Audio Note UK M9 balanced Phono two-box preamplifier with RIAA phono section review, post #86

Wonder how long it will take that volume pot to break in?

 

That volume pot costs GBP200.

The M9 Phono is very time consuming to make and requires a very high degree of skill to put together, it takes about 140 man hours to manufacture, as a result productuctuction output is strictly limited and long delivery time is almost always inevitable.

Haven't heard of productuctuction before. Is it a Danish word?

 

If a thing's worth doing it's worth overdoing. That's my motto.

 

“Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

I like the clean look of the M9 but it's out of my league.

 

Totally out of my league as well to be perfectly honest. But this is like the rare Ferrari or Astin. So few were ever built that almost nobody gets to experience it. I love to look at the beautiful pictures of these things but rarely meet someone that has actually driven one and can tell me what it feels like.

But now we have someone who can tell us first hand what it's like. How cool is that!

 

Very cool!

 

I love it.

 

Wow Steve, what a great opportunity to try it out! I have been really, really impressed with my new IO Gold cartridge and AN-S8 SUT, but to be able to try out a component that is presumably right at the absolute edge - that will be great! I am very curious what sort of improvement it will be over the M6 Phono that you are using.

 

Audionote is one of those companies that attracts a very divided response. Some people adore it, others think it wildly overpriced and coloured. I've owned a fair amount of the stuff....Type E-SPE speakers and the Jinro single-ended amp quite recently. Because I live near the factory and am friends with one of the dealers, I get to hear some of the very pricey stuff.
My personal view is that Audionote is a marketing led company, not an engineering led one; although Andy Groves is an incredibly able designer. A lot of the marketing stuff about special components, seems entirely unsupported by any facts. It's like cables, it seems a matter of personal belief rather than hard reality. Mr Q is a master at presenting his claims, and to be fair, clearly loves music..
As for the pricing.... at the top end,it seems pretty cynical. Some heavy discounting seems to go on behind the scenes. It pays to be a little 'reserved' about the claims of this type of company. Still, some people will own nothing else.
Not me, I sold it. Don' think I would go back, although some of their lower priced stuff is certainly interesting (such as the very nice Oto amp).

 

Wouldn't a marketing led company spend a lot of money - say - to advertise?

 

I think the distinction I was making was between 'engineering' led companies, (would Diavelet be an example?) and firms which are 'faith based'..you either believe in what they say, or you don't. They don't rely on measurements, or even established physics. There are a good few such companies in audio, I've owned some of their products.
For instance, I note you own 'E' speakers; my version, the 'spe' high efficiency version, are described by Audionote as 98db efficient. But Stereophile measured them at 92.5db. Which means you need an amp four times as powerful as Audionotes figures would suggest. In conventional terms, that's highly misleading, but to enthusiasts, it's not terribly relevant.
That's how it is in this hobby. A mass of competing opinions, no way round it really. I can see now that we have become a 'faith based' hobby. So be it.

 

Peter, I can't really disagree with you. I have AN-E HE speakers that are supposed to be 98db efficient and I don't think they are, but I believe they may be if set up in a corner as recommended. I love the AN sound but can see why it is not for everyone. In the end I don't care about marketing or design philosophies (though I do like reading about them)- it's all about the sound. We can disagree about what sound we prefer, but I think we can all agree that when we find it, it makes us happy and if I need to spend more for my sound than someone else- good for them, but I'm happy.

I have to be honest and point out that I don't have factory built AN gear, but those that I have built from kits, so not exactly the same, but they share the same design and most of the AN parts (the speakers are all AN parts) so it has that AN sound but a little lesser quality, but also a lot less money. So I'm not really a member of the AN club but just an adjunct.

 

Correction - it actually costs GBP230 + tax, in other words about GBP290.

This volume pot consists of 42 0.5W Audio Note tantalum resistors at about GBP3.5 each (and 2 1W ones). But is it "right at the absolute edge"? No, it is not. It could have been, had they used the Charcroft / Vishay / Texas Instruments "naked" foil resistors. Those, however cost between GBP8 and GBP50 and are not made by Audio Note.

 

Are you confident that the differences are audible? Some friends and I rigged-up a passive and swapped a basic Alps Blue and a rather expensive attenuator. We couldn't hear any significant difference, although the attenuator would certainly be more durable and have more precise tracking. Something can be technically better, but still sound essentially the same. Even if the attenuator did sound different, it wouldn't follow that it sounded better.
I say that because, on one occasion, I upgraded resistors in my Audionote phonostage using tantilums......and didn't like the result at all. It's all very personal.

 

The AN E (regular version) was measured by Hi-Fi Choice and Hi-Fi Critic by Paul Messenger and Martin Colloms (unlike John Atkinson - Colloms has a degree in engineering and formed the speaker company Monitor Audio and is also an expert witness for Audio in court cases). The measurements came back as 94.5db (AN claimed 94db).

