Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

Audio Federation High-Fidelity Audio Blog
 by Michael

System Two now has two racks

… and system Three has none.

Both RixRax equipment racks are now over on the second system. We wanted the added capability to compare two turntables, two phono stages, and the Audio Note Ongaku to the Kegon Balanced to the Kegon.


We put the Kehon Balanced amps on the Kharma Mini Exquisites.


The tops have been off so we can stare at the internal electronics for awhile 🙂 But the tops will be back on soon enough… 1) they take up a lot of room just laying around, 2) the safest place for the tops of the chassis is on the chassis, and 3) just to get the aesthetic effect of a system that does not have exposed tubes.


Since our Audio Note M9 Phono preamp is still to arrive, we are using the Audio Note M1 phono preamplifier to drive the Kegon Balanced. We also had the M1 on the Ongaku integrated for awhile, to get a feel for the sound of the M1 in the system that we are so very familiar with.

The M1 is a very nice pre and I, personally, want to keep it here forever. At the price it sells for on Audiogon sometimes, $700, it sounds more like a $5K to 10K pre – and it always surprises me.

All the low-end AN gear surprises me – I keep expecting a more discordant and harsh sound – like the low end of every other line of equipment. But nooooo, this has more harmonics and warmth than the top-of-the-line, which is more neutral and detailed and transparent and realistic.


The end of the rack is now ALFULLY close to the speaker. But we figure the trade-off is worth it – that we can configure some great sounding systems that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to hear.


The Audio Note Kegon Balanced on the Kharma loudspeakers.


The Audio Note Kegon Balanced. On first blush, the M1 pre + Kegon Balanced amps is very, very competitive with the Ongaku integrated amp.

I would say more neutral [OK, nothing has that 211 sound except 211-based tube amps and the Kegons are 300B-based amps] and more transparent – more separation …and solidity?

We’re still listening…


The Soundlab system without a rack looks pretty darn cool itself. The Audio Aero Prestige is sitting on a Rix Rax amp stand.


Yes, that is a Nordost ODIN between the Prestige and Edge Signature One amps.


The Ongaku is now in System Four in Listening Room Three (L3). We haven’t hooked it up yet – this is still a AN Oto integrated-driven system.

in Audio Aero / Audio Note / Edge / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Kharma / Rix Rax / Showroom 2 / Showroom 3 / Showroom 4 0 comments
 by Michael

Jury Duty

The last few days I have been serving on a Jury in a very minor criminal case here in Boulder County. It was certainly an interesting and all-absorbing experience – a randomly selected 12 people who were all very well educated, white, 8 men, 4 women passing judgment on a Hispanic’ woman’s complaints against a Native American man. But after 7 – 8 hours of deliberation – I think decisions were reached that were accurate based on the available evidence – the combination of so many prejudices canceled each other out leaving the distillate truth [I believe].

WAY too much responsibility for me to want to do it again anytime soon.

Sonically, the little 20 minute jurist orientation video by Ed Sardella [a local newscaster] sounded screetchy and was recorded at way too high a level – but the microphone/speaker system in the court room itself was actually not too bad – serving more as a supplemental voice amplification system – and not needed by the louder-speaking lawyers in the room 🙂

OK, back to shootouts and… unfortunately, updating of lots of price lists that have rolled in in the last couple of weeks.

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

News of the Week

The Audio Asylum Critics’ hangout had some gossip. I haven’t noticed HP’s marginalization at TAS – it seems like his copy grows and shrinks at random anyway. It does have a different feel than the ‘corporate’ [is that the right term? Rah rah. Lacking depth. etc.] feel of the rest of the magazine. But rumors of HP starting another magazine… he doesn’t seem hungry or interested enough in what is happening in audio anymore in my opinion… Theyalso mention in this thread that it is common knowledge? that TAS’s circulation numbers are falsified. Maybe so, but it certainly keeps getting fatter and Stereophile keeps getting skinnier… for whatever reasons it appears like TAS is doing better and better these days.

Checked out Dagogo for the first time in awhile. They seem to have a ton of reviews listed on the front page of cool looking stuff. For all you web developers out there, if your target demographic is older people, you need to use a large text font – because we are near as to be blind [although with the FireFox browser, ctrl + or ctrl mouse-scroll-button makes all the text larger – but I happened to visit using Internet Explorer, which I think a few people still use 🙂 …or is it 🙁 ].

The Marten [previously Marten Design, the guys who make our Coltrane Supreme loudspeakers. Yeah, them.] folks have just finished their new demonstration studio – the Marten Center. Extensive photos and commentary in Swedish is at the Swedish Euphonia AudioForum [anyone else noticing that Audiogon ad at the top of the page on that forum? Now that our country, and by inference everything in it, is worth half as much as it was 7 years ago, This is really a good time for Europeans to shop on this side of the pond for used gear.]


