Paul and I will be there, our first RMAF and we're looking forward to meeting some of the people we share with via the internet and email.
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Don't worry Dan, you'll be represented.
Just Fedex me two key lime pies and I'll share them around!!!
Ralph,
If you can tweak that remote so it operates the TriPlanar, I'm in!
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Dan,
I'm holding the Andalusians out as an incentive for Larry to visit! (Nudge...)
That LP's too rare to risk bringing to a show, and ours is a first pressing. (Maybe the only pressing?!) Not bad for $3, eh?
Thom,
Thanks for the tips on how to make the most of our show time. Very helpful.
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Suggestion to all attending Cello's welcome gathering, save your name tag and wear it the next day. I know we'll all have show name tags, but the sight of a different one lets you know that the wearer is probably another A'goner.
HI HO! HI HO!
IT'S OFF TO PACK I GO!
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It's unfortunate that for the most part, systems with low noise floors don't get to strut their stuff at shows because of this. Subtlety, to a large extent is lost. That's always been our fear, and somewhat explains why we've never gone to a show. Aside from the unavoidable noise pollution, the overworked hotel electrical circuits won't help such systems either. But we'll crash Larry's bash, drop in unannounced on all our favorite exhibitors, annoy Thom by bringing 52 Baroque LP's that need a super low noise floor to appreciate and generally be nuisances. Should be a blast! |
Wow, lots of stuff here. Thanks all for your ideas.
Ralph,
I'm 100% in agreement that a well matched and set up TriPlanar will outperform a well matched and set up Schroeder, including the Reference and certainly a Model Two. A TP on Win's table would provide arm stability and adjustability to match the table's speed stability and apparently silent noise floor. That'd be quite a treat, and was the whole point of my comment that his table deserved a top flight arm (and cartridge). I didn't name names to avoid diverting the discussion into a tonearm war, let's hope we don't go there.
Stringreen,
No argument about warps and their sonic effects, depending on the arm, but the speed variations I'm talking about are in time with the music (stylus drag induced), not in time with platter rotation (warp induced, possibly). No reason one couldn't use a ring clamp on a Saskia. I had one on my Teres and it was a big benefit.
Terry,
Rock (or any artificially amplified and mixed music) is much less transparent than top quality recordings of acoustic instruments. The kinds of time errors I'm referring to would be inaudible on most rock recordings, in even the best systems. (They're much too fine to be measured by any strobe either, so don't ask me to measure them.)
The most revealing LP's of all (to our ears) are original/authentic instrument recordings, such as those recorded by Christopher Hogwood and his Academy of Ancient Music for L'oiseau Lyre (Decca recordings, pressed by Philips in the Netherlands).
It takes a system with exceptional clarity, low distortion and low time domain errors to play these LP's without making them sound like fingernails on blackboards. Many people hear that and assume the fault lies with the instruments or the records. They're wrong. The fault invariably lies with the reproducing system. In a really good system, this kind of music is simply amazing to hear, but it's not easy. It took us 3-4 years to work our setup to the point where such LP's were even listenable.
Most people don't listen to this I know. But there's no tougher test for a system that I'm aware of.
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Too busy catching up at work for a full report. Quick impressions...
A huge thank you from Paul and me to Larry and Steve for the A'gon receptions at "Garcia's". Friday night was great, Saturday night was better! I got to meet many A'goners for the first time. I didn’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve!
BEST COMPONENTS
Win's (Mosin's) Saskia turntable. WOW! I expected a lot and it's much better. We brought an LP specifically chosen to reveal certain shortcomings which we'd predicted. The Saskia proved us wrong by playing it beautifully. Macrodynamic pace and microdynamic timbre were both rock-steady through transients of every description, the best speed performance of any table I've heard. Win's beauty deserves a better arm and cartridge than it had, nothing but the best in fact. My vote for Best Component in Show. I'd only want to hear it in a quiet environment with top class companions before saying it's completely worth the rather impressive asking price.
Reinhardt Thoress' 300B mono amps (in the Highwater Sound room). New to me, but they made extraordinary music.
Odeon Speakers (being driven by the above amps), a completely involving musical performance from very small floorstanders. Proof again, if it were needed, that efficient, easy to drive speakers and a great low powered amp are the key to clarity and musical honesty.
Audio Kharma speakers (here and there). If only they did bass, they do everything else so well.
