[Stereophile has graciously offered our readers a $5 off deal on tickets to the HE 2006 show. To save the 5 bucks, go to Home Entertainment 2006 to register and enter the super secret passcode “audiofederation” when you sign up for tickets online. ]
Well, it looks like Audio Federation is scheduled to attend the Stereophile Show in L.A. in June. [yes, now that we’ve started to speak of ourselves in the third person – we KNOW we’ve made the big time 🙂 ]
“I hope it doesn’t suck.”
OK, I just had to get that out of the way. 🙂
Stereophile shows are pretty consistant from one to the other. So I think we all know what to expect. [Details? You want details? OK. As a consumer oriented show there are the local dealers who bring in their best stuff and from what I can tell make it sound way better than it does in their showrooms, but that few dealers have either the product lines or the skill or the patience to make these systems really sound great. The manufacturers and distributors who do attend tend to not bring their top-of-the-line stuff because it is a consumer show, and not all consumers are millionaires – which is really kind of too bad from our perspective and we wish the govt. would get back to work on the economy and remedy this, toot sweet].
And as for locale, nothing against L.A. per se, but NYC and San Francisco, previous venues for HE shows, certainly have more glam and more culture from this small town boy’s perspective.
We are still working on the structure of the reports, trying to get to that Ultimate Format. Both the Montreal style and the CES style have some things in their favor. As is typical in my experience, the solution probably involves even more work: perhaps a long flowing textual report [like putting the Montreal Commentaries into one long commnetary, and commenting on every room, and having bookmarkable links to each rooms commentary in this big, long report – kind of like CES but with fewer photos] along with a room by room photo montage, each room on a separate webpage, like Montreal’s room-by-room photo pages.
Hmmmm… was that confusing?
Anyway, nothing is set in bits and bytes until the day after the show, so…. so you’ll have to stay clicked in to see what really happens! [And if you have an opinion about all this one way or the other, or perhaps for something complety different, please let us know].
Hey, Dr. John is supposed to play there! Let’s see, uploading the days’s best photos or seeing Dr. John play? Uh oh.
Though, you know, I haven’t bought a Dr. John album for over 20 years…wonder what he sounds like these days? OK, bye for now, its off to Amazon and who knows where to see what he is up to these last few decades….
… “but we’re all better now”.
Our host, lunarpgaes.com, whom we are very happy with, has been upgrading their data center and I guess there were a few gliches. Everything seems to be up and running now just fine.
I am just so happy that it is they who are handling the server management, … we are busy enough without that burden.
Patience they say, is its own reward.
Well… this is a nice reward. 🙂
Some photos…
Initial impressions?
Today the Prime replaced the Stealth INDRA interconnects in order to hear just what the interconnects can do – this is the way that we often audition interconnects. All interconnects up to this point have taken a back seat to the INDRA…
Until now.
A funny thing happens with audio gear. Like the Audio Note CDT-3, and now these cables (and, of course, the INDRA themselves), and to some degree all gear, what arrives as an inanimate, cold, dead, technological curiosity comes alive and gets this glow around it as one learns to appreciate more and more what the piece does – how it is enriching one’s life and those who hear it. It goes from being valuable in a monetary sense to valuable in a life-sustaining sense. It is food, that tastes goooooood.
OK. Initial impressions in comparion to the INDRA:
PROS: More authority, lots more separation, lots more presence, deeper soundstage, a little more bass, more suspense, more resolution.
Also… it has more beauty – the inherent beauty of the music comes through better. This is not richness of tone or dynamics or anything like that. Some of this has to do with the musical rightness of riffs playing off of and against and into another. Not too clear right now what else is happening – hopefully will get more insight as time goes on here.
CONS: None [Yeah. Right. This is Audio Federation. The picky people. There are always cons.] except the midrange being a tiny bit leaner than the INDRA, and similarly the midrange is experiencing a little more compression as well.