Notice how the bass towers are on the inside? Just like we had ours until about 3 days ago…

OK, we are NOT the Avantgarde news channel. For one, I can barely spell it. But here is the photo of the latest version of the Duo Mezzo:

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

(Re)Positioning the Coltrane Supremes

Well, we finally decided our experiment of having the bass towers INSIDE the main towers had gone on long enough.

The speakers were fairly easy to move, though both of us participated in a you push you pull fashion. The Black Diamond Racing Cone pucks slide pretty easily across the carpet – but, especially in the case of the heavier bass units, the relatively high friction of the plush wool carpet sometimes causes the cone feet fall off of the pucks and the speaker tips a little bit and Neli accuses me of reckless driving [it IS kind of dangerous when the towers are close to each other, we really, really (add more reallys as you see fit) wouldn’t want the two titans to tip one into the other!].

The main towers are about 6 inches closer together.

The original reason the main towers were positioned on the outside of the bass units was to try and get a wider sound stage than what we had before. And it worked.-
But over time we worried that we were loosing some coherence, solidity and stability in the imaging and soundstaging. It was really pretty darn goooood, don’t get me wrong, but we felt we had reached a limit as to what we could do. We want more, MORE!

So, the initial impressions? Well, we have more positioning to do… 🙂 BUT… the soundstage is perhaps even wider than before – so we are good to go on that front. But solidity etc. was perhaps a little worse than before.

Darn! The just-plopping-them-down-somewhere-near-where-we-thought-they-should-go technique failed us once again [you know, it DOES sometimes work, and, seriously, rolling the dice this way does lead to some discoveries about specific room-speaker interactions that the strict-placement methodologists would never discover].

Anyway, I am hopeful that having nothing between the main towers will improve imaging. Makes sense, right, because the bass towers were acting like some kind of really strangely configured equipment rack between the speakers that are generating all the music’s location cue frequencies.

However, that said, we sure are tempted to at least put SOME of the equipment on a rack between the speakers sometimes – so that [most likely the digital] part of the system can be cabled with pure, 100%, high-octane cables like the Jorma Design PRIME [who needs to imbibe anymore?], Audio Note PALLAS [who needs Carnegie Hall anymore?], and Nordost Odin [who needs components anymore?].

Well, I exaggerate [a little :-)], but hopefully have also communicated why we are tempted to put a rack up front sometime – the heck with imaging [well, the rack WOULD be pretty far back from the main towers …so its impact WOULD be really minor, right?].

But the 2nd-rack-in-the-center would probably be turntable less, and have us still run the turntable from the side of the room. Why? Because stepping over maps and around cables and power cords is annoying at best, and with turntables, it just makes putting on an LP more about tip-toeing through the equipment than ‘Oh! Let’s hear THIS!’. I guess CDs are just so Slam Bam Play that it is not quite as perverted of an experience. Maybe it is because everyone has their preferred position to stand in when putting on an LP, and we just feel more comfortable when a $30K (or $80K) amp is not bogarting in our fav-o-rite location. Anybody else feel that the usability of centrally located racks is a little less than desirable?

Anyway, time for the speaker location tweaking process – which usually takes awhile… argh.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Marten Design / Showroom 1 0 comments
 by Michael

This Week in Audiophiledom

Anyone else bored by after surfing around trying to find something interesting on the Net?

Me. Too.

Things might appear kind of slow here too, the way we have been having to stage the introduction of new equipment into the systems in order to facilitate a number of shootouts we really, really wanted to hold – so that we can really, really understand what the advantages and disadvantages are of one thing compared to another.

But between shootouts… we are largely just playing music and holding auditions.

So… we will try something new. I wanted to do this for awhile – it is kind of like reviewing the reviewer’s reviews – but wider in scope.

And that is to post news items about what is happening on the Net. Not ‘Musical Fidelity releases version 124.1 of their 206 watt amp’, but rather ‘Fremer reports on failings of Grand Prix Monaco Equipment Racks at Audiogon’ kind of news [I messed this thread myself – but I *heard* all about it.].

And it would help if some of you helped out by posting comments to these News Posts about threads and news about the goin’s on out there.

To start… we will have a little catching up to do.

At CES, Positive Feedback’s Danny Kaey teamed up with Josh to help restart and grow the SonicFlare online magazine. Lately he has been popping out reviews left and right, which, interestingly, are simulcast on Postive Feedback as well.

