Our room at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest.
[Sorry about the lack of posts yesterday – the laptop was buried, trapped, inaccessible under and behind a number of large crates and extraneous, it now seems, room furniture]
The before shot
The during shot
The after shot
The after shot – the rack
Kind of a surpise this snow storm… it was supposed to arrive yesterday around 1 pm or so, not 9am. We planned on using a truck, a rear wheel truck, but our driveway is very steep and somewhat long (100 yards or so) and 4-wheel drive vehicles have problems getting up the thing if there is snow – especially when the temperature is warm enough that an ice layer forms underneath the snow – which is what I think happened but… well more later on that.
So the truck HAD to get out of there before the snow starting sticking to the asphalt – or we would be marooned with all our equipment stuck at ‘the shop’ .
So from 9am to 10am Neli and I carried most of the equipment down the stairs (except the 120lb Edge amplifiers and 50? 60? lb Audio Note M10 powersupplies – which we waited until the stairs were icey to carry down the 45 steps…? Guess my brain was frozen too – it is my job to carry down the heavy stuff).
Anyway, with help from one of our stronger friends, Don, we made it out of there (Thanks Don! Davis Duz All), who helped us last year as well, (especially getting the 230lb Edge Reference amps, which we took to the show last year, down the stairs!) .
But in the rush we left a lot of stuff (like clothes) at the homestead to go back and get later…
Whcih we did. Here is what it looked like 3 hours after the last picture, around 5:00pm
This time, even Neli’s Audi A6 did not make it up the driveway, which had about 6 inches of snow at that time.
The roads up in the foothills there were getting pretty bad by that time. So, in a mad dash, we got the pieces to the HRS MXR rack, the Shunyata Hydra M8, the Acoustic Dreams equipment rack pieces, our posters, the Jorma Design poster, clothes, food, HRS nimbus’s and couplers, etc etc etc. – and in 5 trips carried them down the stairs and down 50 yards of snowy driveway an hour later. The snow was coming down at 2 inches/hour and our shoveled stairs were already snowy and drifty but the heck if I was going to shovel them again for the forth time in about 6 hours.
In all a foot of snow was predicted to land on our little adventure by the end of the night. It was snowy in Denver as well but only an inch or two – really not much down in south Denver at the Marriott RMAF show hotel.
Neli’s car, which was not quite sideways in the driveway, did manage to slide around with the front once again facing front and at about 5 mph we made it back into town and an hour later we were back at the hotel.
After supper , we braved the icey winds (which one of us cursed – not me – a large, but not quite infinite, number of times)., and fetched the Meitner CDSD and DCC2 out of the truck – out of the very front and bottom corner of the truck underneath 8 Acoustic Dreams rack shelves and amp stands and….
All this so that could have all of the components up in our room over night, where it was warrrrrmmmer – figuring that they would not like sleeping out in the cold any better than we would.
*sigh* Not to complain or anything but we were happy with the show being a month earlier, around the end of September – the heck with CEDIA.
BTW, our temporary room is the Audio Note / Audio Federation room next door to our main room. I’ll have to take a photo of this room with all of the furniture still in it, which looks quite strange in comparision to what the room WILL look like in a day or so when it is full(er) of equipment – Yes, I’ll have to do that, as soon Neli lets me take photos in here …
Looking forward to warmer drier times… we have a box of great albums with us…
and CDs….
Now it is time to get all the rest of the stuff out of the truck and up here – hopefully they will free up our room, our OTHER room, soon … and this afternoon the Marten Coltrane Supreme speakers should arrive from Sweden… and then… music!
… before the stairs get any more slippery than they already are and the driveway turns to ice.
We are officially closed for the show. It is now Tuesday 12:00pm noon.
See you at the show!
The equipment of what we are taking is here:
Audio Federation’s equipment list for our room at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2006 in Denver Colorado
It is supposed to rain late tomorrow and snow the next day here…. So it looks like we are going to try to go to the show tomorrow morning…
No we are NOT ready.
or “Round ’em up, Head ’em out”
or “We’re just going to pieces”
or “Break in Two Systems, Two Systems, Two Systems in one”
Breaking in Sound Lab Ultimate loudspeakers and Audio Note M10 preamplifier together – using the EDGE Signature One amps and Audio Aero Capitole CD player driving them over on the floor to the right [Oh, you can’t see it in this picture, but you can see the Nordost Valhalla interconnects snaking across the floor there].
