The Audio Karma Fest [hard not to type Kharma] is right around the corner, time wise, and right outside Detroit Michigan, hotel wise.

Audio Note U.K. will be showing our Zero level line of separate components. When we fired them up, right out of the box, cold, new, in front of doubting ears [ours], it was immediately obvious that they sounded better than 90% of the rooms at shows that I have heard - and that they sounded like a system. Very well-balanced.

As you can see, they are fashionably small, but not small enough to fit side by side on the Acoustic Dreams’ rack shelves. Almost, though.

A full report later - but hopefully many of you will be in Detroit next weekend and get to hear it for yourselves.

There are four pieces, a transport, a integrated amp, a DAC and a Phono preamplifier.

DAC 0.1X ‘Valve Output Stage’ with USB input

R Zero/II ‘Valve Phono Stage’

I Zero ‘Valve Integrated Amplifier’

CDT Zero/II ‘CD Transport’

There is a very popular Iranian Hi-Fi Blog. I’ve been watching it for awhile, actually, as they link to us and they quote things off the blog and website occasionally. It’s mostly in Farsi, so its not like I get a whole lot out of my visits.

Amir, who runs the blog, emailed me about Romy’s DPOLS speaker setup observations, and I wrote back, and think you all might be interested in both my response and others, which he has posted on his blog here:

Iran Hi-Fi Blog

I kept writing DPOL, by which I meant Dead Points Of Live Sound *Point* but the my abbreviation wasn’t really thought through. I could have used ‘DP’ but that acronym has other meanings and Dead Point does not seem to be very flattering for such a wonderful speaker location. Maybe OP for Optimal Point might be better.

OK, here is the transcript:

“Yeah, I think Romy has something here. It makes sense anyway. Romy posted this a long time ago, and we’ve had some time to mull over the idea.

Some of the issues I see:

* It gets more confusing when there are multiple people with multiple tastes involved. Some prefer a fuller sound on the bottom so that the overall freq response is flat [more like live music] - some prefer the best possible transparency, etc.

* It is very easy to keep moving the speaker so that it appears to get better and better with each move - yet overall the sound gets worse. I’ve seen this with hardware modders too. I think this has to do with each move improving one area of the sound inadvertently at the expense of another

* It is very easy to just give up after finding a local maxima [using simulated annealing as a model of speaker position optimization]. I.E. you find the best spot within a particular inch or two and particular orientation and you just want to sit down and listen to some music

* The dpol changes if you change the amp, cd player, cables, power cords, etc. and probably when there are more people in the room. Some of these changes are minor - but dpol is all about minor changes having large impacts…

Anyway, as a store we change things all the time - and so DPOL is hard to maintain over time. We more or less just try to minimize any negative interactions with the room and be happy with that - though this is another approach to speaker placement in and of itself and it has paid off big time once in a while.

One thing I have not seen addressed is how to mark the position of speakers accurately. Tape on the floor is really horribly unhelpful when we start talking about positions more highly resolving than half an inch or so, and about, oh, 5 - 10 degrees of arc or so.

Happy to hear you all are getting good results. Have these results given you a deeper perspective on this subject that you would like to share?

Thanks,
Mike.

جالبه بدونید نظر آقای آرتور سالواتوره رو هم جویا شدم:

Dear Amir,
I’ve never met Romy, but we have communicated in the past, we have links to each other and I visit his website once a month or so.
I’m not sure about DPOLS, because I have never experienced a situation where 1/16 or 1/32 of an inch made such a huge difference, as described in the short essay, and I’ve heard many thousands of setups.
I obviously realize the critical importance of speaker positioning and room acoustics, and I have spent months, and sometimes even years, optimizing just one set-up (my own system of course), but not to the degree of an ultra tiny movement that I can not even see with my eyes or measure (for repeatability).
Sadly, most audiophiles are not even in “the optimum zone”, let alone the one perfect spot, and that should be addressed first before moving on to a goal which may not be feasible for most.
Best Regards,
Arthur Salvatore
www.high-endaudio.com”

These shootouts focused on primarily Jorma Design interconnects and speaker cables, [the No.3, No.1, Origo and PRIME but not the No.2], and Nordost ODIN interconnect and speaker cable kept appearing [largely because everyone was curious and as a kind of reference standard] and INDRA was thrown in once in awhile.

