Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

Audio Federation High-Fidelity Audio Blog
 by Michael

CES 2011 flyby #1

Just a few photos to give a taste…


YG Acoustics speakers driven by Tenor amps. Bass issues in room did not hide the fact that te mid and uppers were very nice.


Marten’s new Coltrane 2 speakers and amplifiers. Bass issues in room did not hide the fact that there was an ease and authority to these speakers that the Coltrane 1’s did not have. Lots to do with the 1″ tweeter as much or more than the increased size of the cabinet and woofers


Soundlab’s new inwall speakers. Demo of the inwall speakers is tonight or tomorrow night (sorry, I am too old to remember nothing)


Kimber / IsoMike / EmmLabs / Sony room. Best by far I’ve heard these Sony’s sound.


Dynamic Contrast was exhibiting some innovative vibration-controlling equipment racks. The test I conducted was inconclusive – need a better test track [mostly, I just feel how much the chassis of the equipment is vibrating – and listen too, of course]

in CES 2011 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Marten Design / Show Reports / Soundlab 0 comments
 by Michael

View from the Flamingo room window

… and all the exhibit rooms on this side of the 4rth floor hallway.

CES 2011 skyline

On the left is Ballys, on the far right is Bellagios, In the foreground on the right Hurrahs, and in the center back there is the Venetian [actually, this post in wrong in that these windows are facing South, not North, and that building just LOOKS like the Venetian (I forget which hotel it actually is)]. Just ignore the red brick building. Just apartments I think.

Otherwise, yeah, the view on this side of the hotel sucks. The other side of the hall, where we were last year, had views of the Flamingo gardens… palm trees, green stuff, yummy stuff that we haven’t seen for a few months in the snowy rocky mountains.

Twilight Zone moment: Last night we got a complaint about playing music in our room at around 65db. Haydn’s Nelson Mass. Sometime between 9pm and 10pm. (!)

Let’s just say shows, and Las Vegas(!), ain’t what they used to be.

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

Room setup in Las Vegas, CES 2011

Blue sky most of the way here yesterday. Nice.

Just a test photo…. of the Audio Note room during setup. Not sure it will look anything like this by the time the show opens… but I need to put the laptop thru its paces to make sure it all works for the show report.

Audio Note CES 2011 Room Setup

Mostly having issues with the Flamingo internet connections going up and down and up and down all of the time.

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

Snowing in Vegas…

We’re about ready to head on out…

Audio Federation Listening Room

Here we see what was the current state of things, with the Audio Note CDT-Five transport and Fifth Element DAC and its Fifth Force power supply going through… the Lamm preamp and amps in this case.

Have a lot to say about this digital front end, and how it compares with the just-a-few-steps-down AN DAC 4 Balanced and CDT-Three transport.

But now, we need to be getting out of here and down to cold, snowy Las Vegas and T.H.E. Show and CES.

The plan is to post photos and news here fairly steadily during the show. Hopefully something interesting will be there … beyond what we are taking, of course 🙂

‘Till Vegas then…

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

Wilsons, the Sasha, and the Alexandria X-2

I was reading the RMAF Show report in TAS… We already did our report, and our report on the Jonathan Valin report – (JV’s report from their website is printed in the TAS as part of their report in the mag). But glancing through the other reports…

These show reports, just like the ‘Best of the Year’ reports, esp. in TAS, and Hi-Fi+, etc. and ALL of the online rags… well, you would do better picking good gear with a monkey and some darts and a lot of beer.

But I want to talk about Wilson, how dealers are selling Wilson, how reporters are reporting on it, and how it reflects what is wrong with… well, it just reflects the lack of support for decent ethics and due diligence in our culture at large, so not much to say there.

Alexandria X-2
The Alexandria X-2 (thanks Jim :-))

To put it simply, dealers are pushing inferior equipment to drive Wilson speakers, and the ‘press’ is, through incompetence or worse, saying that this is just great.

We can talk about WHY, and WHO, and WHAT… but the answer to these is easy [follow the money] but fraught with finger pointing and blame and there is enough of that on the faux news channels.

What we can talk about though, is the IMPACT this has on [the reduced ranks of] audiophiles and the [proliferation of gear in our] industry. I mean, how mucked up is our hobby that the #1 selling loudspeakers have an …undeserved!… reputation for being bright, edgy and hard to make sound good? [where the real truth is that the equipment they are being sold with is bright, edgy and hard (impossible) to make sound good. And to make it Suck Less they are sold with cabling that is choking the sound as much as possible because the less there is of the (bad sounding) sound, the better]

Or we can talk about how to fix this [there are many people, however, who do not want it fixed – again, who makes money off the status-quo?]. The fact is that most dealers and reviewers do not give a hoot. Reminds me of the U.S. auto industry before Japan killed us. Some decent equipment manufacturers do an end run around the whole kit-and-kaboodle – choosing unique, and perhaps crazy [that would be us :-)] dealers who care about the sound. Others try to play the ‘game’ and hope that their higher quality will get ‘noticed’ by dealers and/or audiophiles… someday… hopefully real soon.

