Audio Federation - high-end audio blog

February 13, 2015February 13, 2015 by Michael

Neil Young is our most famous champion

Neil Young is our most famous champion; so audiophiles… don’t you eff with him.

In the New York Post there was a recent article (yes, I know, it is the NYP, but I think they are representative of the hordes who we do expect to eventually join our community, albeit perhaps as causal imbibers as opposed to addicts like the rest of us)

Engineers at Neil Young’s company admit doubts on music player

This is typical Luddite fodder. First declare Neil as the Audiophile’s champion, then have what he champions, and how he champions it, appear to be ridiculed by people who are close to him, work for him or who are members of the Audiophile community itself.

They even poo poo 4K video in this article, also as ‘too advanced’ for real people to ever care about [I’ve had a large 4K monitor on my desk for a decade, and of course the size and resolution does not give me a competitive advantage :-)]

This article takes a ‘high-resolution is worthless’ position.

They interview Chesky, who explains what improvements high-res can bring [presumably on devices that can handle the higher bandwidth. Like Neil Young’s Pono]. Yay David!

They interview Lukasz Fikus, digital audio designer at Lampizator [a relatively new and relatively unknown, but rising, brand. Their room at THE SHOW Las Vegas 2014 sounded decent] , who explains “the difference is so miniscule that it’s not even worth talking about”. Not… worth.. talking… about… Well, I guess we better close down the blog, since that is ALL we talk about. Perhaps someone who thinks these differences are so minuscule does not a great digital audio designer make? I don’t know.

Hey, everybody has their favorite approach to digital audio technology.

Audio Note likes Red Book just fine. They do well with it 🙂 [We are certainly enjoying the poop out of their very expensive 16-bit CDT-5 transport and DAC5 Signature]

EMM Labs like extremely high resolution, and they do well themselves. But, if I remember correctly, feel that most players out there that support the high-res formats do not have the horsepower [powerful enough DSP chip and support structures] to properly handle the higher bandwidth required.

The real situation is that most players that say they support high-resolution, like 24×192 etc, are typically better built than those that do not. They care about catering to the audiophile community, unlike that vast majority of everyday consumer electronics out there. They are making a least a small nod in the direction of people who think the quality of the sound MATTERS.

And so the Pono, by supporting higher resolution formats, is saying that they care about the sound, unlike the other mainstream digital audio players out there.

And, let’s face it, it is a mathematical certainty that higher res sounds better than low resolution…. All Else Being Equal. And the vast majority of people can perceive higher resolution quite easily [both audio and video]. And they really like it.

All Else Being Equal.

Of course, if you have to remaster to bring the media to the higher res format – well, mastering often has a larger, more beneficial, effect on quality than resolution. So does upgrading your speakers or headphones. Or cables. Or power supply. Or power supply or circuit architecture. Etc.

So higher resolution isn’t the ONLY way to improve playback sound. I am sure the Pono does other things to improve sound quality as well. Just as I am sure one could find ‘engineers’ who question what capacitors are used, and the thickness and width of the traces used. And whether they are curved or rectilinear …

—–

Neil was on Fallon a few night ago.

His approach was to say that the Pono [has a higher quality sound that] is for ‘music lovers’ but not everybody is a music lover; some people like to listen to music in the background.

🙂

Them’s fighting words…

Told you he was our champion…:-)

in Sounding Off 0 comments

February 9, 2015 by Michael

When you absolutely positively need more rack space

[As I was just getting over the CES cold I caught a worse 24 Hour Fitness cold. Now that I can stand up without coughing, it is time to move more things up from downstairs…:-)]

We wanted to put a turntable on this system – ostensibly to test it out. We didn’t want to move any of the components off the main HRS MXR rack there because we have a big demo tomorrow and everything is nicely warmed and settled.

So.. what to do. What to Do.

Inserting the HRS SXR rack in front like this works great. A little unsightly…. perhaps. But we can get to the preamp controls just fine [if we reach], and we do not need access to the DAC and Preamp power supply below on the lower shelves, so… it works!

Its a wonderful day in the neighborhood – about 65 degrees outside here in the Mountains in mid-February.

We have a lot to say about this Audio Note-fronted Emm Labs MTRX amp and Acapella Atlas system – about just what goes into a system sound that one will never forget … but give us a few days…

January 24, 2015 by Michael

Some semblance of normality

The shop is back to halfway operational now… finally … after CES 2015. And after both of us getting sick…. *cough* *cough cough* *SNEEZE!* … and now mostly recovered.

Since we took the HRS SXR rack to CES, and there was nothing sitting between the massive EMM Labs MTRX amps all of a sudden… we took then opportunity to move the larger HRS MXR rack up front.

This gives us 4 shelves instead of the 3 we have on our SXR.

Room for… the famous 2-box M9 Phono audio Note pre-amplifier. The Audio Note CDT-Five transport. And the Audio Note DAC 5 Signature DAC.

So… level Five, one step below the top-of-the-line Audio Note into the killer EMM Labs MTRX 750 watt drives-the-poop-out-the-speakers amp into the Acapella Atlas hyperspherical-horn speakers.

