Yeah, yeah, everyone wants to know how it sounds and how it compares to the Meitner…

So do we!

You can really tell it is still breaking in because everyday it sounds… different from the day before. One day is is bright. The next it is over-damped. Tomorrow… ?

And, like everyone else, there is some trepedation on our part that it will get ’stuck’ with of these abnormal personailities and be done breaking in, stuck in a less-than-optimal ‘gear’.

But the Capitole takes about 6 weeks before it settles down (usually, but sometimes it seems to break in much more quickly (!?)) so we are trying to be patient.

And the sound is converging towards something very… I would say analog. It doesn’t have the detail of an LP, of course (nothing digital has that much resolution, …so far, anyway), but there is this feeling, this kind of warmth that is not like tubes and not like anything else but vinyl. I know, it is kind of weird - but the Capitole was somewhat like this, at least dynamicaly, and the Prestige seems like it is following in its footsteps - but more so…

At least today it does.

We have a pair of the yummy Audio Aero Prestige monoblock amplifers here on loan. We’ve had their baby brother, the Audio Aero Capitole 50 watt stereo amplifier here for a few years and loved it - so we have high-expectations for these puppies.

Here are some pictures…

More on how they sound later (they are however, largely unbroken-in, and we need to fit them in between auditions… too many things breaking in at once makes for not-so-nice listening sessions)….

Meanwhile the Prestige SACD/CD player in continuing to break-in quite nicely.

We got this in last week. Still breaking in… and just a prototype, but right away it sounds better in almost every way than our older CDT TWO - much more engaging and of a whole - and we are eagerly waiting to see how breaking in improves the sound and just how far it leaves our older (discontinued) CDT TWO in the dust…(!) Dontja just love the high-end?

Some pictures:

In order to preserve the beauty of the transport for the final owner, we are leavng the protective plastic over the display.

Side-by-side with the older CDT TWO

The CDT THREE rear panel.

Got the new player in… was it yesterday?

Here are some pics:

The player is sitting on an HRS Isolation Base and has a HRS damping plate on top.

You can see here that the Prestige, like the Audio Aero Capitole, comes with three Black Diamond Racing Cone feet, two ‘4’s and one ‘3′.

The Prestige has a built-in preamplifier, also like the Capitole. The powercord is a Shunyata Anaconda Vx, the interconnects are the Stealth INDRA.

Our first impressions are very favorable. Our expectations were low, switching from the warm Meitner, which had been on for a week or two since the show, and has been broke-in in for a year now, to a cold Prestige with no time on it . But we were very pleased… out of the box, CDs were actually very enjoyable - as we couldn’t help but play about 10 different CDs to check it out (naw, just like most people, we can’t stand waiting until the player is warmed up and broke-in in more than a few hours like we are all supposed to….).

Burn(in) baby, burn(in)!

Obsessive? Compulsive? In need of serious therapy?

You bet!

Here is where we will post lots of pictures and detail the crazy goin’ ons here that occur between tours in pursuit of extracting every last nuance and artistic merit from each track on each album… pushing the state-of-the-art using the finest audiophile-grade off-the-shelf home hifi stereo amplifiers, cd players, loudspeakers, cables, equipment racks, turntables, and vibration control components we can find [ok, it’s true, that last phrase was just liberally sprinkling google-friendly keywords around all over the place].

Wht bats? Because our nominally 3-story house in on the edge of a minor cliff, making it seem like a 5-story house as the bat flies… and so they l;ike to nest way up there in the rafters.

OK, onward!…. to the next track!

It has come to our attention that a number of you Kharma speaker owners are selling your Tenor amps (both the 75’s and 300’s) and perhaps even, *gasp*, your Lamm amplifiers in exchange for other amps, most notably the little Kharma amps and darTZeel amps, both solid-state.

Now, far be it for us to get in the way of anyone’s expresion of audio nervosa, but… Why?

Why breakup one of the most synergistic combinations known to high-end audiophiledom?

The answer we hear most often is ‘well, the bass wasn’t as tight as it should be, or there wasn’t much detail, or the sound was muddy, etc.’.

But before any of the rest of you sell off your tube amps, often at a significant $$$ loss, ask yourself one thing: what are you doing to isolate vibration away from those oh so sensitive to vibration tubes? Do you have them on a decent amplifier stand, one commsurate with the amp and your investment in your system?

We see so many people disparaging tube amp sound only to find out that they are using little better than furniture underneath their amps. Those rave reviews you read about how Tenor and Lamm goes so well with Kharma speakers are with the amps on a good amplifier stand.

Jonathan Tinn of Blue Light Audio uses custom Silent Running Audio (SRA) platforms (all SRA platforms are custom) underneath the Tenors at CES and the Stereophile Shows. We use Harmonic Resolution Systems (HRS) Isolation Bases under our Lamm amplifiers (and, actually, just about everything else we pump music through) with amazing results.

Using a world-class amplifier stand for your world-class amplifiers makes a world of difference.

Otherwise, the amps will sound wonderfull, but nowhere near as tight and detailed as one might prefer after extended listening. One might wonder why they don’t just build the amps a little sturdier, so that we did not have to worry about them vibrating like Tom after Jerry wacks him another one - but they don’t, and they are not likely to anytime soon, either.

OK, ’nuff said. And we can assume you are all using world-class power cords already, so no need to go into that…right?

And you can ignore all this if you really want to get back into the component-a-month club.

We’ll see how this goes, using real blog software, WordPress, instead of static web pages.