Funny, we were told to expect these two symptoms as part of the cable settling-in process [ Even funnier, we NEVER believe stuff like this that people tell us, about how something is going to sound. But sometimes, they are right. Too cloudy here – it is snowing – to see if there is a blue moon outside or not.] Well, experiencing them we are. These anomalies are also supposed to go away in a few hours to a day or so – and they are diminishing after only two hours…
TO BE CONTINUED…
Speaking of tomorrow, the plan is that the Jorma Prime speaker cables will replace the Jorma No .1 speaker cables and the system will be almost completly Jorma Prime.
‘Till then, then.
Funny, no matter where I am in life, no matter how well things are working or how well things are going, …or not – there is always these times spent waiting for something to arrive in the mail.
There is the ‘Waiting around for the FedEX package during the 10:30am or so time frame when they usually deliver things so I can sign it’ Blues.
There is the ‘Trying to wake up in time to make the 9:30am ETA of one particular UPS guy in order to intercept him BEFORE he tosses the package up to the front door from what sounds like 10 feet away’ Blues
Then there is the ‘It didn’t come today, what a waste of my time, what a waste of a life sitting around waiting for this thing” crescendo followed by the ‘Going to do it all again, tomorrow, anyway, cause it will be so great when it gets here’ Country Western top 10 jingle.
Top Secret ASCII-encoded message dated: 4/20/2006
Under no circumstances may this information get into the hands of hotels or nervous exhibitors.
It is only through the utmost care and stealth, and the slience of you, the reader, can the Mixhibitors live on to create uber systems out of what they consider to be the crude parodies found in rooms at high-end audio shows throughout the world.
As a reminder: The Mixibitors are a group of fanatical audiophiles who live to form sudden, temporary teams very late at night at various shows in order to, with the utmost care and subterfuge, move components from one exhibitor’s room to another’s (usually large) room, mixing and matching the very best components to create Ulimate Systems and, thereby, the Ultimate Listening Experiences. Finally, in the wee hours, they must, with their last ounces of strength, return everything to their original rooms and systems, verifying that everything works as well as it did the previous day, as well as appears the same (this year, they almost ran out of the synthetic dust they use to sprinkle over everything to replace the dust that was displaced during all the moving – it was a dusty show).
Exact numbers of the Mixibitor membership are only available on a need to know basis. And since nobody does need to know this, nobody knows just how many there are in the world. There have been cases when groups of them, unbeknownst to each other, have hit a show at the same time. In cases like this there have been only minor dissagreements about what uber systems to build – it being obvious to everyone but the exhibitors themselves – and it has often been observed that more substance abuse than normal occurs under these circumstances.
This show was a nice change for Mixibitors, as there were not an excessive number of widely unbalanced systems in Montreal. But Mixibitors will be Mixibitors, so the itinerary went like this:
The big WAVACs from the big Verity Lohengrin room went down to the big Avalon Eidolon Diamond room, replacing the VTL amps. To replace the WAVACs there was a fight to see if it would be the new Berning monoblocks or the Nagra solid-state amps. As usual when there is a tie like this in the voting, the lightest component wins – so Berning it was. Not to take this lying down, the Nagra contingent moved the Nagra amps down to drive the gigantic Pierre Gabriel speakers.
And, well, that was it! It only took about 20 minutes for these senior system-swapping experts – with a lot of milling around of the Mixibitors who had nothing to lug from one system to another. And the results, they say, were mixed, but if it is one thing they tell me over and over – if you don’t pay the price of having to move these hernia-indiucing works of art – you don’t get to hear, or hear about, how they sound.
Hey, I just wonder how they don’t get caught lugging someone elses mega-buck equipment to and fro late at night. Or maybe it is when they do get caught that they decide to recruit the catchers as new members. Guess I might just start strolling shows late at night, seeing if *I* can be the one to catch them in the act and get to hear these Ultimate Systems.
Well, it looks like Robert Levi over at Positive Feedback gave Jorma Design’s Prime, their statement cables, a rave review. [But he didn’t put the Jorma Design No. 1 cable in with the group of the best of the $2000 to $4000 cable group. For shame. It belongs near, if not at, the top of that list. Actually, the order in that list is a little strange… Oh, but on to the real topic of this entry:]
We sell the Jorma Prime cables, but they are new this year and we cannot talk about them until we really understand what they do.
