ended (RCA) interconnects [irregardless of the ARC reportedly being a balanced architecture].


[The Fluke multimeter was used to bias the Lamm amps after their recent move to this location, with presumably a different wall voltage than the previous location across town].

That Odin interconnect is kind sticking out of the rack at an odd angle, isn’t it? 🙂 All I know is that *I* was out of the room at the time :-).


The Esoteric K-01

Both the K-01 and XDS1 were put up on HRS Nimbus Couplers – significantly better than the sound with the standard feet.


The Esoteric K-01


The EMM Labs XDS1


The EMM Labs XDS1


The EMM Labs XDS1

We played mostly light Jazz, large scale classical, and the 1st cut off of Radiohead Amnesiac. All told we spent about 5 hours at this shootout.

We first did a round of shootout with the Synergistic power cord on the players, and then a round with the Nordost Odin power cord.

The Odin brought the performance of the 2 players MUCH closer together [bringing subtlety and imaging to the K-01 and more slam to the XDS1] but their differences were still quite evident.

Esoteric K-01
[Note that other power cords may do as well here in place of the Synergistic – not just the $$$ Odin, but just note that this player IS power cord sensitive, more so than the EMM Labs I think]

* More authority [in the end, I thought this the most compelling aspect of the sound of the K-01]

* More HiFi sounding [sounded more like a stereo than music – a lack of subtle information made each note stand alone as opposed to forming a whole. 95% of this went away with the Odin power cord. There was little or no imaging(!) either until we replaced the power cord]

* A little leaner [but not in such a way that detracted from the music, IMHO]

EMM Labs

* More like music [for many reasons, I think. Voices had more information in them, allowing us to hear emotion. Notes had more information, allowing us to string them together into songs. Much more listening to music as opposed to listening to how each note sounds]

* Softer, more laid back [The K-01 was more forcefully dynamic]

—————

This shootout really revealed the strengths of these 2 players: The XDS1 sounding like music in spite of being solid-state :-), and the K-01 having great powerful midi- and macro-dynamics [and not just in the bass], in spite of being solid-state 🙂

Strangely enough, these 2 players were closest on the track I played, the Radiohead. Notes are coming from all over the place anyway, so the K-01 did great, and the XDS1 really brings out the voice of the singer and his longing to be left alone. On this track the K-01 was more like a kid running around in a candy store, listening to this note, then that note…the XDS1 more holistic, more drug-like .

I also want to say that, contrary to what I have read elsewhere, the K-01 does NOT have more resolution – in fact it has less – the K-01 does emphasize the main body of each note more than the XDS1 however, and that might be interpreted as detail by some, but the overall information here is really is less because the subtle, more nuanced parts of the notes are quite a bit less prominent.

in Emm Labs / Featured Emm Labs Posts / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Reviews 31 comments
 by Michael

Hiendy: Ktêma, Audio Note Gaku-on, Audio Note M10, Esoteric

[… and here we are starting a new category – cool Sightings, in the wild, as it were. People often point us to extreme high-end systems they run across. Finally it dawned… maybe we should collect them here – let people see that we, and they, are not the only ones with the vision and passion. Thanks go out to Florian for this one]


Hiendy: Impeccable home visits

[The system components are listed below. These would run about $1M USD. The speakers are by the previous founder/designer at Sonus Faber (who left when they were bought by a hedge fund)]

CD player: Esoteric P-01 VU version + D-01 VU version + G-0Rb Master Clock
vinyl combination: SME 30/12 + Simplicity + Thales Air Tight PC-1 Supreme + Boulder 2008
Pre-Amp: Audio note M10
Power-Amp: Audio Note Gaku-On $
speaker: Ktêma
Power Processor: Shunyata Research Hydra V-Ray + Shunyata Research Hydra 2

cables:
Siltech Royal Signature Ruby Double Crown PC 2M x 3 (turntable, mono- block after the class)
Siltech Royal Signature Empress Double Crown XLR 1.5M x 2 (CD decoding – the former level, Phono-preamp)
Siltech Royal Signature Empress Double Crown XLR 2M (before the class – after class)
Siltech Golden Eagle 75 X 3 (Clock Cable, Clock – turntable, decoding)
Tara Labs The Zero AES / EBU 2M x 2 (CD turntable – decoding)
Shunyata Research King Cobra CXZ filling sand version x 3 (mono decoding, Master Clock)
Shunyata Research King Cobra CX x 2 (Phono Amp, Power processor)
Audio Note Sogon PC 2M (Pre-Amp) x 4

attachments:
Finite Elemente Cerabase Compact x 3 sets (after class)
Finite Elemente Cerabase x 3 sets (Boulder Supply device)
Air-Tight Carbon Block graphite block (Pre-Amp)
SYMPOSIUM (Master Clock)
Vibraplane’s Active Air flotation pads x 2 + pump
in box Tripoint Audio TROY
audio frame: Venture HiFi Rack x 2

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Sightings 6 comments
 by Michael

Show Report Updates

At this time the current plan is to duplicate all of our past show reports and convert them to the new website look and feel.

