Neli will be at the Lone Star Audio Fest in Dallas Texas late this week and weekend representing Audio Note U.K. and Audio Federation.
Yes, we missed the Montreal show and it looks like we will miss the Stereophile Show in NYC.
No, we do not like this.
We going through show withdrawal hell…but RMAF will be here soon… kind of.
We had somebody come by who wanted to hear the Adagio loudspeakers in a larger room… and it was easiest to bring them upstairs…
.. and put them on the Audio Note Ongaku integrated amplifier…
… driven by the Emmlabs CDSA single-box CD / SACD player.
After we got over the initial shock of how much efficnet these speakers were than the Audio Note speakers they replaced…
They sounded pretty darn good!
We know some system builders like to put cheap amps on expensive speakers… well, this is the other side of that coin.
And in this case I think it worked better, as there weren’t any nasties… mostly just limitations on dynamics, mostly midi- and micro-dynamics, and various subtlties that we in the high part of the fi like to have along with our music.
Things have been a little in flux here… which gave us a chance to listen closely to the Ongaku in several different configurations – primarily:
1. On the Rix Rax Outpost amp stand with a $2 OEM black power cord
2. On the Rix Rax with a $1600 Elrod Signature 3 power cord
3. On HRS Nibuses on an HRS M3 Isolation Base on the Rix Rax Outpost amp stand with the Elrod PCs…
And the winner is… 🙂
I wanted to try out #1 because that is what some of the diehard AN experts suggest sounds best, and we will try this again in a system cabled with just AN cables and with AN components, but….
Adding the Elrod PC:
a. Removed some of the compression. In some of the guitar notes on Sailing to Philidelphia, really simple notes by the way, with the OEM PC they sounded hardened near the top of the note envelope, like the note just ran into a wall – splat. With the Elrod there was a smooth rollover as the note went from getting louder to getting softer.
b. The Elrod revealed more harmonic content
c. The Elrod removed an ‘scratchy agreessive edge’ that the sound had had. As expected. A lot of people associate this edge with ‘immediacy’ (quickness, speed, etc.). If they don’t here it they may think something is missing. It is unfortunate that it is often the case that to get immediacy one has to accept this edge. In this case it did not seem to me to be the case, however, as I listened carefully for just this sort of tradeoff.
Interestingly, some people will sacrifice everything to get a little more immediacy, real or IMAGINED(!) (like AvantGarde owners :-)) and some will sacrifice everything to get rid of the ‘edge’ (like PS Audio, MIT, and SRA owners…. etc. etc.). The latter group significantly out-numbers the former, in my experience.
d. Finally, the Elrod brought EMOTION to the party. The music became engaging,. Enough so that it was much more difficult to listen to the sound because the music kept distracting me.
Presumably this was because some of the nuances were being lost with the cheapo power cord – or perhaps the ears were shutting down / shuttoing out nucance to protect themsleves from the ‘edge’ and ‘comrpession’ artificats.
When we added the HRS under the amp… first, what a tower, looks very Chinese ….
a. the first thing was very much improved bass response. Everything tightned up – but it was mostly the bass that now had a degree of slam that was quite … impressive.
b. the next thing I noticed was that HRS has a ‘sound’. Not sure what this sound is, but with 9 HRS bases here, and after trying them under everything (usually not in soup-to-nuts HRS setups though, but we are gaining more experience here as well), there is a quality to the sound that is recognizable. This is a sound that is hard to do better than – but it is becoming hard for me to analyze anymore – the old noggin just shuts down…. I could convince myself that this was less, the same, or more emotionally satisfying than the previous setup.
Perhaps over time it will be easier to settle this – and one should spend some time evaluating system mods like this – especially if one is subject to emotional swings on a minute by minute basis [aka doing system setups with one’s spouse :-)].
It was actually warm and sunny out yesterday… but the photos did not come out so great. Will try again on the next sunny day. Should be one coming up … sometime.
It is also hard to show just how BIG the amps stand, and amp! are. We;ll try to fix that for next time too.
Anyway… there are some HRS couplers under the amp, but in gernal we have not done extensive listening tests to test the HRS or the system itself in this configuration… yet.
These speakers, this system, actually does fill up the room with sound. It is amazing.
Not quite the easy open bass the Triolon bass towers had- but few systems have THAT large of a sound.
But the bass goes down on both this and the previous system to about the same frequency, and with about the same resolution… so there ARE similaritities.
And here, the soundstage is a more reasonable 6 or 7 feet tall, instead of 20 feet – so it is, as always, about tradeoffs. And at about 1/4 the price… we are happy with this being the primary system… for awhile.
I will have to take more photos of the Ongaku on the Rix Rax outpost amp stand. It was just a kind of accident that this got set up this way – the HRS going out on a local audition this week – but this looks really … farout man.
The two are about the same size and it is as if were made for each other. And Neli polished up both of them, which doesn’t hurt the visuals either.
Sonically… we are playing with power cords and have a $2 OEM cord on the Ongaku to establish a frame-of-reference… so can’t say anything yet.
We sold our red ones to someone who just had to have red – so Neli picked walnut this time.
Still breaking in. Which is the reason for the choo-choo-train speaker setup…
Looks diff, huh?
You can tell an audiophile passed through here… there are two mains outlets on each wall, one dedicated Hubble outlet, and one lamp outlet.
First up is putting the Audio Note system back where it does not have to contend with the horn speakers behind it… Then the Coltrane Supremes 🙂
… a great thing for those of you who register and then later forget your user name and password…. 🙂
… and we’ll see if this works. Still need to login, for now.
For those that are interested, the way the spammers work is that…well…
… there are 10s of millions of blogs out there that use WordPress software, like this one, and each of them has the same functions (webpages) with the same names.
If someone finds a way around having to login in order to post, by calling a specific function that the writers of WordPress did not expect outsiders to call, then they have a way into each and every one of the 10s of millions of blogs.
I.E. a way to post their message about erectile disfunction to millions of blogs and even more people, some numbers of which must actually want to hear about this problem that seems rampant amoung American males.
A custom site, like Romy’s The GoodSoundClub, and some of the more unique forums, do not have to worry about spammers – their software has functions with uncommon names and even if the spammers get in they will not be reaching those 10s of millions of eyeballs – it just isn’t worth their time.
The amount of spam we were getting went from about 10 per day to 200 per day. Kind of depressing.
After hacking WordPress we are back down to 50. When we get it down to zero we will re-enable comments – hopefully no longer requiring people to register and login to comment any more.
What people do who do not know how to code – I do not know. This is the depressing part.
Been spending my blogging time in this fight. This is the other depressing part.
But I’ll try to slip in a few updates here and there. The Triolons are supposed to get lugged down to the garage tomorrow morning – but it is starting to snow now, so we’ll see how that goes.