Audio Circle continues to have an impact, at least on some of our local audiophiles here, larger than their modest membership would indicate. Mostly this means people cycling through Red Wine, Omega, some lower-end PC audio gear, etc. Some ModWright-modded equipment too, but not so much the ModWright-branded equipment. Similarly equipment like Odyssey is left out – seemingly in response to the ever-hopeful search for champagne on a beer budget…. thereby leaving some damn good beer on the shelves while drinking some champagne that might be mislabeled.

SixMoons continues to hang in there – though it is mostly Srajan doing reviews these days. I have no idea why more people aren’t doing reviews for 6moons – and why the number of advertisers keeps fluctuating so much. For those of you who don’t know, Sixmoons has the best online news stream, although to appears to be published only once a month, about the releases of new high-end audio products.

Otherwise, flame wars on Audio Asylum, threads disappearing on Audiogon, Stereophile getting smaller, TAS and HiFi+ slowly losing their edge, the 20,000+ AVSForum is the only high-end forum but still, somehow, largely content free… [except for outing the rumor that there is a new super-Meitner player due to arrive in the 2009 time frame :-)].

… yada yada yada… same ole same ole.

Let’s see, Globe Audio Marketing and Brinkmann North America have announced that they are bring back Avantgarde Acoustic to the North American continent. This line was previously so mismanaged that it kind of killed the line here for several years. It is of my opinion that European manufacturers just do not understand that some American distributors are just out for a ‘quick buck’. The concept seems to escape them.

Well, it looks like Avantgarde is now going with some reputable organizations and, as much as we think there are problems with their speakers, they are starting to look awfully good compared to the … stuff… that has been flooding the market these last few years. This was something I was going to talk about in the show report as well – that there is a natural percolation up towards the Best of Breed for some brands who just hang in there as every Tom, Dick and Harry puts out yet another new under-performing $40K speaker.

Anyone who knows of anything else, anything else at all, please post about it in the comments section.

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

Burning in the ELrod power cord on the Nordost Vidar

We have to jury rig the Vidar in order to burn in power cords.


The Vidar passes a very complex sequence of low power signals over cables when it is burning them in. We have run two full cycles, about 8 – 9 days, s far.

How this works for power cords, which one might think would like to be broken in with, say, a monstrous 10 amp signal, we’ll see in the upcoming shootout between this and the exact same powercord that has just been sitting in the system on a transport.


We will probably have to do two shootouts, because it takes about 3 days for an Elrod power cable to full charge up, because they have a large amount of capacitance.

So two shootouts, unless the Vidar’d powercord is obviously better: one with the Vidar’d power cord straight off the burner,. and one with the Vidar’d power cord sitting in the system somewhere charging up for 3 days so that both it and the UN-Vidar’d powercord are BOTH charged up.

Hard work these shootouts…. or maybe just hard work sometimes explaining them 🙂

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

Make room, Make room!

We need to make room and are selling some gear that is just the kind of stuff that some of you may be interested in:

Edge NL Reference 800 watt pyramid amps (demo)
Soundlab Ultimate 1 electrostatic loudspeakers (demo)
Walker Proscenium Gold Signature turntable (demo)
Marten Coltrane loudspeakers (used)

These are all the top performers in their particular category – more or less just like everything else we carry. There just aren’t that many of these that come on the market at demo/used prices. If you want one of these, now is the time.


The Edge NL Reference amps are sitting waiting for a new owner. We need to make room people, the Kegons, both pairs, the Ongaku, the Lamms, … We got amps coming out of our ears….

They are up on Audiogon if you are interested.


The Soundlab Ultimate 1 loudspeakers are playing music while waiting for a new owner. We got amps coming out our ears and speakers coming out our…. ears too. We got four systems and still we always have at least a couple of great speakers just sitting around for months on end.

The Soundlab U1 are still the best electrostatic speakers and are up on Audiogon.


The Walker Proscenium Gold Signature turntable is ready for a new owner. Also on the infamous Audiogon.

Here are some photos of the pieces that come with…


We have the compressor and large damping chambers up on a bookcase in the room next to listening room #2


The compressor.


The large damping chambers


The Walker motor controller.


Another view of the motor controller.


The small damping chambers sit nicely next to the rack.


A closeup of the small damping chambers


A pair of Marten Coltrane loudspeakers that we had here a long time are available – the owner is moving and is selling their entire system. It is not on Audiogon but please, if you are interested, contact us immediately.

OK, back to our normally scheduled programming. 🙂

in Edge / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Marten Design / Soundlab / Walker 0 comments
 by Michael

Leap Day 2008

Just an update as we finally, for the first time since the lightning strike, have all 4 systems powered up at the same time. A little worrisome… but it is a good feeling.