So, now, everybody expects me to write about how it sounds. Neli wants me to tell everybody about what it sounds like.

You know, this thing we do in high-end audio… where we change something in the hifi system and the sound changes and we evaluate the differences, hopefully enjoying the differences…?

We do this a lot. Most of you do this a lot.

The sound after we change something – it does not have to be all that much better. Just different. It is quite entertaining for it to be just different.

It can be… well, let’s face it: it is ALWAYS thrilling when the change makes the sound way better.

But it is also ALWAYS entertaining when the change is just a change.

And this change for the sake of change is what drives a large percentage of the industry, especially the used marketplace.

And it provides for seemingly endless fun here at Audio Federation as well.

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

Changing RCA interconnects out for XLR (or visa-versa).

Maybe the component likes XLR better?

Maybe one component handles ground differently than the other?

Maybe the XLR part of the circuit is not broken in yet?

Maybe the better connectors on one versus the other is making all the difference?

Maybe that extra 3dB of the XLR is doing some good?

Perhaps the RCA is better shielded and the XLR is getting too close to a transformer?

Maybe it is better to put the superior interconnect on the Source as opposed to the Amplifier?

….

Or maybe not.

Let’s try it and see!

Sometime I will try and write an exhaustive list of these things to play with and try in our systems.

[But for now… for this post… today… Sorry, I just couldn’t bring myself to write another description of yet another awesome sound of this what is becoming a very good-sounding system. Hope you enjoyed this non-post :-)].

in Acapella / Audio Note / Emm Labs 0 comments

January 20, 2015 by Michael

CES 2015 High-end Audio Show Report wrap-up

The best way to view the CES 2015 High-end Audio Show Report is by using the CES 2015 Show Report index. You can find a link to this index, on most pages, in the sidebar there ===> near the top of the page and high-lit in, currently, ‘orange’.

177 rooms. 2500+ photos.

With the end of THE SHOW, held at the Flamingo Hotel, this is the smallest show, OVERALL, we have seen in a long time. We saw 194 rooms, combined between the two shows, in 2013, and 244 in 2009, only a year after the crash. It was even bigger in 2007, and before then, but I do not have precise numbers.

[Have to admit it was convenient / time-saving / warmer to not have to walk the half-hour walk back and forth between the two shows everyday. Still… a loss. The featured photo shows the ad for the show that replaced THE SHOW Las Vegas… THE SHOW NEWPORT].

For our part we brought out-performing Acapella Cellini speakers ($50K+) [and a kick-ass Audio Note front end :-)].

The first and last days were really, really slow. The middle two days were much busier, and high-quality focused listeners [as opposed to looky-loos going quickly from room to room with little listening and little understanding what they are seeing.]

As a listener and show photographer, I like the slower days 🙂 As an exhibitor… our room with Acapella was positioned well-enough, and with an attractive setup that stands out [aka brilliant red horn speakers], that traffic remained good all 4 days. I didn’t hear anyone else complaining either, so perhaps, even on the slow days, show goers were intent on listening and exhibitors had someone to listen to the music they were playing.

When they were playing music, that is…

What seemed to be a new trend this year, many rooms were either playing music incredibly softly [merely background music], or not at all.

This is, after all, a show for people to make business contacts right? Trade-only? Held in the middle of the week?

But the reality has been that hard-core audiophiles have always ‘snuck in’ and these people played an important part of the economic viability of CES for high-end audio exhibitors. But these people now have other, more welcoming, shows to attend.

Between CES not really caring about the High Performance Audio part of the show [the CES staff are nice, and to a degree, helpful, but they are still largely ignorant about everything except for our existence], and high-end audio caring less and less about CES… [most forums do not even have a CES thread for the shows anymore].

See the trend here?

Sad because traditionally CES had the best sound of all the shows, at least at the ultra high end part of the hobby.

This year? Not so much.

This is in large part why I have decided to punt on describing how things sounded.

————————————

When I take photos, many exhibitors point out what is new this year.

This is nice, and I make sure to take a few extra photos of the new things.

But, unlike the ‘Press’, I want photos of everything. For many people, YOUR WHOLE BRAND is new. To others, those old pieces of gear that came out last year? They are the ones at their local dealers, or on the used market, that they have been looking at actually buying.

I know Arnie tried this at Audiogon with limited success, but…

EXHIBITORS, feel free to POST YOUR MARKETING BLURB, describing your gear, in the comments section for your room.

I know, Stereophile and HiFi+, etc do this for you sometimes [if you had something new this year, and they visited your room]. But if you want to get the word out about your other gear, and in your own words… here is your chance.

in CES 2015 0 comments

January 15, 2015 by Michael

The Sands / Venetian Ballrooms: CES 2015

The featured photo is a shot from near one of the doorways. This is about 1% of what was here and about 5% of the Health and Fitness in Technology section of the show that I was interested in in the context of Yet Another Job I have been working with for a year or two now.

