AXPONA Highlights / Lowlights (mainly speakers and amplifiers)

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by avanti1960, Apr 25, 2015.

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  1. bhazen

    bhazen I Am The Walrus

    Location:
    Deepest suburbia
    I didn't mean to disparage or discount avanti1960's observations. I need to get to one of these things to experience for myself.

    There are a lot of different roads to Damascus.
     
  2. kevinsinnott

    kevinsinnott Forum Coffeeologist

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    For what it's worth, I noticed some difficulties in several rooms due to their acoustics and the additional air-conditioning noise. I even joked about it with one of the exhibitors, referring to the Westin room treatment, which meant the vinyl headboard to a bed which had been removed. At least it gave me hope for my system, which has always been in a smaller-than-ideal room.
     
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  3. Metralla

    Metralla Joined Jan 13, 2002

    Location:
    San Jose, CA
    You used the words "almost omnipresent" - I have been to many shows (CES, CAS, Munich) and I simply don't agree. I am sure that some systems have that glare, that spotlight on the upper midrange, pushed forward by the high volume some rooms are cranked to, exacerbated by the dismal hotel room acoustics - but it's not the norm, in my somewhat limited experience.
     
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  4. Erik Tracy

    Erik Tracy Meet me at the Green Dragon for an ale

    Location:
    San Diego, CA, USA
    They could be behind because of a halt to production to fix an issue with parts.

    From another forum:
     
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  5. avanti1960

    avanti1960 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago metro, USA
    Blade 2's which were launched in NY, 2014.
     
  6. avanti1960

    avanti1960 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago metro, USA
    Thank you David for your comments and efforts at the show. We all know there are many variables that can play into how a system sounds in any given setting.
    The music that was playing was an orchestral piece, and the dynamics were very nice. The presentation was smooth.
    But since my expectations were sky high after reading so many positives about Audio Note components and speakers, I mean everyone seems to love this new audiophile brand, and the name has acquired arguably as much cache' as any new arrival in the market in years- I had to call the sound I was hearing from those speakers The biggest disappointment at the show.
    With all due respect and sincerity, no offense whatsoever.
    They reminded me of the Klipsch heritage series. Geared toward the "natural rhythm and flow" type of preference. So while some may love this sound, and many do, it is not what I prefer.
    As for having an acquired preference to sound that is "high end glare", and therefore the letdown by contrast, I don't think this is the case.
    I have zero tolerance for glare and know it when I hear it. I have called out modern components that do have glare- namely D&li speakers, R**a speakers, and Rog*# Au%@o hybrid amplifiers.
    At one end you have glare (hyper detail?) and the other end you have rhythm and flow / warm and smooth. My preference lies somewhere in between, no more no less.
     
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  7. Re: Difference of opinion on the Audio Note Speakers.

    Different strokes for different Folks. I finally came to accept a few years back that not everybody liked the same thing I did, and I came to realize that I don't even think people hear the same things - between hearing loss, sinusitus, background, personal preferences, mood, Atmosphere (hot, cold, humidity, relaxed environment room, a tense one, music, etc etc etc)

    You like what you like, and there's no need to get defensive about it.

    Viva La Difference!
     
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  8. Henry Love

    Henry Love Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicagoland
    I really enjoyed the Rossi Lio integrated amp with the Harbeth HL5's.
     
  9. David Cope

    David Cope Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gales Ferry, CT
    I'm perplexed. Are you referring to Audio Note when you say "new audiophile company?" The best capsule history I could lay hands on quickly appears in an intro to a product review Jack Roberts wrote for DaGoGo:
    "Hiroyasu Kondo started Audio Note in Japan in 1974. Peter Qvortrup began to work with Hiroyasu Kondo in 1979. By the mid eighties, Peter was making Audio Note much more accessible to the western world. Then in the late 90s, it all fell apart between them, and ever since Peter’s company and Audio Note Japan, or as it came to be called Kondo, have been two totally different companies."

    So, overall, Audio Note is over 40, and Audio Note UK has been operating separately with its own designs for about 20 years. The original DAC5, for example, came about in 1997.

    Perhaps we have widely differing views on what 'new' is, too.
     