The main system, with Lamm ML2 amplifiers, Nordost ODIN and Jorma Design Prime and ELROD doing the cabling


Digital for the front end, Audio Note and Lamm.

The Brinkmann Balance turntable is not hooked up, no phono preamp and no shelves, we purloined them for a system downstairs for a bit.


The Kharma system with the Audio Note Ongaku integrated and EMM Labs CDSA SE Upgraded.


The Walker Proscenium Gold Signature turntable – also for sale up on Audiogon. The Audio Note TT3 Reference turntable and Lamm LP2 phono preamplifier.


The Soundlab system driven by the EDGE Signature One amps and Audio Aero Prestige CD/SACD player with linestage.


The little Audio Note system with OTO integrated amp.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Showroom 1 / Showroom 2 / Showroom 3 / Showroom 4 0 comments
 by Michael

CDSA SE with Upgrade – First Impressions

These are just first impressions… and we are still looking forward to a direct shootout between the CDSA with the upgrade [mostly the new metal transport] and the CDSA without.

But the sound seems more refined, more finesse, more smoother, more transparent than the old CDSA. The old CDSA was a little rougher, but a little more dynamic than the CDSD and DCC2 combo. The upgrade seems to put it closer in sound to that combo – and hopefully without loosing any of its old dynamics and ‘life’.

Sounded pretty good yesterday… anyway. The transport definitely has a more ‘uptown’ feel to it. Nice.

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

EMM Labs CDSA and CDSD Upgrades

Our CDSA just got back, a few days ago now as we let it warm up and start breaking in… again, from getting the latest upgrade offered by EMM Labs.

The upgrade consists of a new German transport, new machined feet for the chassis, and a new bezel on the transport door. The upgrade retails for $1500 and is available only for CDSA’s and CDSD’s made in the last year or two. The CDSA is now shipped only with the upgrade and now costs $11,500 USD. The CDSD SE similarly goes up to $9,900 USD [these are only two in a raft of price increases we are receiving from most manufacturers].


This is the current setup with the upgraded CDSA SE. It is actually sitting on tall HRS Nimbus Couplers, not the new machined feet, and for lack of an extra platform, on the carpet there. That is a Nordost Brahma power cord on the CDSA and Elrod on the Audio Note Ongaku. Along with Stealth INDRA interconnects and Nordost ODIN speaker cable this is a darn simple system. We like these three piece systems [Kharma Mini Exquisites as the 3rd piece in this case].

They are so, simple. They sound good. They don’t cost a lot in interconnects and equipment racks and are visually appealing.


The name tag remains the same.


The bezel looks slightly different?


The machined feet are significantly more robust, wider and heavier looking.


Now a bunch of photos of the new transport. Much more robust feeling and looking.


A lot more metal and less plastic.


I have no idea what the 6, 9 is doing on the Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms CD – or even whether it is something Neli wrote or is on all CDs.

How does it sound? Well cold, out of the box, it sounded pretty good – but it has been a few weeks without our CDSA now and we missed it dearly – so I think the old model would have sounded pretty good at this point.

But we will do a better job as it is now warmed up and has 24 – 48 hours on it. A few more days…

And hopefully we can rescue more equipment from all the other shootouts we are running here simultaneously.

We got the:

* New Elrod power cord versus new Elrod power cord with a week or two on the Nordost Vidar cable burner test running.

* We got the Walker Proscenium Gold Signature versus the Audio Note TT3 Reference turntable shootout always running

* We got the Lamm LP2 photo stage versus the one in the Audio Note M1 preamplifier [Yes, I know which one is probably going to win, Neli, but I want to hear HOW it wins :-)].

* We still have the rerun of the recent interconnect shootout but not as digital cables, not as tonearm cables, but as honest ordinary interconnects

* We want to do a shootout between the Kharma and Audio Note SEC Signature speakers [yes, I know they are very different, but the new completely upgraded AN speakers should compete in the basic areas of frequency extension and overall resolution, trading efficiency and dynamics for upper midrange uber resolution – but I want to hear that they do].

* And then there is the new Audio Note Kegon Balanced versus the Ongaku versus the older high-gain Kegons.

And we will most likely have an older 6 month old or so CDSA here to do a shootout against the upgraded CDSA quite soon.

And the real problem is many of these have to run on one of the two major systems [and we like to be somewhat familiar with the sound of the system in a large sense to do the shootout in order to have a slightly higher level of confidence in our findings – so we can’t do too many changes, too fast] -and so we got a complex traffic jam on component substitutions planned that we really could use an advanced project scheduling tool to manage – if we didn’t hate these tools so much [long story, to do with idiot managers… need we say more? :-)].

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