BEST ROOMS
Highwater Sound (room 1116), with the Thoress amps, Odeon speakers plus Thomas's TW-Acustic Raven and four tonearm/cartridge combos. Fully integrated sound, slightly softer than a Kharma or a screen but not so much that we objected, and fully engaging on each of our three visits. A room worth coming back to. Paul's vote for Best Room in Show.
Oswaldsmille Audio (room 464), with Win's table, Schroeder Model 2 + Soundsmith Voice (this table deserves much better), a little Tectron amp and the only large horn speakers Paul and I have ever been able to tolerate. Not only did we tolerate, we stayed for nearly two hours, more time than we spent in any other room.
INTERESTING STUFF
Nordost Quantum QX2 and QX4 power circuit treatments/conditioners/thingies. We're still puzzling out how they work, but work they do.
MISSING STUFF
Wish Coincident speakers had been there. Something I haven't heard but want to.
OTHER STUFF
Room after room that sounded boring, wretched or downright painful. Paul's long time fantasy of buying a certain speaker was shattered: we heard it in three rooms, ran screaming from all three. Somebody must enjoy them.
BIGGEST/SADDEST MYSTERY
I know show conditions are tough, but why would a premier speaker manufacturer whose products I know are good, plus a premier electronics manufacturer whose products have impressed me in both my system and others, showcase their elite models using a mid-market CD player. I suppose some other arrangement must have fallen through, but they should have begged, borrowed, bought or stolen one of the umpteen top shelf digital players floating around the hotel. As it was, they spent a fortune on the largest ballroom in the show to demonstrate the ability of superb electronics and speakers to reveal the inadequacies of a third rate CDP. High hopes going in, very sad going out (about 30 seconds later).
MOST FRIGHTENING
Frighteningly expensive speakers that looked like robots on LSD, and sang like them too.
MOST FUN
Meeting so many of my friends, dinner with Tim (Piedpiper), watching Paul get schnockered at Tri Mai's free single malt reception (now that's a class act), seeing Chris Brady's new tonearm and hearing his enthusiastic explanation of some of its features, watching Thom and DocSavage not panic on Thursday night when he realized the phono stage they'd just delivered was in fact a line stage and he couldn't play anything but a 60hz hum, learning that Vacman, Dave Slagle and another guy we met are near neighbors so we can trade visits, discovering there was a Starbucks in the lobby so I didn't have to drink the so-called coffee in the restaurant at breakfast, sleeping in on a weekday, chatting with other audio geeks while waiting for the ever stalled elevators, etc........
Great time! Thanks to all who make it possible.
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Hi John, Great question. How were you able to separate which components contributed to or detracted from the wonderful sound in that room? Separating which component is contributing what in an unfamiliar system is indeed difficult, often impossible. No argument there. That said, there are certain types of sonic damage that only a turntable (or tape deck) can produce. These are in the domain of “temporal correctness”, as Palasr put it just above. Pitch accuracy and stability on held notes is a function of platter rotational speed. Nothing else in an audio system damages pitch like a platter that can’t maintain speed accuracy and stability. The same is true of the harmonic relationships produced by natural instruments. LP’s can be chosen to test this, and I brought one such with us - specifically to test Win’s table. No TT is perfect of course, but the Saskia came notably closer in this regard than any table we’ve heard. Except for the Saskia, every table we heard at RMAF exhibited audible errors in this area, some worse than others of course. (Dan_Ed joked in an email yesterday that he’s surprised we liked anything!) We walked out of several rooms just because we heard the table speed wavering, and that included tables costing north of $20K. Prime example: any table that uses a rubber(y) drive belt will be speed inaccurate by definition, and the effect has always been audible to us in any system. Even the excellent, three-motor TW-Acoustic Raven suffers from this, though it’s better than most rubber belt drives and the slight softness of the speakers in that room helped mask it. The HRX in the Soundsmith room was worse. Hope that’s enough examples, I don’t want to trash anybody’s favorite table. I have listened to Schroder arms and the Voice cartridge in several highly revealing systems. In all of these systems, the Schroder arms and the Voice cartridge didn’t appear to be mediocre but rather clearly outperformed the previous arms and cartridges. It wasn’t even close. I believe the Schroder arm is nothing but the best. And while the Voice is not the best cartridge I have ever listened to, cartridges that bettered it carried a much higher price tag. The Voice at its current price seems to be a steal. When I said Winn’s table deserves top class components I meant it literally and without regard to price. Win was using Jonathon's Schroeder Model Two. Like you, I believe that arm is the best in its price class, but that doesn’t make it top class or “nothing but the best”, as you put it. Frank himself wouldn’t claim that or he’d never sell a Reference. As for the Voice, we may have different sonic priorities. |
Quiddity,
We've gotten virtually all our (hundreds) of L'oiseau Lyre LP's off ebay. They're readily available from sellers in the US and Europe. Intercontinental postage can be a killer, but at least these LP's are almost invariably in perfect condition (since you and I may be the only two humans who actually play them!).
