Review: EAR Acute CD player

[aerius]

The EAR Acute CDP

Or, how does one decribe the goodness of an Ansel Adams photograph? Is it the technical mastery? Ansel Adams was afterall a master with his darkroom work and the technical aspects of his pictures, the exposure, contrast, detail, sharpness, tone, and so forth are outstanding and beyond reproach. But there's a lot more to his photos than that, the composition and how he captures a scene, the artistic aspect combined with the technical mastery is what makes them truly great. There's a lot of things which can't be described with words, but if you see the photos you instantly know that it's something special.

And that's the problem I have when trying to describe the sounds of the Acute, I could go on about the soundstage, detail, textures and all that other stuff and have a 2 page review typed up in an hour...which upon reading tells very little about the player and its sound (my first couple drafts ended up that way). It glosses over the emotional aspect, the Acute has a way of connecting to the soul of the music in a way which I've heard only a handful of times, there's a been a few times where I've found myself laughing and going "damn, this is fucking ridiculous" because listening to music should not be this much fun, at least, not with CDs. It's happened several times with vinyl but only once with CDs, and that was with the Simaudio Andromeda.

To start things off, the Acute is not perfect, it's not dead even top to bottom like the Andromeda, if you want a player where the details, soundstage, forwardness, etc. are all perfectly even from the lowest bass to the highs you can forget the Acute and buy a Capitole, Andromeda, or other CDP where this is true. The midrange is where the Acute is world class and will run with anything else I've heard, but the bass & to a lesser extent the treble don't have the same goodness though this can be mitigated to a large degree with the right tubes. Which is not to say the bass is bad by any means, it isn't, with the stock tubes I'd place it at around the same or slightly behind the Audio Aero Capitole, with everything else being better than the AA.

Compared to the Capitole the bass seems a bit slower, on the other hand it's got more weight to it. Whether this is good or bad depends on the music, with thinner sounding CDs it works out nicely in filling in the bottom end, with quite a bit of my music where the bass has already being EQ'd and fattened up, or with albums which are already a bit too warm & mushy it ends up being detrimental to the sound. For example, it works great with Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes album, but muddles up The Beekeeper even more than it already is. Does it sound bad? No, but it sounds worse than the neutral straight through presentation of the Capitole.

The next issue has to do with the transition from bass to midrange, and this was probably my largest issue with the Acute with the stock tubes. The midrange as I mentioned above is damn freakin' good, it's fast, it's lively, the tone is vivid & dead on, and everything sounds very right and real. The problem here is when you have an instrument such as a piano where the range goes all the way from the bass into the midrange, there's a discontinuity where the notes lose some of their goodness as they go down the scale which leads to some unusual effects. The notes lose some of their tonal completeness and texture, some of the low-level details aren't quite there.

At this point I ask you to refer to Darth Nut's Omega II review and his explanation of depth cues, specifically, #2 & #3. In the midrange the Acute has the full range of both whereas the bass doesn't. The loss of some of the depth cues leads to the imaging & placement losing a degree of accuracy down low, low piano notes are no longer "locked" in place in the soundfield as well as they are in the midrange and can appear to originate from slightly nearer or further away from where I expect them to. I probably wouldn't notice this at all if the notes in the midrange weren't so well placed & locked down. The same is true of the treble, though as mentioned it's not as obvious. If on a scale of 1 to 5 I give the bass problem a 5, the treble issue is only a 1 or 2. Hard to notice unless I'm really listening for it, and only on my RS-1s or a good speaker system.

On the subject of soundstage, or headstage with 'phones, this is where the Acute is something special, and again this has to do with the depth cues presented in Darth Nut's review. Since the Acute is a very detailed & resolving source and it also has a very broad tonal gamut, it's very good at satisfying all four of the headstage depth cues referenced in his review. It has a broad range to work from in each of the four areas, and put together it can create the image of a very deep soundstage with precise placement of the instruments & sounds in the soundfield.