It says Venetian Ballrooms but it is upstairs from the Sands ballroom and outside the building it says ‘Sands’, so…. well, if one tries to make sense of things in a casino, one is going to get a headache.

Several years ago, we would have turned right here to get to the additional High Performance Audio exhibits that did not fit in the tower or wanted large rooms. This hallway is a very long hallway with masses of people going back and forth all day long, with occasional reductions in density like this that allowed me to hold the camera up high and take a photograph.

Here are a couple of ‘hearing aid’ booths – and there were several others. The line between in-ear headphones and ‘ear phones’ for the hearing impaired is narrowing and they all talk about audio performance being great. For hearing impaired audiophiles, and we all may be members of this community at some point, I can’t but think this is great news.

I think Star Sound builds OEM speakers…

Aurender / TVLogic was also upstairs in the Venetian Towers and we covered them as part of the main show report. Not sure if it was a good decision on their part to be down here as well… or not.

There may have been other high-end audio-related booths here, but I covered [walked. lots of walking] about a third of this ballroom, out to Robotics and 3D printing, and didn’t see any others.

in CES 2015 0 comments

January 15, 2015January 15, 2015 by Michael

Report report: High-end Audio, JV and CES 2015

Not too much to say in our traditional response to JV’s $20K+ high-end audio show report this CES.

Agree that nothing stood out this year as being great and, although I thought that by the end of the show our room eeked out a distinct advantage, other rooms no doubt also got better by the end of the show.

We thank JV for his kind words about our (and Acapella’s) room, and he is quite right that there was “a bit of room-induced boom on standup bass” [and other kinds of bass too :-)]. This was fixed the second night after hours at the show by, surprisingly, not by pulling the speakers out an inch or two further from the front wall, but by inserting a AC power device in front of the front end, which removed the excessive bass-room interactions and made the sound more linear top to bottom as well. This not-in-production and perhaps never will be in production box belies our experiences to this point that all power-altering boxes are evil [still think that pulling the speakers forward a little would have worked too, but I could be wrong. And Neli and Hermann were concerned that it would put the listeners that much closer to the speakers in what is already a rather tight cramped space there].

In general I think JV is being too kind to many of the rooms he writes about this year. Even our perennial favorites: Lamm and Acoustic Zen, had their issues this year [in my opinion. Neli may disagree… but she would be wrong :-)]. For that matter, the rooms this year were such that the EMM Labs on the severely problematic Sony speakers was one of the better sounds at the show [the EMM Labs MTRX amps making the Sony sound way better than it should], and, similarly, the rooms with the smaller Magico S1 and S2 speakers constantly had good sound [the speaker’s even-handedness and innate forgiveness helping otherwise merely competitive systems rise above their competition].

His report omits at least two rooms that I would like to mention and that were up there with all the other contenders he writes about:

The KONDO and Kaiser Acoustics room

Very musical and extraordinarily engaging, although they were playing, while I was here, music too simple for me to get a good handle on what the overall extent of the system’s capabilities here was.

The Orca Design, Bohmer Audio, Scaena, Silversmith room

The sound here was much more even top-to-bottom and permitted a wider sweet spot than I have experienced previously with Scaena, and along with all the positives: great dynamics and quick responsiveness, I thought this room did very well this year [I visited this room about 2 hours before closing on the last day].

I think these were the only two rooms that were overlooked that immediately came to mind in what, for TAS-constrained JV reports lately, is a wide-ranging show report.

in CES 2015 1 comments

January 14, 2015January 15, 2015 by Michael

IsoMike, EMM Labs, Merging Technologies: CES 2015

The IsoMike, EMM Labs, Merging Technologies room at CES 2015. 22 photos.

Instead of the hoped-for Wilson Alexia speakers they had the old standby Sony speakers here.

We did get a preview LOOK at the new EMM Labs SuperDAC [see photos below].

[This room is obviously out of timeline order, as here we are back on floor 30. I waited until I had time for breaks before I allowed myself a visit here, and this actually took two visits over the course of the show, the last visit only an hour or so before the end of the show].

in CES 2015 0 comments

January 14, 2015 by Michael

Lamm Industries, EMM Labs, Graham Engineering, Kubala-Sosna, SORAsound, TechDAS, Wilson Audio: CES 2015

The Lamm Industries, EMM Labs, Graham Engineering, Kubala-Sosna, SORAsound, TechDAS, Wilson Audio room at CES 2015. 28 photos.

in CES 2015 0 comments

January 14, 2015 by Michael

Lamm Industries, Kubala-Sosna, Emm Labs, TechDAS, Verity: CES 2015

The Lamm Industries, Kubala-Sosna, Emm Labs, TechDAS, Verity room at CES 2015. 44 photos.

This is the only room where I forgot to take a photo of the room sign. So, instead, here is a photo of what it looked like out looking the windows in the Lamm room.

The ‘Million Dollar System’ did not materialize as the big Verity speakers did not make it to the show. So we got to hear the smaller Verity Lohengrin II speakers. The speakers were bi-amped with the Lamm ML3 on the bottom (the larger amp put on the woofers) and the ML2.2 on the top. [! :-)]