The first one we did is of the most recent show, RMAF 2011,

This is all brand spanking new, so please be patient with the little gremlins…

This also commences the start of the creation of our Show Photo Database – something I have wanted to do for many years [but got talked out of it for some reason each time :-)].

Show Photo Database

Only 50 photos have been indexed so far, and we have at least 30,000, so there is a ways to go.

Speaking of which, we will be adding better navigation tools for the Show Photo Database as well as the show reports – to more easily jump around in the galleries.

Our plan, for CES 2012 anyway, and at this moment in time :-), is to do the show reports both here on the blog and in the show galleries.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / News / RMAF 2011 / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

Website Updates

Updated the website last night.

The old website is and will remain available at the link in the lower right-hand corner of most pages on the new site.

Still quite a bit to do, but after borrowing from some of the best luxury and shopping sites , we are hopefully more fully representing the quality and wonderfulness of the few extreme high-fidelity products in the world [obviously there is more to come].

Now YOU have a friend in the high-end audio porn business. 🙂

This new design requires a lot of photos. Although we have over 100K photos of audio equipment, finding the best ones, and showing them in this no-holds-barred bald manner, is laborious and really somewhat intimidating.

The deep dark secret is that although I work really hard long hours compared with most, and I have a passion for the subject :-), I know almost nothing about photography and just a wee bit more about Photoshop [though I am learning more each day]. Though sheer quantity of the photos I can find nuggets with quality.

But this has got to change, and I need to step it up a notch or two in the ‘get cool photos but with quality lighting, perspective, and detail’ department. I would just so LOVE to really present awesome visual eye-candy for this equipment that were commensurate with how awesome the equipment is.

Somehow I just just need to channel Danny Kaey AND Albert Porter … and myself… and At The Same Time [can you IMAGINE the type of person that would then be me? :-)]

—–

Anyway, lot of products are missing from the Components menu, and a lot in the menu have no pages yet, and no Galleries except the home page is up yet,… and Systems? We got plans for that category that should be pretty cool….

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

Blog updates

We’re going to be updating the blog over the next few… time units.

We’ve been getting a lot of spam, that I have to keep deleting, and it is annoying.

In order to prevent bots from submitting spam the question on the Comment form has changed. Please be aware of this and don’t just type ‘human’ .

The Twitter feed on the right will now display the feed from Audio Federation on Twitter, not Spintricity. Now we just have to think of what to say over there that is not completely redundant like what everyone else says over there….

Many more changes coming, but mostly to make the blog a little more modern, more upbeat, more groovy 😉

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

HRS SXR double-wide equipment rack: changing the height (or adding a shelf)

The happy owner of a new HRS SXR equipment rack wanted to change the height of the first shelf of the rack, from 10 inches to 12 inches, so that he could put his Lamm ML2.1 amps on the bottom shelf.

So we ordered up some new posts and went over to swap out the 10″‘ers for the 12″‘ers. I brought my camera.

A lot of photos but this whole procedure only took about a half hour, though I did forget to time it… so I could be off by a bit [i.e. don’t feel bad if it takes you longer, and if you do it faster? The heck with you :-)].

These racks are like audiophile erector sets: you can, by screwing and unscrewing posts, make them taller, wider (single-wide, double-wide, triple-wide and on and on), add more shelves [we’ve only seen them go as high as 4 shelves, but…they go down to 1-shelf which is amp-stand height. In fact single-wide 1-shelf tall SXR racks are exactly that: amp stands. Everything is interchangeable, and everything is so tightly spec’d, it just all works, no matter what your assortment of pieces parts is].


We turned the rack upside down and removed the screw on spikes.


Next we remove the nuts that hold on the bottom shelf. Here we are using the wrench that comes with the SXR to loosen a nut.


Once they are loosened, once anything is loosened, the precision construction allows us to just use our fingers and spin the nuts up off of the post [this is actually quite fun, just make sure you slow down when the nut nears the top of the post so it doesn’t go flying :-)].


Next remove the special polymer washers. The polymer used by these washers appear to be similar to the polymers used in the feet of the HRS platforms and in the Nimbus Couplers [soft hockey-puck-like things that go under a component chassis to control nastiness-causing brightness-causing blumpy-bass-causing vibrations – it consistently works really really well unlike everything else we and our friends and customers have tried]


Lifting the bottom shelf off the upside-down SXR rack


No, it is not all that heavy, per se, but the tolerances are tight enough that you have to lift it STRAIGHT up.