This is all just a temporary setup. We are breaking in each notch on the M10 volume control. We got up to ‘5’ yesterday, but that was driving the little Kegons pretty hard – and the Coltranes were getting pretty loud.
But over here, on the still somewhat inefficient Sound Lab speakers – with a solid state amp… we are doing ‘6’ today and will do notch ‘7’ tomorrow. That ‘should’ be enough, the Marten Coltrane Supremes (which made it through customs, yay!) are much more efficient than even the Coltranes, so notch ‘7’ should be plenty loud enough for the show…?
Every time we up the volume a notch, the M10 sound is bright and annoying for several hours and the pre lets off another waft of New Electronic Component Smell [Yummmmmm. Is this the only reason we buy TVs and computers and $50K preamps, to be able to experience this smell? Nahhhhhh].
This M10 + Sound Lab speaker-centered system sounds surprisingly good. The Sound Labs really like upstream equipment that errs on the warm side (as opposed to the more icey Parasound or Pass Labs soild-state amps, the former is usually shown witht eh SoundLabs at CES and the latter is to be at this RMAF show in the IsoMike room), and even warmish cables help – like the Pranawire Cosmos speaker cables.
The latest Sound Lab upgrade did seem to tighten the bass quite a bit and increase the midrange dynamics as well – adding perhaps 3dB? of efficiency. Still breaking in, but I noticed that the unfamiliar bluring of images in the soundstage that I heard when we first starting playing the SoundLabs after their upgrade has almost completely gone away.
The old Marten Coltrane system, going to pieces Time to box up most of this system, and move the Marten Design Coltrane loudspeakers to listening room 3. The Sound Labs are going to go over here, next, after the show – and how we get around them when we go up and down the steps is still to be determined.
The current state of listening room 3. Most of the system proper is going to the show, including the Acoustic Dreams rack.
We want to put the Marten Coltranes in here after the show – but they sound best with the Lamm ML2.1 amps and the HRS MXR rack. But the Kharma Mini Exquisites sound best with the EDGE amps… it will be hard to build a system that is optimized for two different speakers like this… not to mention the Acoustic Zen Adagio speakers.
And then there is the HRS MXR equipment rack problem, or rather lack of problem: we want a double wide on the Coltrane Supreme speaker system in listening room #2,and another one upstairs so we can play a turntable in listening room #1 (it is the only thing that will work on our very bouncy floor) – but we currently only have one rack….
So little time (and money) and such a long Wish List.
Argh.
New and cold out of the box, played quietly, the Audio Note M10 linestage preamplifier was heavenly.
Several hours later, played loudly, there was a harshness / brightness to the upper mids (could have been the Meitner still wamrmng up… people (and you reviewers out there) do know that the Meitner takes about a day to warm up, right?)
The next day, no harshness, but a very tubey tube tube sound.
Today – sounds pretty good. With the purity of the Meitner / Emm Labs front end and the M10, the upper frequencies are very very lovely, the diamond tweeter approaching (and perhaps even supassing?) that of the Acapella plasma tweeters. It WAS very lovely and giggle-inducing.
Tomorrow – who knows.
Break-in darn it. BREAK-IN!
We are thinking about seeing if we can keep all of this plugged in somehow, and then making a mad dash to the show so that everything will only be off for a few hours, instead of the day or so that seems much more likely given that it all sits on and in front of the rack that we are taking.
The Marten Coltrane Supreme loudspeakers are in Denver in Customs. The drivers of the Supremes are broken in at the factory for several hundred hours, as are various other o fits pieces and parts. Cool huh? But we would be a lot happier if they had several months on them.
The important thing now is to get them into the room and just have them sit still for awhile (all that jostling during moves is not good for any component), acclimize to room temperature (it really helps things to sound better if its parts are not both cold and warm and hot at the same time), and get them playing music. And I do not want to argue why all these things are so, just like I do not want to argue why gravity works the way it does – it just does. I mean is.
These things just are. Try and figure out why, if you want to and have the time and expertise. But just don’t deny their existence because nobody can explain why they are indeed so to your satifaction.