We heard these at CES in the Swedish Statement room (on the Marten Design Coltrane Supreme speakers) and we certainly liked the sound of that system – so we know they don’t totally suck (note: the term ‘suck’ is not audiophile approved).
But to understand the sound of the cables themselves we would have to listen to them here at Audio Federation.
And we are! I mean will. They are supposed to be here today, or hopefully tomorrow. Exact same cables and everything. So, we will hear what we will hear.
As always with these Expensive things, one always hopes that they live up to their price (or really, one hopes on the one hand and fears on the other 🙂 )
Let’s see, can we afford to love them, given that we are now getting the Coltrane Supreme loudspeaker?
No.
Do we (i.e. me, Neli ain’t here) have the will power to not open the box when they come?
To not put them on the main system, replacing the Stealth INDRA interconnect and Jorma Design No. 1 speaker cables?
Uh oh.
… for a few days.
But don’t panic!
Acttually, she has a few stops to make so it will be more like 10 days.
Uh oh. I can sense panicking out there. Or is that me? Definitely me, but maybe you too.
She will try to answer her phone calls as best as she can.
No, you are absolutely right, nothing gets done around here when she is gone – but email if you can or please leave a detailed message and we’ll see what we can do.
Please, stay in your seat and remain calm. Waving of arms and screaming will not help. Really.
Nope, no matter how many times I repeat the above sentence it.. is… not… working….
Seriously, with two people, we can do twice as much as most boutique dealerships that have only one person. But we are used to it, and it is hard to scale back down to a normal dealership workload when one of us is absent for a little while.
Let’s see.
We added a bunch of Kharma photos to the Kharma pages:
Kharma Mini Exquisite photos
Are there too many similar pictures? After getting rid of about 95% of the photos of these speakers that were just not ‘right’, these last few I just can’t decide between.
We added a bunch of pictures of the Brinkmann LaGrange turntable with 12″ arm:
and still need to add a few picturing its dissasembly.
Also added some pictures of the L2, ML1.1 and ML2.1:
Lamm L2
Again, some of the photos are probably too similar to each other – but we will remedy this over time 🙂
Rearranged the Audio Aero, Marten Design and HRS photo galleries to make them easier to access (and more visually attractive) and to prepare for adding galleries featuring others of their product line (in the very near future 🙂 )
Like all photo galleries, they will be updated with photos over the months and years that are ‘better’ and/or more ‘artsy’ and/or more ‘sexy’.
The Hifi’ing magazine has also eveolved into its next stage. The pictures still need ALT text for people who can’t see the pictorial index, but it is pretty close to being finished – for the near term anyway. It allows indexing into this Blog both by Article Category and now by Major Article. And, of course, this Blog allows browsing of the articles in Cronological order. And as a last restort there is always Google. 🙂
The new look of the HiFi’ing Magazine
Kharma Mini Exquisites still breaking in….
Audio Federation is raising the bar once again.
We are excited to announce our partnership with Marten Design and Sound Advice in bringing this technological tour-de-force to the Americas. We are now and will be the exclusive U.S. dealer and showroom for Marten’s statement speaker: the Coltrane Supreme. We are also the Coltrane Supreme dealer for our friends up in Canada for the forseeable future.
Marten products have always had industry-leading price/performance, and it is just mind-boggling contemplating the performance of these cost-no-object loudspeakers.
Ladies and Gentlemen, you all know how picky we are.
Picky, picky, picky.
So it was with great pleasure, and a little surprise, that after extensive consideration and evaluation of any and all speakers worldwide, we found that the next giant step forward, the state-of-the-art both technologically and musically, in the ongoing evolution of high-fidelity speakers was right here with one of the product lines we already carry.
The Coltrane Supremes list for $250,000.00 and should be here, ready for auditions in the July-August time-frame and we plan on exhibiting with them at RMAF, the 2006 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, this October in Denver.
Perhaps it was best chanted by John Coltrane, and later Santana / McLaughlin (my personal favorite), the Dead, and many, many others…
“…
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme
…”