For example, take the Cowboy Junkies' first two albums, Whites off Earth Now! and The Trinity Session, both were recorded with the same Calrec Ambisonics microphone straight to a DAT deck. Both are excellent quality recordings but there's a very important difference between them, space & distance; the former was recorded in a garage while the other was in a good sized church. With the Acute this is very apparent, "Whites" has more detail & more of everything on all the instruments, especially noticeable on the cymbals and electric bass. All instruments are more dynamic, more complete, and so forth, which means they are closer to the microphone, and the same is also true of the echoes and reverberations. This, the shorter echo time, and the ability to hear where the echoes bounce from allow an accurate outline of the acoustic space to be drawn.

Because of this it's very easy to visualize the size of the acoustic space (small), as well as the fact that the microphone wasn't centered and neither was the band, plus the band members moved around both during and between songs. The character of the reverb changes which means the band members moved and the sound isn't being soaked up & reflected in the same way. I can't spot this effect at all with my Denon, it's noticeable to some extent with the Capitole and fairly obvious with the Acute. In between some songs they do reposition the amps & speaker cabs, this is pretty easy to spot with decent CD players and once again, easiest to do so with the Acute.

With width & height, yeah, it'll do that too, plenty wide but not unnaturally so as with a K701 which stretches out everything widthwise. If the recording calls for wide, it'll do wide, if it's a flat suckass recording with everything in the centre, that's how it'll sound. Same thing with height, it is what the recording is. Separation is much the same, you get what's on the recording. On the Cowboy Junkies albums where everything is in the same acoustic space, the instruments will overlap because that's what happens in real life. In real life, instruments do not get their own separate spheres of sound, that's an artifact of close-mic'ing & studio editing, and if you play an album which was recorded & mixed that way then you'll get that super separate & spotlit effect from the Acute.

Moving on to detail & resolution. If you're looking for detail & resolution above all else, skip the Acute and get yourself a topline Wadia, Simaudio or dCS, the Acute won't yank quite as much detail off a CD as those CD players. Then again those CDPs cost at least twice as much as the Acute so you get what you pay for. The Acute is by no means a slouch in this department, it'll beat out the Capitole and give the Wadia 861SE a damn good run for the money. The Wadia will edge it out but it's close, close enough that I sure as hell wouldn't want to blind test a detail-fest between the two.

Which brings me to dynamics and the giggle factor. It's a tube output player but you wouldn't know it from the dynamics, this sucker can slam dance. One of the local audio guys is also a recording engineer and he made a pretty interesting test CD. It contains several takes of the same drum kit playing the same tune, but from varying distances, one of the takes was from about 5' in front of the drums. Which is to say it's painfully LOUD and impactful since it's completely uncompressed (recorded in 24/96, then mixed down to 16/44), it puts the drum track on the Chesky demo CD to shame. Provided the rest of the system is up to scratch the Acute will pass it though unmolested. This was so fucking cool that it left me with a case of the giggles, or maybe I just had too many beers that afternoon.

On the subject of dynamics, there's something which Allen Wright of Vacuum State refers to as "Downward Dynamic Range" (DDR), which is the ability to preserve low level details in the presence of a large dynamic signal. Let's say for instance we have a solo violin playing, we can hear all the overtones of the string & the violin's body and all that other stuff. If, say, the timpani kicks in, we should still be able to hear all those details if we listen closely enough. On a system with poor DDR, all those low level details are gone as soon as the timpani come in, we can't hear them no matter how carefully we listen.

As an example, load up Dvorak's Slavonic Dances Op.46 No.1 in C Major: Presto, and follow the various instruments through the quiet & loud sections. The instruments which are playing in the quiet sections should still sound complete in tone & detail when the rest of the orchestra kicks in, and with the Acute they do. The instruments can get overwhelmed & drowned out, but if you use your brain to filter out the orchestra and zero in on the instruments, everything is still there. Lesser players such as my Denon fail this test, those same instruments become washed out & lacking in detail when the orchestra joins in for the loud sections parts. The Wadia 861SE & Capitole are the only two good CDPs I had a chance to compare with the Acute with respect to DDR, I think the Wadia might again be a bit better with DDR, with both holding a noticeable edge over the Capitole.