Put the bottom shelf to one side…


Next is to remove the posts that connect the bottom shelves to the, in this case, top shelf of this two-self rack.


This orange doohickey wrench thing is a really cool thing:

1. It allows up to loosen the posts which are screwed on tighter than finger tight
2. It will not mar the posts in any way
3. It allows is to tighten the posts exactly the right amount, acting as a torque wrench [if you try and tighten the post too much, it will start to slip… i.e. the coefficient of friction of the rubbery material of the wrench is just perfect to allow us to tighten the posts p-e-r-f-e-c-t-l-y].

These are bigger than the wrench that was shipped with the early racks, and, along with the bright orange color you would think we would not possibly misplace it. Yeah, you would think that [we did find it but it took a minute of looking – and I do NOT remember it being underneath my chair that I spent most of this process lounging around in ;-)]


I went around and loosened all the posts. Here Neli was being fancy and unscrewing 2 at once.


All the posts have been removed.


These bolts sticking out of the shelf are the same as the bolts on the end of the posts. Everything works with everything else because of these kinds of consistencies and extreme attention to detail.


Screw the new [taller in this case] posts on the upside-down top shelf.


Next put a tiny amount of oil on the threads of the new posts so that everything goes together silky smooth [seems to work :-)]


All the posts have been screwed on.


The bottom shelf has been alley-ooped back on the rack…


After putting the polymer washers back on, we put the nuts back on with Neli then tightening the nuts with the special wrench [again, a lot of manly spinning of the nuts onto the posts like they were tops on strings or something. Great manly-man fun :-)]


After we screwed the spikes on to the posts.


Ta da!

Because the floor was actually flat here, unlike our built-by-guys-on-drugs mid-70s home, the rack was perfectly level and there was no need to adjust the spiked feet to level the rack.

Took about a half hour I think, with most of the time spent by Phil and I unwrapping the new posts and re-wrapping the old posts in packing material sufficient [forgot to take photos! :-(] to guard against…well….

You know, after WWIII and we are all dust and after the radioactive wastes cool down, our 6-eyed descendents will have some kick-ass equipment racks to play around with.

in Featured HRS Posts / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / How-to / HRS / In The Field 1 comments
 by Michael

RMAF 2001 – Audiocircle Show Report

[Hi Pez :-)]

Uh oh. Someone is expressing opinions in a show report:

Pez on Audiocircle: RMAF 2011

Luckily we never do that around here. 🙂

I’d like to address the ‘room treatment cures all’ philosophy later, first, and I quote:

‘”the ______ aren’t fully broken in so there’s a bit of glare” Absolute dumbest thing you can say as a manufacturer. ‘

OK.

I am sure I have written this exact kind of thing in one of our show reports. So now I will take the time to elaborate on why my very similar statement back then was not as perceptive as I would have wished it to be.

It is indeed indicative of a lack of communication between the exhibitor [who wants well broken in happy happy speakers] and the manufacturer/importer [who was not able to get the brand-spanking new model of this or that out the door until the last minute – just as they did last year, and the year before that, and …]. Shows are THE place to debut brand new gear. That is just the way that spacetime works – not much we can do about it.

Audio Note electronics are the only things I have yet seen or heard of that sound good brand new and cold out of the box [makes me feel like giggling madly].

But the point that I want to make is that are a lot of subtle messages being passed to the listener here:

1. Yes, I can hear the glare too. I am not an idiot.
2. Yes, I respect you enough that I am not writing you off as a fan boy/girl/reviewer and that you can actually hear the glare
3. I am making a big assumption here that you do not like glare [some people have learned to expect it, and it is not high-end without it, poor souls]
4. If you like the sound of the speaker except for the glare part [and likely associated compression/constrained dynamics artifacts] then maybe you want to consider this speaker: if you are ever in the market/if you see it again sometime/not to be a piece of trash
5. Feel sorry for me, my life sucks
6. I am going to shoot the manufacturer if I live through this [but then again, I got this as a loaner, and they do help pay for the room, and the speakers will in fact sound great in, like, a month or two… so maybe not]

They are really asking you to do them a favor, to ‘listen around’ the glare – to use your mind to blot it out. Try it. Is there else anything interesting about the system? Maybe not. And this ‘listening around’ something takes a bit of effort that is hard to expend on all 160 rooms at a show… but be choosy… sometimes it will be really worth it.

On the other hand, some rooms are just for show – often everything is new out of the box. Sometimes they just consider their room to be a store front and intend to sell it all at bargain demo prices. These rooms are not for listening to [though they will be upset if you say so, especially in show reports :-)] and woe to the poor show attendee who gets confused about this.

