We put the Audio Note Gaku-On amps on the Marten Coltrane Supremes. And we had a few extra Nordost ODIN cables we put on the amps [I did not trust myself to put them on the pre-amp at the same time]. With the Emm Labs XDS1 CD/SACD player there was an amazing amount of separation - both dynamically and spatially. We then hooked up the S9 step-up transformer to the Brinkmann Balance turntable with an old Lyra Titan cartridge.

It has made me re-evaluate the assumption that real dynamics could only be [best be] gotten from a horn speaker.

Almost all of our equipment lately has gone to improving dynamics - and at the Same Time increasing the delivery of uber resolution and clarity to the Supremes - which can handle everything we throw at it [try to name one other speaker that can do that. It sucks but that is where our industry is at: it costs $300K just to be able to forget about the speaker being the primary limitation of your system. …though we would like to try the Marten Momentos… and they are only $150K ].

And, personally, I think the improvement of the S9 step-up over the S4 that we have been using is head-spinningly silly amazing. We will be doing some tests shortly to verify this - for other reasons too annoying to disturb our fine readers about.

The Marten Coltrane Supremes in the foreground, the Gaku-Ons in the background.

Audio Note U.K. Gaku-On

Audio Note U.K. M9 Phono - a preamplifier with a built-in phono stage.

Audio Note U.K. S9 step-up transformer

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo, Shows, Audio Note, Emm Labs, Nordost, RMAF 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.