#audioblr

In my experience.

Back last century I and a buddy used to explore audio stores in New England. That included Massachusetts, and Connecticut and Rhode Island. We heard a lot of Stuff. Much of it was what we now call high end. We just thought it was cool stuff. The salespeople were tolerant as in when these kids get money....

In no particular order here are some I would own in the proper circumstances.

Original Klipschorns. Yup the big monster very efficient things from Arkansas. If you have never heard a set well do it! Are these the best, no. But for an experience of dynamics they are almost the best and only need a modest amplifier to drive them. You have never heard a Trumpet in a recording if you haven't listened with a K'horn. Drums hit you in the chest, hard.

The K'horn was in a private home of an acquaintance.

Fulton J modulars. This was in a dealer in Massachusetts who may still be in business. BIG about the size of a large refrigerator. Man tall, feet wide, and deep. They had a large modesty screen over an awkward stack of midrange and tweeter boxes. Fragile tweeters and not tolerant of amplifiers. In the photo below I see two Dynaco 400s (maybe one is a 416) and a Crown DC 300. Big Iron.

I could not remember the music played but the Bass was incredible. Deep and well defined like the bass drum was in the room. My buddy ended up getting the FMI 80 which was here used for a midrange driver. We both decided that "when we get rich..."

The next set was in a dealer in Connecticut near a submarine base. I do remember the music here, it was "Alan Parsons, I Robot". The electronics were a full suite of Audio Research with the SP3 preamp and two D76 tube amplifiers.

What can I say. This made an impression. I am still a fan of ARC (Duh!) and if I had the room I would get a set. (restored, as they do not age well.) I have stated my affection for Magnaplanars here more than once.

Quad 63 electrostatics. beautiful delicate sound with stupid levels of detail. They are also rather fragile. Better than the Quad 57s.

We were looking for Dayton Wrights, but this was a close as we got, but damn. for acoustic guitar and chamber music nothing is better than these. Of course I listen to Rock and full power symphonic music so there you go.

Dahlquist DQ10s in a Dealer I think in Mass, but may have been Rhode Island. These are remarkable and weirdly sound like electrostatics with bass if you have at least 1/2 horsepower of amplifier. More is better.

And the Bass is not that great. You need a big room and a patient partner. They can get louder than an electrostatic, but only using all your amps power.

Double Advent loudspeakers. We owned this! They were a recommended, just below reference set up, as described by the original Absolute Sound Magazine.

We both had a pair of Advents, and when he bought those FMI 80s, we set up his pair with my pair in my place. I had a Sony turntable, a Dynaco PAT5 preamp, and a Dynaco ST400 amplifier. It sounded very good.

This rig was interesting as it sounded fine with every type of music. Not spectacular, but there was nothing wrong at all with any part of it. Kinda weird no?

There were other outings, but not all made an impression like these did.

Much later in life I have heard the Wilson Audio WATT/Puppy in a local dealer in Vancouver. It was probably the room which was 4 hard walls and concrete floor.

It was painfully awful, but I think it was the room, the electronics, and the stupid semi-deaf sales people playing it way too loud for their mark. These do have an excellent high end reputation and I have heard them. I should give them another shot.

I have to mention the stuff I actually have now. I have high standards and have got pretty good at making things. I own a pair of original Advents, and I restored them from being blown and surround rotted. Those are the only commercial product main speakers I own.

I have no photos, but years ago I built a big array electrostatic speaker and there was nothing wrong with the sound. There was everything wrong with the size and hazardous voltages hiding around the back. They had to go away when I became a parent.

I still have my 48" tall monolith towers now part of my AVI surround system. It has 4 x 4" drivers each side with Piezo-ceramic tweeters and 12" woofers biamped. Not shabby at all, but not my serious system.

My serious system had been described a few times. Those speakers are inspired by these, Sonab OA14 from Scandinavia. I had heard these ages ago, and liked them.

By inspired by, I mean mine are not copies, but similar. With the grills on them they do not look like speakers at all. I saw a set of Sonabs for sale years ago. Before I could pounce someone else did. Damn, but wait I can build some and that is what I did.

I looked for and found the violin concerto online. It was a recent recording on the LSO label (London Symphony Orchestra) with Simon Rattle conducting and Veronika Eberle solo violin. (on a Strad of course)

The apple music Classical stream had a nice treat. There was a 27 page "booklet" with the usual blah blah about Beethoven, the concerto and details of the recording. High resolution DSD and all that. Apple claims lossless, but also Dolby Atmos processing so distorted with care and deliberation. I like good liner notes. More should do this.

The LSO will sell you a vinyl of this.