Which finally brings me to the curse of tube gear, tube rolling & the search for "perfection". As I've mentioned repeatedly my largest complaint with the Acute is the bass and the discontinuity of the bass to midrange transistion. I only have a few Mullard, Tungsram, and Valvo 6DJ8/6922 tubes around, and none of the exotic Siemens/Telefunken CCa's or any other unobtanium like that. So far my best results have been with the Mullard E88CC and the Russian 6N23P, the latter giving the most even overall sound at the expense of some midrange magic. With this tube I can spot the bass/midrange discontinuity only on a good day with the right music, but there's something missing and it's not as emotionally involving of an experience. Tungsrams are kinda like that but worse, since they start killing details, making things flat and annoying me. The Mullard E88CC, damn, now we're talking. Adds more goodness all around but doesn't erase the discontinuity as well as the 6N23P, so the bass to midrange hiccup can still be noticed on most days with some of my music. It also rolls off the treble a tad which is great with my RS-1's.

But none of that really matters, hearing the Acute was and is an experience much like the one where I first heard Biggie's RS-1 rig 6 or 7 years ago. There's a rightness to it where all the little flaws and so forth don't fucking matter, it just connects with your emotions and wires you into the music in a way that's hard to explain. You don't listen & hear, you feel & experience, you end your listening sessions going "damn...damn that was intense" and then you wanna go back and do it again. I should also note that it looks like it's worth 1/5 of what it costs & the remote's even worse, but I don't care. The sound's what counts and to me only the Simaudio Andromeda's better, but it ain't got a built in pre-amp with a remote volume control.

To sum it up, it ain't for everyone but it's great for me. Detail freaks can look elsewhere as can those who like the Benchmark DAC1 sound, there are better choices for those people. For those who like Grados, this is your CD player, go rob a bank to buy one if you have to.

[pabbi1]

Very nice... once I clear up $6k, that is a possibility. What else in this range did you consider, other than the mentioned Capitole?

[Pars]

Nice review. I'd like to hear a Capitole and an Andromeda.

[GPH]

Very well written review, thumbs up. If you ever bring the player to a Toronto meet, perhaps I'd consider making the trip.

[Augsburger]

Very nice review Aerious, I would like to A/B the Capitole and the EAR Acute sometime.

[aardvark baguette]

Outstanding review.

I really wish this had a digital input.

[Torpedo]

Aerius, you need to get some CCa tubes, either Siemens or Telefunken. Be patient and spot them from a reliable seller. They might get that bass right while keeping the midrange rightness you're loving so much. You might also be surprised for the improved detail over the Mullards/russian tubes and the dynamic slam. IMO that player deserves those tubes.

If you cannot find them, then try Siemens or Teles E88CC istead. If you still cannot spot any, then JJ goldpins or Jan Philips can be a decent quite complete alternative.

Thanks for the review

[aerius]

Very nice... once I clear up $6k, that is a possibility. What else in this range did you consider, other than the mentioned Capitole?

Let's see, the Audio Aero Prima CDP, Prima DAC, Capitole & Capitole SE, and Prestige. From Simaudio the CD5.3, Supernova, and Andromeda. From Class

[Blackmore]

What I must say? Thank you for your great review, but on the other hand, I "hate" you...

As for the tubes, get E88CC Philips SQ gold pins Holland made and you are done...

For those who like Grados, this is your CD player, go rob a bank to buy one if you have to.

[HiWire]

Great review.

[recstar24]

I'm also thinking about changing the output transformers, I don't need a 5V output so I can use a transformer with a larger step-down ratio, that way I can keep the volume pot cranked up higher and it might take care of the bass issue as well. I'll probably get around to that after I finish designing & building a couple more tube amps for my Grados.

Ummm...aren't those transformers supposed to be hand wound by Tim, and world renowned for their performance? That is what I gathered in what made the hp4 so special, as well as other Ear products.

[HiWire]

Hey - the display looks very similar to the one in my Arcam FMJ CD36. They must have used the same part. The Arcam CD36 and CD192 also use a Wolfson DAC...

Where did you get the test unit from, and did you end up buying it, aerius?

[tkam]

The Ear Acute is essentially a highly modded Arcam player. I forget which one but I believe the transport and digital section are pretty much the stock Arcam parts. Maybe some mods to that but the output stage is all Ear.

[HiWire]

That makes sense. The magic is in the tubes.

[tkam]

Actually I'd give the output transformers more credit than the tubes.

[recstar24]

Actually I'd give the output transformers more credit than the tubes.

I concur