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  10. beowulf

    beowulf Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chula Vista, CA
    The guys over at Decware have reported the same. The Super HL5 plus paired with Vinnie Rossi were one of the best rooms there regardless of price. According to them, they pretty much stole the show in terms of both sound performance and value. Another show stealer was Volti Audio and Border Patrol, but that was an expensive kit in comparison.
     
  11. beowulf

    beowulf Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chula Vista, CA
    I think it may be due to a lot of hype surrounding the AN speakers, especially on this particular forum as we have our host, a couple of dealers, a reviewer (or two) and some very passionate owners as well that voice about them often and for myself I have set seriously high expectations on them as well. But sometimes when we do actually hear a piece of kit for ourselves it just doesn't click and we're left thinking to ourselves "WTF?" and can't figure out where all the hoopla stems from. It's happened to me on a few occasions as well.
     
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  12. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    You can't please all he people all of the time as they say Dave. You catch a room on any given recording, at any given time - if you hear a very bright room and then an AN room it will sound - err - well not as bright. So you sit there for half hour or so to let the ears adjust but how many people come into your room and actually spend 45 minutes and request to hear their own music or a variety of recordings - at a show you're running around trying to hear and check off as many rooms as is humanly possible and if the guy is playing a darkish recording or a bright recording then poof XYZ is bright or dark. If you were playing Noisia "Split the Atom" that Peter seems to utterly love his reaction would probably be entirely opposite.

    I read the commentary and remember a guy who posted a blog about the Audio Note K/Spe which he called bright and thin - too much upper midrange lowere treble (so there) and I actually went to his house to listen to his AN K/Spe - at that time I owned the same speaker and we both bought them from Soundhounds. So I went and two other guys were there and we listened against a Gershman Acoustics X1 Sub 1. This is something like $14000 and umm includes a sub. The room was a BIG open plan living room 20 by 25 or something in a big house on the water. The K was placed 7 feet into the room and probably 8 feet from a side wall - directly beside the Gershamns. The amplifiers were utterly unlistenable Odyssey Stratos high negative feedback bright as all get out amplifiers. I told him before he bought them - smallish room - put them in a corner or near the walls. Nope - the speaker sounded bright as hell - A Sonic Impact sounded a lot better ($30 class T amplifier of 5 watts).

    The problem for you Dave is that from what I can tell you play music that you actually like and the sound quality of the album is a distant second consideration. But most rooms I go into do not do that - some have what appears to be about 20 albums and they tend to be variations on a "Stereophile Test recording" and one room that played the same LP over and over and over - every time I went by it was the same singer. I can't imagine that that is good for the LP but there you have it.

    How many times do you hear Hotel California and Diana Krall - I'd probably like Krall a lot more if it were not for the fact that every third room plays it or Patricia Barber - both are generally quite well recorded "if simple to reproduce reasonably well."

    I don't envy you your job Dave because there is absolutely no way you can find a piece of music that every single person who walks through the door is going to like - and then have your system present the given piece of music that meet's someone's heightened expectations. I suppose you could play "Keith Don't Go" on endless repeat because it seems one of the flavours of the month and it does have lower treble upper mids - but 8 straight hours for three days - even you would be out buying a gun if you did that :biglaugh:

    Lastly, I hated Audio Note the first time I heard them. The thing is most places have several speakers and the product that is the biggest standout (you note glare) but also "slam" can draw the most attention. No wonder each rooms seems to be trying to "out slam" the guy in the next room. I can't tell you how many show reports that love your room will say something a long the lines of "And Audio Note was a nice respite from the noise" of other rooms. I have read and written reviews of Audio Note and the thing is I have read polar opposite commentary over the years. I have heard polar opposite sound from them - a pretty decent sign of contrast ability is the fact that one comment can be "small vague soundstage to "panoramic" soundstage to Peter Bruninger comparing them to his MBL's for filling the room ability. They get described as dark or veiled to transparent and lean from open to cupped, to too much bass to too little. Hi-Fi Choice way back said completely opposite things about the speaker in the same review and that was Paul Messenger - that made me chuckle.

