2008 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest

[Fungi]

As someone(s) said on here once, Diana Krall sounds great on everything, just better on some.

[deepak]

Diana Krall also sounds boring on everything zzzz

[ingwe]

Great photos!

Thanks, ASR, for the report.

-m

[Asr]

Final Scattered Thoughts

Not many speakers at RMAF "disappeared" very well. By this I mean the quality of the musical event to sound like it was in the room, but even more specifically, not sound as if it was coming from a particular point in space (as in the speaker drivers). I listened for this quality on every speaker I listened to - alternately with eyes open looking at the wall (and trying to sense the music coming from between the speakers), and with eyes closed, trying to "see" where the music was located. Speakers that disappeared to me included the Tidal Piano, TAD's mini-monitors in a Bel Canto room, Dynaudio Sapphire, Tyler Acoustics Decade D1, Classic Audio Reproductions T-1, Ascento C8, Kaiser Kawero (with the Tidal Piano disappearing the most). The Monitor Audio RS8 that I heard pre-show at a local dealer also disappeared very well.

I also heard AV123's new massive towers. I forgot to ask for the model name (and forgot to photograph them as well...yes I accept the irresponsibility) but they were damn tall, at least 8 feet, and had a ton of drivers. These were awesome, I played Massive Attack's "Inertia Creeps" on them as well as the same Alison Krauss track as before, and they did both tracks justice. AV123 is local to me but they don't have a showroom, but they did say I could easily take up their 30-day guarantee anytime when I want to try out anything.

I was also specifically interested in Balanced Power Technologies and Silver Circle Audio since I'm planning an eventual power conditioner and my visits to their rooms made my decision more complicated. Dave Stanard (Silver Circle) was a very nice guy and I liked him immediately, and he didn't have a snake-oil type sales pitch in regards to the Juice Box Jr that I asked about (and there was one on display). He was honest and he gave the appropriate amount of technical info that I felt he knew what he was talking about. BPT, on the other hand, was tied up by other people when I went over there so I didn't get a chance to talk to either Chris Hoff or Ryan Scott. I know they have a solid reputation though and both of them are smart guys. So I may end up buying both the Silver Circle Juice Box Jr and the BPT CPC and see which I like better.

I saw two press members from Audiogon that were documenting on videocams and was half-tempted to heckle them about the increased ad-listing fees but decided against it.

I also see I double-posted YG Acoustics in post #38 (oops), so if a moderator could delete the 2nd pic I'd appreciate it. Also two corrections there, the pictured speakers are the YG Acoustics Kipod (and if that could be moderator-edited too, I'd appreciate that also). And their "The best loudspeakers on Earth. Period." ad in Stereophile is actually for the Anat Reference II Studio.

Thx for spritzer's correction on the Oracle CD transport as the front-end for the Von Schweikert VR-9SE. I was annotating my pics so fast the other night, I mistook that source as a turntable (and my closer-up pic clearly shows it's a CD transport).

And thx for all the thanks, I do consider thorough reporting at events like these one of my civic duties. It was all a lot of fun anyway getting to see and hear so much stuff, and meet the companies who attended. Speaking of which, I also have to add that Tyll is one of the greatest guys in all of audio-dom, people like him are few and far between as many of us here know. And I met Ivy and Mike too, both of them were very nice. I hadn't met either before and it seemed like they both knew I was a Head-Fier when I walked in...

[Voltron]

I am curious to hear some TAD speakers with a realistic, achievable system. Their Reference 1 speakers in the Tape Project room at the last Stereophile show in NYC were incredible. The sources and amplification, as you can see in the pic below, were over the top in every way. I really want to hear those monitors now.

[tyrion]

I am curious to hear some TAD speakers with a realistic, achievable system. Their Reference 1 speakers in the Tape Project room at the last Stereophile show in NYC were incredible. The sources and amplification, as you can see in the pic below, were over the top in every way. I really want to hear those monitors now.

I remember that room. It felt like it was 90 degrees in there from those amps. Those speakers retail for $45,000.

[Voltron]

Oops. Maybe the mini-monitors are more attainable?

[Hopstretch]

I also heard AV123's new massive towers. I forgot to ask for the model name (and forgot to photograph them as well...yes I accept the irresponsibility) but they were damn tall, at least 8 feet, and had a ton of drivers. These were awesome, I played Massive Attack's "Inertia Creeps" on them as well as the same Alison Krauss track as before, and they did both tracks justice. AV123 is local to me but they don't have a showroom, but they did say I could easily take up their 30-day guarantee anytime when I want to try out anything.

Those were probably the LS-9s?

AV123 produces some incredible bargains, but they're always all over the place, "introducing" two revolutionary new products for every one they actually ship. Those LS-9s originally sold at $3,995 -- which must be some sort of price/performance record. I think they're $6K now. There's also a more practical line array with six ribbons and eight woofers for less.