Oh, and some of these things people measure, trying to be all ‘scientific’ and using equipment with lots of dials and acronyms instead of nouns. Well, you might as well just the weigh two pieces of equipment to determine which sounds better as to compare them with most of this pseudo-scientific BS. Just because electrons are juicier in one cable than another does not necessarily have anything to so with the quality and accuracy of the sound as enjoyed by a human being. They never prove this casual effect, one way of the other, between what they are trying to measure and the experience that we lay down the big bucks to enjoy. They just pontificate (or assume – and we all know what Felix had to say about ass-u-me-ing something:-)) it is so and awawaaaaaay they go.
Oops, I think that was a soap box. Get that thing out of here!
Anyone know if it Rocky Mountain AudioFest or Rocky Mountain Audiofest or Rocky Mountain Audio Fest… or Rocky Mount Audio Feast?
The Marten Design ‘Coltrane’ loudspeakers, Audio Note Kegon amplifiers, Audio Note M10 preamplifier, Emm Labs CDSD Signature transport and DCC2 Signature DAC, Brinkmann’s Balance turntable, Lamm’s LP2 phono preamplifier.
It kind of spreads out acorss the floor, doesn’t it? Cable length issues dictate that the Meitner CDSD Transport be out front with the Kegons. Then we have the two ‘Galahad’ power supplies in the row behind them. All are on HRS ‘M3’ Isolation Bases. Shunyata power cords and Valhalla cables adorn the floor space between the monoliths.
We do now seem to have a equal numbered set of both silver faced and black faced equipment. What to do… what to do.
How does it sound? Even though cold? Even with the M10 not broken in?
We haven’t heard the Kegons on this system in a long time, the Meitner for an even longer time. But given what we know about the Kegons and Meitner together – and these speakers – and we know a bit….
This is a big step towards the sound we have been always looking for.. engaing, magical, sophisticaed, natural, dynamic, exciting,,,.
The guitar on Radiohead Amneeeeesiac now sounds like my guitar upstairs. Never noticed that it didn’t sound quite exactly right, tonally, until now.
The soundstage is much more dynamic – like the recording engineer intended it to be – things not only more solid, but moving much more fluidly around while maintaining their solidity, keeping the part of one’s brain, that ancient part that keeps an ‘eye’ on things in one’s immediate neighborhood, which was suspicious before about those solid-sounding singers and instruments that were seemingly invisible, at even fuller attention. [uh, sorry about all the commas in that sentence…kind of a parsing nightmare… but onward…]
And we have two more big steps to go until we get to our RMAF Show system:
1. Putting the Jorma Prime cables on the system…
2. Replacing the Coltranes with the Coltrane Supremes.
Holy ‘How am I supposed to get any work done NOW?’ Batman!
Listening room #3 with Audio Note AN/E SEC Silver Signature loudspeakers, Audio Note high-gain Kegon SET amplifiers, Audio Note M8 preamplifier, Audio Note 4.1x Balanced DAC, Audio Note CDT-Three transport, all on a Acoustic Dreams equipment rack.
First we put in the M8 preamplifier into the system with the Lamm ML1.1 amplifiers. But something was wrong, the timbre was messed up to these ears (Neli didn’t hear anything wrong). Well, I’ve never heard Lamm sound off key, so it was kind of a mystery… until we put the Audio Note Kegon amplifiers into the system in place of the Lamm.
Ahhhhhhh……..
For some reason the M8 and ML1.1 just did not work well together. But with the Kegons….
The one thing that Audio Note does better than anyone else seems to be the reproduction of Music – with a capital ‘M’. There is just something ‘right’ about the sound that is quite unique. More on this when we talk about the M10 preamplifier that arrived today – but I think it has to do with some very subtle cues from the music that other equipment seem to obscure a little – cues like very fine gradiations of harmonics,
This system, sorry or glad to say, not sure which – sounded WAY better than the Audio Note systems we have heard at shows – both Kondo and U.K. I guess we are just addicted to what vibration control and fat power cords will do for a system – which both of those camps eschew (though Kondo did use some kind of platforms at CES 2006 – they also used a loudspeaker that just…did … not… work).
Our Kegons are the high-gain Kegons. Our Kegons can drive a rock. The newer low-gain Kegons however have more finesse and micro-dynamics, especially on efficient speakers like the Audio Note speakers.
This system actually had too much bass – to keep these amps on here any longer we would have to move the speakers out from the wall, or reposition them in some fashion.
We also used Nordost cables in this system which caused our system to sound leaner in comparison to one cabled with the Audio Note cables, whcih are very rich, and emotional sounding cables.