The difference is a simple one - Audio Note provides a real world in room measurement of their speakers (with an S). So 98dB is taken with the speakers (both speakers) in the corners of the room.

Stereophile measures (uselessly I must say) ONE loudspeaker in the middle of a room or outside.

Corner gain adds ~3dB - and the second speaker adds ~3dB. That's 6dB. So AN gets 98dB and Stereophile should get 92dB.

Interestingly enough - JA got a bit snippy with the AN's numbers but when DeVore (an American company) which doesn't remotely meet spec either - nary a mention is given. You can thank me by the way for the Orangutan getting class A not class B because I pointed out to JA that his reviewer bought a $13,000 Class B DeVore over a $3k model they awarded class A (that none of them would buy). I pointed this out and then a few months later - they decided to "upgrade" the classification to class A so as to not make Art look stupid for paying 4 times the price for a worse loudspeaker.

When we talk about measurements or design you have to be careful - what AN provides to readers and the competition -- and what they know are not the same things.

The fact is they sell SET amplifiers - they're not going to win on spec sheets so why bother? It's not faith - it's what can be heard in direct A/B comparisons - and if you wish level matched blind listening sessions.

The technical merits of CD players or speakers can be debated but every major company sells speakers made by an engineer. And they all see it differently. Single Driver, line array, omni-direction, planars, ESLs, hybrids, sub-satelite, wide baffle, narrow baffle, open baffle, active, passive, and within those - each will tout the quality of the materials they chose, plastic, kevlar, Hemp, paper, bextene, diamonds, aluminium, Beryllium.

And they can each post a white paper telling you why they chose what they chose. That's umm - marketing - because all that crap doesn't mean Jack's droppings because if A sounds better than B then all the blather and white papers in the world ain't going to seduce me into buying B just because someone says that a particular graph looks better.

I started out in this hobby ready to buy Bryston/Mark Levinson/Threshold/Krell and speakers from the likes of PMC/B&W/Martin Logan. All this stuff was the king of the measured performance incidentally - some of which can be found in recording studios the world over.

And to be fair - AN themselves often admit that they make comparison and part A sounds a lot better than part B but their measurements don't show any tangible differences. So what can they really do?

If A costs them 10 times more to make and they feel they and their customers can clearly hear it - then you make it. The alternative is to ignore what you hear and just always choose the cheaper part. And that's of course fine IF the competing company charges accordingly - but there are a lot of things out there that cost just as much if not more than Audio Note and use very shockingly cheap parts and sound lousy in comparison.

But unlike most companies you can put them to the test - simply audition the M3 versus the M6 preamp - exact same design - the only thing changed are those illusive parts. They make plenty of power amps and integrated and DACs that have the same design and same values and you can A/B them.

It's important to note that I am not out to convince people on the sound they hear or should hear. But as it comes to design you can generally see a certain pattern throughout their products. Expelling resonances as fast as possible, light damping, no feedback - no making errors and then trying to correct them with various error correcting circuitry etc.

I enjoy Kevin's review - a guy who spent $20kGBP on pro monitor equipment and big fat cables and then brought home a mid level AN system to give it a whirl.

http://www.audioasylum.com/reviews/Other/Audio-Note/Level-3-system/general/345133.html

 

I am not shure what you are saying here. You now seem to be defending Audio Note in using their own, cheaper resistors. In your previous posts you said that AN prices were exorbitant relative to the quality of the product they sell.

I can't argue with a position that changes 180 degrees.

 

Apologies if I wasn't clear, my intention is to raise a general point , the issue arose because of the pictures in this thread. What I am suggesting is that many expensive parts are not necessarily 'better'... and what I also said was that the higher priced Audionote components were, in my opinion, over-priced. That seems to me a reasonable position.
As for the efficiency of the speakers....I know very well that they are nothing like the claimed efficiency because I have genuine 96db speakers and they are at least three db louder for a given input (measured) than the Es. Even in a corner the E's aren't remotely 98db. And I have no reason to doubt John Atkinson's measurements; he has an excellent record on such matters.
As for the more expensive versions of specific components sounding better..that's a matter of personal opinion. No objective evidence is ever offered, just as the claims for special resistors and so on, are rarely backed by any genuine specs. Which is why I spoke of 'faith based' components.
As you mentioned Martin Colloms, I might mention that I have here (on loan) a pair of Thrax Spartacus amps, described by Mr. Colloms as the best amps he had ever heard. I rather like them too, but some of my friends disagree about the sound quality. That's always how it is.....faith based. We have no method of 'settling' the debate, we believe what we believe.

 

Isn’t this measurement usually taken on one speaker on axis at a meter’s distance?

 

Nice. I could use a couple of those.