😉

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / RMAF 2011 / Show Reports 0 comments
 by Michael

Our Traditional Report on Jonanthan Valin's RMAF 2001 Report

His report is over at: JV’s RMAF 2011 Report.

I hadn’t gone over to check out his report until now – thinking that this high-end show that was not really high-end might not have enough interesting rooms for him to review, and his report would be as short as mine. But lo and behold, speakers above $20K is actually a broad enough category to include quite a few rooms.

JV’s report this year seemed very polite to me, saying nice things about rooms with sound that had serious problems, always finding some nice things to say about SOMETHING or another, just like the Stereophile reports.

In fact, JV’s reporting seem quite uneven this year. For one, he relies too much on the idea that he does not like gemütlich, by which he seems to mean warm sounding systems by virtue of the fact that they are not ‘real’ enough for his taste. We can take him at his word, but all too often if he does not like a system’s performance in some area, any area, he blames it on being too ‘as you like it’, another phrase he assigns to systems that are not ‘cold as ice’ [my words :-)]. In my opinion, these systems have flaws because they have no separation and blur notes together, or because the harmonic color has been removed, or the tonality is all wrong, or because the imaging is non-existent or too precise…, not because they are too polite or beatific or wonderful sounding.

VTL/TAD

JV is a reviewer so he got special treatment [but check out the Audiocircle reports – which we will get to later – boy oh boy they earned themselves some real enmity amongst the people who will actually pay real money for their amps]. He heard it before the show, I heard it the last hour of the show. It was certainly the best I have heard VTL sound – though still missing micro-dynamics, realistic harmonic color, continuousness, linear dynamics as things went from sssssoft to lllloud, etc. But given all this, at this show, it was my choice for best big system.

———–
Magico Q1

JV has a way better description of what I heard than what I wrote 🙂 [I was annoyed they did not bring the Q5]. JV still gave it a runner up position in his top rooms of the show – presumably the sound got improved.

Let’s just say that on Saturday, I believe it was, it did not sound as good as your everyday ordinary high-end audio monitor [and not as good as the old Magico Mini, which several of our customers ended up buying, some many times :-)]. I figured it was trying to be too ambitious with such a small speaker in that large a room. JV apparently thought it was upstream electronics – doesn’t really matter. We report on the sound and move on…

—-

Skipping several rooms because I just did not find them interesting… [and too much marketing-speak for my taste, JV, eeewwwww!!!].., some confusion between Acapella and Lansche with the Lansche room review [to, no doubt, both companies chagrin. Need to throw in Avantgarde next :-)]. Sorry I missed the new MBLs.

—————
YG Acoustics Anat Reference Professional II Signatures

[Best speaker in the world AND longest name too ;-)].

OK. JV says Tenor [he does not like Tenor] makes everything sound [too] beautiful. Well, for one, this system sound was not beautiful. Just because he found it hard to get a handle on these ANATs, he decides to blame it on being too listenable [essentially]. Well, I did not find this especially listenable.

I also had a hard time getting a handle on these speakers – in fact I never did figure them out, even knowing the Tenor sound to some degree. I blamed it on the source – the computer audio playback.

The problem for me was that the notes sounded OK by themselves, as far as I could tell, but they were so separate from each other, my brain could not string them together into music and then run pattern matching against other music on other systems I have heard before. It was just ‘single note’ followed by ‘single note’ and on and on.

———–
Schimmel Voxativ Ampeggio

I liked this room too, although in my opinion I liked it because it was so very listenable, very Enjoyable, to the point of being even a little Druglike. This should be the opposite of what JV likes. Anyway, we both agree, I think, that we want to hear them again. Hopefully I will be able to spend more time analyzing what they do at CES.

—-
Cessaro Affascinate I SE

I was much unhappier about the severe lack of integration here. JV said it was very coherent but the slightest bit discontinuous? Seems like we are going to disagree on this one. I know these can sound good, so they were a disappointment but I would still go see them next show.

—
Estelon XA Diamond

These sounded OK, and JV seemed to like them. They also seem popular with people, the look or something striking a chord. To me, though I like them there seems to be something missing, some midrange energy or dynamic structure or something – not sure what it is but I find it off-putting and do not stay all that long in this room [I get like a double personality here – I want to stay but I want to go].

—-
Skipping… skipping … skipping the Venture Grand Ultimates room but I do not think JV and I heard the same system here. Then JV plays nicey nicey with system sounds that are so far from real that, well, let’s just call an end to this “Review of the JV Review”.

Hopefully CES will *rock* [so to speak] and we will have a lot to talk about. We plan on doing a traditional hugemongous show report and the pursuit of the Ultimate [ultimate] Music [music] Experiences [experiences]. 😉

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / RMAF 2011 / Show Reports 0 comments