So, we didn’t get to a 100% pure Audio Note system. But we got a glimpse of what it would be like. We got a glimpse of our future.
Listening room #3 – The listening couch.
… and we have plans to expand its scope over the course of the next few weeks and months.
Yes, we know that we review something when we get it, saying we will say more when it is broken in, only to pull a Harry Pearson (sorry HP 🙂 ) and never end up getting back to saying anythnig about it. It is not that we don’t have anything to say, but there just really hasn’t been the context – something else is always going on.
Well, we have ideas on how to fix this – so we will have sections in which it makes perfect sense to ‘get back’ to components. Hopefully this will help get me in the head-space required – none of our products here suck, or we wouldn’t carry it (which I think makes us unique, but I digress) – but it still requires some effort to come up with the necessary delicacy to talk about plusses and minuses, and just exactly where something fits into the n-dimensional sonic character space that we call high-end audio reproduction.
Coming up:
* We got the new Sound Lab Ultimate 1 loudspeaker upgrade in today. We will write about the before and after….[we know from other reports on the web that the efficiency is better, but we have heard nada about how the sound has changed – I guess it isn’t important? A big WTF to all those people.]
* We are getting the Audio Note M10 preamplifier, which finally squeeeeeeeked through customs today, in tomorrow. That is going into the Marten Coltrane system, along with the Audio Note Kegons and the Emm Labs CDSD and DCC2 digital equipment on the HRS MXR rack, with Brinkmann’s Balance turntable (with Lamm Lp2 phono preamplifier) heading the show. Anyone else notice that this will take 7 – 8 shelves? And we have 4? Should we add this as a Fundamental Law that the number of shelves will always be exceeded by the number of components?
[The solution is to put the 3-box M10 on the floor on HRS M3 platforms with the Kegons (and Balance powersupply and heater). Can you just see is dancing a jig to get to the turntable through all the cables and powercords and platforms for 5 (five) f-i-v-e components? Too bad my daughter isn’t here… at least SHE took ballet lessons and knows a little about tiptoeing]
* Harmonic Resolution Systems is sending out a MXR equipment rack, in silver paint, to the show for our room (thanks guys!).
* The Marten Coltrane Supreme loudspeakers should be in Denver tomorrow to start their squeeeeeeeeeezing through customs.
* With the Audio Note Kegon amplifiers on the Marten Coltrane speakers, we will move the Lamm ML2.1 amplifiers, which were on the Coltranes (a match made in heaven, and I think most people who visit would agree) to be on the Audio Note AN/E SEC Silver Signature loudspeakers. I am not sure this has ever been tried before – never heard of it anyway – so this should be interesting.
The Acoustic Zen Adagio loudspeakers have been playing 24×7 since we got ’em. Seems like it has been awhile… so we will take a more serious listen – before the Sound Labs take back that system in listening room #2.
There is probably more…. Comcast has been down for 5 out of the last 7 days (they are usually down just a day or two a month). Kind of puts a crimp in our surfing habit – but we have a dial up connection through Earthlink that allows us to do this blog and write and answer emails – to do just about everything except post show reports…..
But before we switch to the RMAF Show channel….
The reason people have so many problems with upgrading their systems in an orderly fashion is due to a lack of discipline…
We are all human… and being responsible for upgrading our systems, our human frailties impact the result.
1. Something is wrong… which component is doing the stinky? You, Sir CD Player, ARE the Weakest Link. [Human managed SA Optimization]
2. Someone else’s system sounds better in some way…. What can we purloin from their system to make ours as good in this way as theirs. Pardon me Sir, can you spare a Pair of 300B tube-based Single-ended Triode monoblock amplifiers? [Human managed Genetic Algorithm]
3. There is a sound that you dream about, a sound that is the ultimate sound. . You know what you want, and you, all the time, search and think about how to get there. Imagine if you will (and we all do), a music that is so pure, it takes your problems and makes mincemeat of them; so intricate and self-consistant it reduces reality to a charactercher of itself; … sound of thunder, speed of lightning, …. welcome to… the ‘Upgrade Zone’. [Goal directed A*Star Optimal Path Searching Algorithm]
Anyway, part of recognizing these approaches for what they are and looking at the correspondingly more disclipined, algorithmic apporaches is to try and prevent us from making as many natual human mistakes when we upgrade our system, to achieve a more gratifying result.
OK. Lots more to say – but for now… Hope you all enjoyed…