I had been warming the machines up but the wife got into turn it down mode to the point the music I was playing was all but inaudible. so I went to headphones for a bit. She left the room to start dinner, and I turned it up for the concerto.

The orchestra image was rather strange. Conductors and recording engineers can arrange things however they want. At first I thought the channels were reversed, but no the soloist was in the usual place just to the left of the center. The "booklet" showed a funky arrangement of the instruments almost like an in-the-round theater. So many microphones.

Sound quality was good. The musicianship top notch. It was very different than the live concert we had been to last week. All the musical notes were there. Perhaps Sir Rattle fiddled a bit with the "mix".

There was a new aspect for me here. There were three cadenzas that were specifically composed by a third party. Usually they are created by the soloist to show off technique and that sort of thing. Here these were small pieces using several instruments in an obviously modern approach to music. A bit jazzy and a bit movie soundtrack, and of course highly technical for the players. I am not sure about that, but hey these are artists.

I have been at this for a while. I was perusing information on old equipment I considered back in the day, specifically the products by G.A.S. and Mr Bongiorno. He was one of the big old school iron audio designers. One of his contributions was the Dynaco ST400 in part. This path lead to a preamplifier he sold called the Theadra. It was a good one in the mid 1970s. So good it was considered basically the equal of the SOTA ARC SP3a-1. That ARC commands big bucks today.

The thread brought me to an old review by Mr J.G.Holt the original golden ear. He really liked the unit. This is from 1976. Shit I am old, I was there.

There are embedded within the review several tidbits of information which I found a bit shocking. Yes shocking, having to do with moving coil phono cartridges. Here is the first quote:

worst drawbacks of the currently popular (we are tempted to say "faddish," but we won't) moving-coil cartridges is that they require a bootstrap input booster of some kind in order to drive adequately a standard phono-cartridge preamp stage, which means either a transformer (which introduces harmonic, phase, and frequency distortion) or an outrigger "head amplifier" in that part of the system where distortion is most conspicuously audible: Ahead of the phono stage.

Wow. This was early in the high end days, but moving coils date back to the 1950s FYI, so they were not some new revolution back then. The most popular good cartridges were ADC XLMs and the Shure V15 iii. Later of course the fad became a wave. People think nothing of throwing a stage in front of a stage now.

The next huh, did they really say that tidbit, is within praise for a V15III:

The fact that an optimized Shure V15-III spherical can sound as good as any high priced moving coil we have tested will probably not impress readers who are already convinced that moving coils are the only way to go.

Spherical stylus? Shit!

As the designer Mr Bongiorno commented about his favorite MC cartridge:

I do hope you will evaluate the EMT again, this time through Thaedra. Although it is very expensive ($330) and hard to obtain, it is the very finest cartridge available. Incidentally, it has a spherical stylus.

Spherical stylus!! In this era the four channel LP had just been killed, but in that service the Shibata, and microline phono styli were available and in use. 45 kHz frequency response. I am sure nobody today would hold that a spherical phono stylus is a good thing. Generally they cannot track deep detail and soften the sound. This was SOTA in 1976? Yes golden ears can be wrong.

The big heavy ARC CL60 tube amp has been in place for a few weeks now. It is winter here and the weather is cool and may be actually cold soon, as in snow. The extra heat in the living room is appreciated. The beast puts out a lot of heat at idle. Warm glow and all that.

Is it purely accurate? No not really. The Naka-san has that crown here. But she sounds good. I cannot tolerate some tube amps and low end solid state beasts. The SS stuff can be harsh and less than pleasant. That Carver makes a good subwoofer amp in my AV system. Some tubers are so soft and mushy it is like fog and reverb combined in the worst possible way. The ARC is considered analytical for a tuber, she aint. I know what analytical sounds like. I have called it golden light before.

Marginal recordings sound good. Good recordings sound great. Great recordings are eyes wide open impressive. Since she went on line I have had a few moment of "what was that sound" in a recording I have lapped a lot of times.

Yesterday I played the Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions CD. Yes the CD. Apparently there is variability to the CD stampings. ( I think it is a little weird that CDs are stamped out like LPs, weird and cool) I have an OLD original Canadian pressing. It is a good one. It has the silly Audiophile noise in the first track.

I have an LP too, mastered by the same engineer who did the original recordings. I prefer it to the CD. It just gets something better. The ARC is like that. So when I want that effect and it is cool enough in she goes.

I just made a rich chocolate Mousse desert for Xmas dinner. It is rather like that. You cannot do that all the time least of which my waist line would grow to unpleasant proportions. But when the mood and conditions are right.

I think this was another stream of consciousness things.