But the truth seems to be that it would be very difficult to fix. Someone would need to start their own magazine, with honest (but not ruthless) reviewers. They would have to have a dealership in most major metropolitan areas that focused on what things sound like, and trust that money would eventually follow quality. They would have to eschew manufacturers that, for whatever reasons, just gave up the pursuit of quality a long time ago.

And they would have to point out every once in awhile that the industry status-quo is very sick and this sickness is killing off audiophiles and potential audiophiles faster than they are made [which is pretty darn fast].

Hmmm… [our entire industry] kind of reminds me of the newspaper industry [which doesn’t have to die either, but it does have to change]

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

CES 2011 Show Report: THE Plan

The Plan…

What is the plan?

The general plan is to post a photo for each room – with little or no comments for most of them and, like the RMAF 2010 show report, to focus on The Few, The Interesting. I figure 200 or so rooms… that is a lot of posts [but not very many photos 🙂 compared to the 4000 or so for last year :-)))))]. We’ll see.

As far as what will be the interesting rooms…

I described a few general points about some general rooms in a previous post for the 29th floor, hallways 100 and 200. That seemed to bore people pretty good… 🙂

So… let’s talk about The Cool. The Not Boring.

============== THE VENETIAN (CES) =============

Maps of CES proper are here:

CES 2011 Show Map

Click on the floors in the Venetian to see maps of the high-end audio rooms. As more and more people move from the ballroom floors to the towers, we only have a few left on the Venetian ballroom level 2 (Move the mouse over each room to see who is in the room):

Mostly YG Acoustics, Thiel, Usher, Parasound, and a few others. YG might be interesting, and there are some rooms that are on hold – maybe somebody interesting might show up there.

On floor 29, it looks like

* Perfect8 is in a bigger room this year in 29-335. They had the $200K or so glass speakers last year – here’s hoping they use different electronics this year.

Zooming in on floor 30 [by clicking the + in the lower left, which doesn’t increase the size of the miniature mouse-over text. Some programmers suck at their job :-(. And the only way get back to the main map of the Venetian is to reload the page] we can see that:

* Marten is in 30-130 [it will be good to hear how the Coltrane 2 speakers do in this modest sized room],

* Kondo is in 30-224 [let’s hope they bring speakers their electronics can drive AND which have the ability to render subtle transients and harmonics],

* Zanden is in 30-317 [they almost always pair their electronics with excellent speakers], the

* Lotus Group in 30-319 [hope they bring their new speakers, either the statement or the new more modestly priced ones will do]

Don’t see much on floor 34 [Emm Labs will be in the isoMike room, but so will the Sony speakers that Ray Kimber takes every year], but floor 35 has

* Lamm in 35-309 and 35-307 [with the Wilson Alexandria X2 speakers]

* D’Agostino [founder of Krell] has his own room in 35-210 [this might be quite interesting to see what he is up to now]

============== THE FLAMINGO (THE SHOW) =============

And then we have T.H.E. Show at the Flamingo:


The hotel is confusing like all Vegas strip hotels. Follow the green lines I scribbled on the map… Registration and most of the large room are downstairs – use the escalator as indicated. Most of the rooms are up on, what looks like floors 3,4 and tower 1 and 2 this year. Use the elevators to get there.

Looking at the exhibitor list [the room maps do not seem to list who is where, except for those in the 5 or 6 suites]

The Show Las Vegas Exhibitors

Well, there is:

* Audio Note and us 🙂 in room 4000

* The David Berning in 4041 [nice amps. Hope the rest of their system highlights them to best effect]

* Jadis will be showing in Conference room E [first time they have been at a show in awhile]

* Magnepan & Bryston in Conference Room A [they had an interesting room a few years ago at the Alexis. Here’s hoping they do again]

* NFS Audio [Not For Sale. Where the party is. Next door to us. Oh boy :-)]

There are, of course, many other ‘potentials’. We’ll just have to see… I mean hear… 🙂

in CES 2011 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo 0 comments
 by Michael

Dear Santa

Dear Santa,

The following is the list of things you seem to have forgotten to bring me this year [I understand the economy is rough; but seriously, could you make sure you don’t have a few items in your sleigh that you forgot to deliver last night???]:

1. 100,000 mint condition LPs, across multiple genres and in order thank you, all previously Loricrafted with the 4-step Walker Prelude cleaning process. [if not this year, perhaps next Christmas?]

2. Enough Nordost ODIN, Jorma PRIME and Audio Note PALLAS to cable out all 3 of our rooms [and maybe the 4th we are thinking of adding] in either 100% pure ODIN (or PRIME or PALLAS) and in any kind of mixed-cable madness we might want to hear someday. [perhaps this is just stuck in the chimney? I’ll go look.] [Nope. Doesn’t seem to be there. Hmmmmm… Not sure what the problem is here.]