    Wes Philips of Stereophile then owner of big slam Dynaudio speaker wrote Ongaku Means Ecstasy which is probably the most over the top praise of a room that I have ever read from that magazine.
    http://www.stereophile.com/ces2009/ongaku_means_ecstasy/index.html

    At the end of the day the AN speakers just aren't going to sound like MOST metal dome tweeters - and thank the Spaghetti Monster we "have graduated from that type of "overly grainy, shrill artifice that passes for reproduced" sound a long time ago." :goodie:
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2015
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  13. David Cope

    David Cope Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gales Ferry, CT
    Yes, I did, based on 36 years in the audio industry, and on having exhibited at nearly every show in North America in the last 13 years, (excepting the last several years of Vegas which we decided was a complete waste of time, money and energy for us), and more importantly, based on daily exposure to live, unamplified music.
     
  14. David Cope

    David Cope Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gales Ferry, CT
    One last stab at making sense of this. Did you, by any chance, come in Thursday morning around 11 with Gary from. Border Patrol? Was the music field drums and a boy's choir?

    If so, I get it. At that point I was adjusting speaker position for bass and that piece, while a bit thick, helped, with it's very dynamic field drums.
    After that, I listenened to other things and decided that the drapes, draped table, banquet chairs and carpet, plus 6-10 bodies, was going to be somewhat opaque and made cable changes to offset that. Up until that change, I would agree with your assessment. After, I can't see it.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2015
  15. kevinsinnott

    kevinsinnott Forum Coffeeologist

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    I enjoyed your post, Richard. I will say my own observations were the rooms tended to be small but well isolated. There were some larger rooms, but the ability to hear without crosstalk was not a problem anywhere I traveled.
     
  16. motorcitydave

    motorcitydave Enlightened Rogue In Memoriam

    Location:
    Las Vegas, NV, USA
    I dunno about that. The JC1 amps jumped up from $6000 a pair to $9000. $9000 is not chicken feed. But if you wanna compare to Accuphase, Luxman, the big mono McIntosh (actually Mc is cheaper than Parasound in stereo form) units, it's a pretty good deal. However, I would take those 3 brands in a heartbeat over Parasound.
     
  17. avanti1960

    avanti1960 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago metro, USA
    Duly corrected, although they are new on my radar, you can't argue with history. Does seem like a recent marketing surge however.
     
  18. avanti1960

    avanti1960 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago metro, USA
    no sir, i was there on friday, probably around noon or so.
     
  19. avanti1960

    avanti1960 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Chicago metro, USA
    you audio note guys remind me of a car dealer I went to many years ago- a salesman tried very diligently to get me to buy a car that i was never going to buy (for a number of reasons). one of them happened to be the color of the car- which happened to be green. he said something like "the color? so what. how many times do you notice the color? when you're on the inside driving, you don't even know what color the car is!" and then i said that even the dashboard was a greenish gray. "no it isn't that's the tint from the windows".
    no matter how you slice it, the AN speakers were on the "polite" side of the fence. the tweed jacket, red leather chair in the study, maybe even sporting a monocle on a chain and a pipe, NOS Mullard kind of polite.
    while it would not be fair to call them (after one listening) over priced, overly hyped high-brow status symbols without substance, for me they may as well be.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2015
  20. utahusker

    utahusker Senior Member

    I see no reason to apologize for an opinion that wasn't derogatory. Just not your cuppa.
     
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  21. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    Right? Everybody doesn't like every brand. It doesn't mean they have bad ears or the equipment wasn't set up right.
     
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  22. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    With the way Audio Note is being described I think I'd really like it. :)

    One of these days I'll get to an audio show where Audio Note is being demoed and I'll get to find out.
     
  23. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    Ham Sandwhich

    Dave Cope seems to lean more to classical in his play mix - so next time you are at a show request this CD to be played to very high room shaking volume levels (let Dave put some noise cancelling headphones on first) and then any notion of laid back, warm or polite will fly out the window - you will A) be impressed by its ability to hit huge bass swings with no audible distortion and you will wonder why anyone says they need more than 8 watts. I heard this CD with the M6 and Jinro Sochu and Empress monoblocks on J speakers here in Hong Kong and it pretty darn fun watching the scotch glasses in the cabinets move.
     
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  24. robertawillisjr

    robertawillisjr Music Lover

    Location:
    Hampton, VA
    Anyone get to the Zu room?
     
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  25. jh901

    jh901 Forum Resident

    Location:
    PARRISH FL USA
    Were there any YG Acoustics speakers demo'd?
     
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