I am faced with the problem of reality. I just read a message from the tube Guru who thinks the differences I heard with Naka-san were substantially due to the lack of global feedback. He avoids it in his designs. It will mess up the phase relationship from input to output. I have read dozens of arguments about how silly it is to avoid feedback. It is an assumed essential in audio engineering to those that subscribe to that faith. Feedback solves so many problems!

Many of those arguments were on the Audio Science Review website and forums. Recently they praised some new Class D amps as they had a global feedback from the far side of the output filter back to the analog input end. This was to compensate for the weird things speaker impedance would do to the overall frequency response at the output filter. From the far side of an inductor and capacitor filter back to the input. Solving a serious problem the worst possible way? So you have to choose between bad frequency response or kiss correct phase relationships goodbye in Class D amplifiers. Another reason to doubt those little boxes. I am smirking.

To those testing people the truth is in the graphs. Reality is a picture.

To me reality is what I hear.

Ironically the ASR's favorite A/B amp is one that uses what is claimed as Feed Forward. The AHB2 Benchmark. The description of that system is eerily similar to the old QUAD 403 and to the Naka-san. Patents, smatents.

So if the Guru is correct, and I believe he is, I have learned something new, or at least pushed it higher in the decision matrix. Phase coherence sounds different. Very different. My speakers are basically phase coherent and the placement in the room avoids secondary reflections so that coherence gets to the listener.

The clarity I hear may be those damn sound waves arriving in the correct space and time. The room sound on Trinity Sessions was enveloping much more than I remembered. Before I heard it was there. This last time I was in the room. Very spooky.

When I got my tax refund and then an unexpected bonus from my company I was in gotta buy something mode. I spotted several possible targets, all solid state. The basic choice was other more recent examples of basically what the Franken-Amp is, and this one outlier, the Nakamichi. It was interesting to me as it was based on a different design philosophy. The others were just different implementations of the main line approach. Some had big meters!

It was more expensive, but not much more. Actually the same price I paid for the ARC Classic 60. Nelson Pass is an iconoclast and as the song says he "goes his own way". I kinda like that bit. Today he has gone pretty far off the reservation, but you have to respect him.

I ordered a Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" album. It was recorded about 40 years ago. This one is a MOFI repress, used, and seems in good shape.

The album was recorded in a Caribbean island on the side of a volcano. The tape deck was a 24 track Sony digital machine. It was originally released on CD and became Dire Straits' biggest hit.

The album won the Grammy for engineering in 1986. I have two other DS albums, but had never got around to this one. (PS turns out I had, I just lost it in the shelf)

MOFI works to get the best sound out of the best masters and they are pretty good at it. They did this one about 10 years ago for vinyl.

I streamed the album last week and liked the music. I wondered why I had not bought it before. The next step of course was to see what was available. If I can get gourmet issues I do. A local shop had this one. Apparently Mofi has some for sale on its site as of yesterday.

It cost about the same money, but with the exchange rate and no duty it was better.

I unwrapped the thing. It is a 2 x 180 @ 45 skate board trick LP. At least it is labeled as 45 rpm. So annoying when they don't do that.

Of course I wiped it down and played it. Gotta be sure its OK. It was. There are stories about the sessions which are kinda fun. Like the set up for the Guitar amplifier's speaker being accidental and really good for "money for nothing." People quitting and being brought in and some tracks getting lost. Usual Rock and Roll nonsense.

Occasionally something grabs my attention. I was getting familiar with the songs from the streams. I liked the sound. Sting's vocal on "money.." was kinda floating around. It was a bit less resolved than the stream, but not in a bad way.

But on side 4 (double album) the sound of the guitar on "The man's too strong" was really different than the stream. When the side finished I played it again. Then I fired up the stream of the same song. OK I suppose I may be exaggerating a bit, but the LP was far more complex and rich sounding.

This particular track had a ringer guitar player brought in and he used a "Synth Guitar". The sound is crazy, metallic, rich, and solid. In the stream the notes are there, but they do not hit you as hard. Over the whole album this was the most noticeable difference. I cannot tell if it is distortion from the guitar amp or something snythy. It just has very rich harmonics. Did the lossless people clean it up a bit?

This was a digital recording from the start. It was originally released on CD and followed with LPs and Cassettes (oh the 80s). This was the first album to sell more CDs than LPs.

Even though it sold very well the critics initially were rather negative. They wanted more edge or something. The Fans disagreed. So much for experts. Later reviews were better.

Digital aint bad by itself. It only sucks when abused by ham fisted engineers. This was an early DDD recording when that acronym meant as much as AAA does to vinylphiles today. Maybe Micheal Fremer can tell pure analog from digital. He has his preference. Oh and he produced a recent Jazz album on digital. Funny guy.