[Asr]

Yeah it looks like the speakers at AV123 were the LS9.

[deepak]

Made the corrections. Hope that's right.

[penger]

Nice writeups. Always a great read. Thanks!

[Tyll Hertsens]

Speaking of which, I also have to add that Tyll is one of the greatest guys in all of audio-dom, people like him are few and far between as many of us here know. And I met Ivy and Mike too, both of them were very nice. I hadn't met either before and it seemed like they both knew I was a Head-Fier when I walked in...

Thanks, mang! They 'knew' you because you just radiate headphone enthusiasm!

[Asr]

Some interesting info on PS Audio's new transport & DAC from their latest newsletter:

The new Ultra Series of audio products are getting closer to Beta testing by the day (more on this later in the newsletter) and we are investing in a new state of the art production facility here in Boulder to build the Ultra Series in-house. To provide room for this expansion we've just doubled the size of our warehouse and taken over the adjacent building. We have two engineering teams working on building the next phase of the Ultra Series: the server, touch screen remote, Bridge and ability of the PWT to play 176kHz and 192kHz 24 bit media directly off a DVD file.

Our year-long investment in rebuilding the PS website is ready for its official launch in November (wait till you see what we've done with the website!). I could go on, but I think you get the idea that we're not slowing down at all.

...

RMAF was the first US showing and we setup the system with just these two pieces, a GCA 250 amplifier and the amazing Avalon Indra loudspeakers. The match sounded awesome!

One of the unique things we did in the setup was place the PWT and Ultralink stack about 30 feet away from the amplifier so we could show the pieces off without interrupting people who were listening to them in the next room. To accomplish this, we ran a 50 foot pair of XLR balanced PS audio cables directly out of the Ultralink and into the GCA 250. This worked great because inside the Ultralink is an output stage similar to a power amp. In fact, the power supply of the Ultralink is sufficient to run a 50 watt power amp!

Indeed, the output stage of the Ultralink has four discrete high voltage class-A amplifiers inside that are connected to the four Burr Brown 24 bit DACS in a dual mono balanced configuration. Each of these high voltage class-A discrete amplifiers is capable of driving nearly any cable length presented to it - from ultra-short to ultra-long without any degradation of performance whatsoever.

The system's volume was controlled directly from the Ultralink's included 24 bit DAC volume control, which (as we demonstrated) is sonically transparent and far superior to any preamp one may want to connect. If you're interested in the digital volume control debate and have questions about its resolution there's a great discussion going on right now on our discussion page. Feel free to jump in and read up on this. You'll be hearing plenty more as time goes on (not to make a pun).

...

As you may know, the Ultra Series delivers data in both the standard digital data stream like TOSLINK, or coax, but also I2S. For those unfamiliar with I2S (which stands of Integrated interchip sound), this is the native format that data is moved inside every DAC, transport and all-in-one CD player. It is the best way to move data and uses up to 5 lines of separate clock and data.

Unfortunately, the I2S data is not typically available to other equipment and you are forced to connect them with an outdated and poor performing format developed in 1982 by Sony and Phillips. In fact, the format is called Sony Phillips Digital Interface Format or SPDIF for short. Neither Sony nor Phillips are high-end audio companies and so this convenient yet flawed method of transporting all the clocks and music through one simple RCA cable has plagued high-end audio with jitter and other nasty artifacts for years.

Think of it this way. Inside every digital audio product everything runs perfectly well using I2S. Since the I2S format requires multiple lines of data (as few as 3 but we use 5), it was much easier to combine all these data lines into a single one (SPDIF) for connection between products. But it's not a great solution for jitter and high-end audio quality.

To help with the jitter and fix this SPDIF problem, we used to build jitter reducers that we placed between the transport and DAC like the Digital Lens. This made things much better but didn't fix the problem. More recently, DAC manufacturers (including PS Audio) have been using a better approach; internal upsamplers to lower the jitter. The side benefit was better sound through upsampling.

The good and bad news of these upsamplers is that while they lower jitter and improve sonics, they do so by manipulating the data in a negative way. If you could have your cake and eat it too, you'd want to have a jitter free way to transport the data and perform no data manipulation.

The best way to have everything you want is to never go through the SPDIF interface at all - hence the inclusion on all PS Ultra Series products of the far superior I2S connection between equipment. And that brings us back to using no upsampling in the Ultralink.

Sure, the Ultralink is one of but a small handful of DACS that provides every upsample frequency used: 88.2kHz, 96kHz, 176.4kHz, 192kHz but we are also perhaps the only manufacturer that offers native sample rate as well. This means we can bypass the upsample chip altogether when we use I2S since we no longer need it for jitter reduction. The results, when using the PWT and Ultralin together in native are quite startling.

And, as I mentioned in the beginning of the newsletter, both the Ultralink and PWT will be capable of playing native high resolution audio like DVD-A and the new Reference Recording formats at 176.4kHz directly. Now that's going to be hot!