Speaking of counter-tenors, among our other most-difficult-to-reproduce LP's are Harmonia Mundi titles featuring Alfred Deller doubled by a recorder, especially one recorded in an echo-ey, stone space. Most systems (including ours during nearly three years of trying) couldn't avoid mushing the pure and similar but slightly time- and timbre-differentiated tones into an inharmonious hash. Frightful and sometimes literally painful. It's only in the last year that our system's been able to reproduce that LP with real clarity and enjoyment.
I used to carry it when visiting other systems, but I got thrown out of the room too often. Again, it wasn't so much the fault of the music as the inability of the system.
Jonathon,
My apologies for mis-remembering your tonearm, which was half the basis for my comment that Win's table deserved top flight companions. So many rooms, so much gear...
FWIW, I'll stand by that comment relative to the cartidge. Win might remember the first thing I said after we'd listened for a bit, "You've proved once again that a great table (and arm) can do amazing things for a mediocre cartridge."
I can only imagine how your room would have sounded with a cartridge having real speed, clarity and neutrality. Of course if you'd done that I might still be sitting in Denver! :-)
Win,
Just reporting what we heard, good and bad, though not naming many names in the latter case unless required when discussing the good. Keep on trying. You've produced the first rim driven table that works for our ears and priorities, and it does so brilliantly. I was sure that Vivaldi LP would expose a weak spot based on the emails you and I traded several months ago, and I was thrilled to be proven dead wrong.
Doug
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Sonofjim,
You understand the economics behind making a cutting edge, top class product for a very limited market, so calling the price "ridiculous" wasn't quite fair. How about, "unfortunate"?
An entry level BMW wasn't a relevant comparison of course. That product contains little cutting edge technology and it enjoys substantial, worldwide sales volumes over which tooling costs are defrayed; rather like a VPI table but on a vaster scale since, unlike turntables, nearly every household owns a car. For a meaningful car analogy, consider the Bugatti Veyron or a Formula One race car. Like the Saskia, these products involve original technological development costs apportioned across tiny production runs. Also like the Saskia, the average person will never own one. C'est la vie...
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Robdoorack,
Interesting stuff, but not necessarily conclusive of anything. Read the posts by Teres and Thom Mackris just above (well, some of Thom's anyway!). Depending on the time span over which "speed" is measured, the effects of stylus drag may produce no measured difference at all, yet may still be audible.
Consider this analogy:
A. You decide to time me running laps around a track, but the seat you chose to observe from can only see the start/finish line. It has no view of what's in between.
B. You observe that I pass the start/finish line precisely once each minute, so you conclude (correctly, from your perspective) that I'm travelling at a steady 4 minutes/mile clip (assuming a 1/4 mile track).
C. What you don't know, because your chosen vantage point doesn't let you see it, is that half the circumference of the track is actually a foot deep pool of water. This slows me down to 8 minutes/mile speed, but I make it up by blazing through the dry half of the circuit at 2 minutes/mile speed.
D. Your limited resolution of measurement (you can only see and measure in whole laps) leads you to the false conclusion that I'm running at a steady pace. The reality is that my speed is varying all over the place. Only the long term average is steady.
E. A turntable with a motor/drive system that allows deceleration due to drag, but then re-accelerates to faster than average speed when the drag is removed, could easily maintain a perfect AVERAGE speed of 33 1/3 rpm, while producing audible or even horrible sonic speed changes that a once-per-revolution measurement would never detect. A longer period of measurement would be proportionately less likely to detect them.
So, the experiment quoted was vaguely interesting, but proves virtually nothing. The human ear is vastly more capable of detecting short term speed changes than the crude experiment you described.
Doug
P.S. If anyone ever observes me running 4 minute miles, please let me know!
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