Venetian Floor 34
(Medium Resolution) CES 2008
Consumer Electronics Show
Las Vegas
January 2008

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The floors were sparsely populated, with only a few rooms in one or two wings of the 3-winged floors. One had to peer down each wing, looking for CES-colored signs sticking out above doorways that were 50 yards or so down the hall. Cisco had a couple of rooms on one of these wings, again far down the hallway, and they had a number of young women carrying signs around the casino telling people where the rooms were. In spite of that, there was hardly any traffic on these two floors, though most rooms up here did seem to have quite a steady stream of visitors.

These two photos try and illustrate just what a supra-normal fantastical view Las Vegas offers at night, even without the glitter of the strip.

I was kind of surprised that this room didn't sound better given the type of sound that people interested in this equipment are going for. Not that it sound awful or anything - it just didn't seem like it was a good match - not impressive, midi- and micro-dynamics both kind of weak.... More refined than sounding, however, than these speakers with Simaudio electronics, which is how we usually hear them.

Most of the associated equipment will contribute a softness to the sound, and the Wilson speakers a forwardness in the midrange and a disconnected bass.

So, after listening to this and that unfamiliar tune [with which I heard no problems except a certain reticence at the crossover point between the midrange and the bass] I was still unable to characterize much about what was happening, sonically, in this system]. Vladimir and Elina were kind enough to put on their Johnny Hartman (with John Coltrane) CD that I was intimately familiar with.

Using the Lamm ML2.1 as a baseline, ....

I was expecting superb control of the dynamics, that the amp would be able to grip the speaker well - like the best amps we have heard - and it did indeed do so, though not conspicuously.

I was expecting superb separation between notes, that the amp would be able to control each note's dynamic envelope well-enough that they did not come out in some kind of soup, and again, the ML3 did not disappoint, and was probably among the best I have heard in this regard. As one can well extrapolate, good separation involves not only disambiguating each note with respect to its location in the soundstage, but dynamically and harmonically as well.

So, OK, the amp performed as one would expect from one of the couple of amps that are the best in the world.

What I didn't expect, and which I was so pleased I got to hear on my very limited time with these amps, was the really exceptional control of the harmonic envelope. This is going to be hard to describe [and even harder for you to read :-)] but I visualized it as each note's dynamic envelope along with its Harmonics as a 3D 'hill'. Some taller, some shorter, some with dips and some not. All kinds of shapes. The line bisecting the hill is the traditional dynamic envelope. Now, imagine harmonics as horizontal colored stripes that create the sides of the hill, like elevation lines, but which are different widths and which can go up and down to other elevations [rise and decay of the HARMONIC].

Using this imagery, the ML3 was able to keep the harmonic stripes from decaying or washing out - it was able to paint them all as they were supposed to be painted. It controlled the harmonics in a way that gave the notes another dimension. A solidity in the 'harmonic domain'.

If nothing else, this CD, including the first track I heard, is very, very harmonically rich. So, during the 4 minutes or so of the song, there was a lot of harmonic information being delivered through the system and it was a real pleasure to hear all the shades of these harmonics, and start to have confidence in the fact that they were not going to be exaggerated nor marginalized.

The bass was detailed and controlled, though this song does not have a wealth of material in the lower octaves, and was about as good as I remember ever hearing it [I usually, however, pay most attention to the voice and melody and their exceptional emotional content].

In general though, this system did not highlight the things it did exceptionally well. In my estimation, that is because much of the associated equipment was somewhat obscuring what the amps were doing [Specifically, the speakers mess up the bass integration and their overall balance is perverted with a tipped up midrange, the platforms and rack dampen micro-dynamics, which is great for systems (especially show systems) that have a tendency to be bright, but this ain't that] In general, we have found that Super Components, like the ML3, will perform amazingly well with whatever you pair it with, but that every time you do an upgrade of something else in the system - you will find out that the Super Component was a heckuva lot better than you had even imagined it could be [kind of like getting two upgrades for the price of one]. System design 'just' becomes a matter of feeding the highest quality signal possible to the Super Component(s).

As I have to say each report, it takes only seconds to hear the faults in a bad system, and years to hear the faults in a great one. I have to say this usually about bad systems because people do not believe that I can tell how bad a bad system sounds so quickly [we all can, just go to Circuit City]. Now I have to apply this statement to a great system - it would take a long, long time to hear and characterize what this amp does really well and potential faults, if any, this amp has. At $139K or so, they are on our list but it will take us awhile to budget for them - and until then we will just have to wonder. Wonder what this song would sound like with the ML3, and what that one would sound like....

As I mentioned in the 'dailies', for me this was a show about two amps: the ML3 and the Audio Note* Kegon Balanced. We will have the Kegon Balanced here, in the near future, and be able to compare and contrast it to the Ongaku, the older high-gain Kegons, and the ML2.1... and someday the ML3. It's All Good as they say.

From the car or bus you may have wondered "Who ARE these people walking or bicycling around?", but the  people I passed in my walks (I walked this path the first three days - the last day my feet told me to take the shuttle) were in very large part friendly and clear-eyed. Yes, there were a few that look like they lost everything in the casinos, perhaps several times - and these few do put a pal over the whole 'Vegas thing for us.

Because the Venetian is so tall, like many buildings on or near the strip, you can see it from the front of the Alexis Park.