3. A blank check and the name of reputable and competent contractors to add several rooms to our house for the following speakers, one pair for each room. which we would also appreciate very much if you could deliver ASAP: Marten Momentos, Kharma Grand Exquisites (and/or Midi Grande Exquisites), Wilson Alexandria II, Acapella Sphaeron, Audio Note Sogon (at least ONE of these new rooms has to have corners for the AN speakers, unlike our current house), [Oh, and FedEx or UPS is OK, too, if, you know, Rudolph and the other reindeer are a little pooped from last night’s hectic delivery schedule].

4. 1000s of free plane tickets – which come with free room and board at the Boulderado, so that we can fly in everyone who wants to hear their favorite music on any or all of the above setups. [or. hey, you can just fix the real-estate mess, make everyone giddy in the process, and get us a place in the big city. You know, a city that people are already traveling to in the normal course of living their lives?]

Well, Santa. Four things on my list. Not so bad. You’re doing a great job so far, and we know World Peace is not something you can help with, but it seems to me that the items on this list are exactly the kind of things you are so awesome at.

But please HURRY; because right now Neli thinks *I* am Santa, and boy oh boy, this list is going to take me some amount of time to work through…

Happy Holidays, Santa [and to all of you out there, too! Happy New Year!]

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

Crossfit WOD – Audiophile style

[Crossfitness is all the rage in fitness land. It consists of highly varied workouts done at warp speed (as quickly as possible) and focus on exercises that are actually useful in the real world. WOD stands for Workout Of the Day].

1. Big Amp Pump: Lift 90lb. Audio Note Ongaku. Take 2 steps forward. Put it back down… carefully.
a. Advanced: carry it up and/or down 10 stairs
b. Advanced: put it down to your right and/or left (comes in handy because of all those amp-stand and cable footing issues)

2. Rack Shuffle: Lift 50 lb component off of a rack and put it gently onto the floor. Lift 50 lb component up off the floor and insert it into a rack. (aka the “cables still don’t reach blues”)
a. Advanced: Do not slide it (feet often stick to and or rub the finish off of quality equipment rack shelves) but instead stick out your rear to counter-balance the weight as you extend your arms and component into the rack.

3. Cable Contortion: connect (correctly!) the 20 ends of 10 cables and power cords to components on a rack that is too close to the wall. (aka “Squished Skull” and “Why oh Why Can’t My Arm Bend That Way Just For a Second” blues)
a. Advanced: use only the big ELROD power cords (when cold and stiff) and suitably stiff interconnects [stiffest ones we have here are Odin and they aren’t too bad] .

4. Component Packman: take 10 components off the racks, amps and speakers and pack them in their shipping cartons. Then unpack them and set them up (aka lets exhibit at a show or someone else’s listening room – essentially 1,2 and 3) .

5. Dusting Time: move all your LPs and CDs and dust the shelves they are on.
a. Advanced: re-order them [this is hard for us since we have 2+ major locations for CDs and 3+ for LPs scattered throughout the house].

——

Now, according to way all the crossfit sites do it, we are supposed to time ourselves and say we can do, say, 4, in, like 26 minutes or something.

We do 1, 2 and 3 all the time.

We have NEVER done 5 🙂

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

Audio Note CDT-5 transport and Fifth Element DAC downstairs


We moved the Audio Note Fifth Element, Fifth Force and CDT-Five downstairs to prepare for demos for a few out-of-town guests this week.


We have the CDT-Five next to the Walker, the Fifth Element DAC and the Fifth Force on the shelf below. The Walker is hooked up to the S9 step-up and it is all going to the M9 Phono preamplifier the two boxes there on the bottom left. Above them our CDT-Three and DAC 4 Balanced are also hooked up. Welcome to high-end audio shootout heaven.


We are still using the Jinro downstairs, soon to be the Ongako, as we move things around like mad during the demos. Our high-gain Kegon amps are on the left there on the old RixRax amp stands.


Closeup of the Audio Note Jinro integrated in black.

A few more details about the Fifth Element DAC (and its Fifth Force power supply):

* The Fifth Force is a separate power supply, which is an upgraded DAC5 Signature supply but with better stabilization, better mains transformers (double HiB c-cores) and other detail improvements

* Fifth Element Valve input buffer; the buffer is synchronized to match the output of the CDT Five, so whilst other CD transports will work, they will not be close to the performance of a CDT Five. The valve buffer consists of an EF800 Telefunken or similar, it has its own separate power supply with a 6X5 valve rectifier feeding the HT

* The I/V interface is a newly designed all silver wired transformer with a massive core (same as the AN-S9), it provides far better low level and is individually adjusted for the exact behavior of the output of the selected AD1865 converter chip

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