The Audio Note PALLAS was not part of the shootouts - it has kind of been relegated to the ‘ridiculously excellent price/performance digital/phono cable’ category [a category it now dominates]. Perhaps we are mistaken to relegate it so. We need to try and throw it in as a regular interconnect sometime.

None of the other Audio Note orNordost cables were shot at because, well, this was really about evaluating the Jorma No. 3 and Origo and we needed to focus on something … otherwise we’d be here all year doing the shootouts [awwwwww ].

A quick summary:

Origo [or-eh-go] means origin in Swedish. At about $5200 or so the first meter the interconnect kills things at the $4K level. It is not the PRIME [at $10K] - but it has lots of resolution and is very open and clean.

The No.3 [their least expensive cable] is very much a cable that sounds like its more precious siblings - just somewhat leaner and with less resolution, and with less presence and image specificity - but the tone is still spot on [just not as rich] and it is quite clear sounding with above average separation.

Using ODIN interconnect to go from the Marten Coltrane Supreme speaker crossover to the amps [Lamm ML2.1 in this case], and Jorma PRIME speaker cable on the main towers and Nordost ODIN(!) on the bass towers is now our favorite setup.

The full shootout report will be forthcoming…

We were wondering if people were interested in having us Twitter the events and impressions of various shootouts here at Audio Federation.

For those of you who have a real life, Twitter is a very popular place to post comments and everyone has something somewhere between a Blog and a Chat Room, into which to post lots of very short messages.

The idea would be for us to post play-by-play about what is playing, what cables are being listened to, what peoples impressions are, and try to answer people’s questions during the shootout.

Anyway, just wanted to see if there was any interest. If there is not, that’s OK as it does take some amount of effort on our part - but if there is lots of interest, then it could be fun and you all out there might have some really good questions and ideas that will help the shootout be more effective at defining the differences between various components and cables.

As many of you know, and many do not, we have been conducting a large number of cable shootouts. They are many focused on the new Jorma Design ‘Orego’ cable that sits between their No. 1 [approx. Nordost Valhalla pricing and performance] and their statement PRIME cable.

Also thrown in are the Nordost ODIN [well.. why not. Wouldn’t you?] and even the Stealth INDRA [interconnect]. We are shooting out with both interconnects and speaker cables - and of course, various combinations thereof.

Hopefully later this week we will have the report up… here I think. Neli says I am not posting on the blog enough, so…. I’ll try and post store-ish stuff here and ramblings and philosophy and humor and perspectives on the magazine.

You know, we have a lovely and very interesting house. But one thing that makes setting up audio systems here a little bit different, some would say more difficult, is that we do not have rectangular rooms.

The small room setup [listening room 3]

Oh yes, some will say we have it easier, but I say that 1) we still get unwanted side-to-side sound wave reinforcement and 2) most speakers were designed for rooms with a front wall [except those that were designed to go out in the middle of the room i.e most dipoles and most rear-ported speakers].

So here we have the Audio Note speakers. Designed to go into a corner. But we have no corners.

We do put them out from the walls, in the ‘middle of the room’, like a plain-old rear ported speaker - and that works as expected. Excellent imaging [superb actually], soundstage depth, transparency etc. But not as much bass as most speakers that were designed to go into the middle of the room would have.

So. What to do. What to do.

We tried making [in our feeble minds] corners out of the octagonal angles of the room and angling them this way and that. It kind-of-works.

The larger room [listening room 2]

We tried putting thm against the long walls [in our smaller room, not in the larger one yet]. It kind-of-works.

Then, somehow, I plucked down the heavy crossovers and let Neli do-with-them-what-she-will.

And, continuing the theme of the CES setup, with them towed in so much that they cross in front of the listener, she put them in parallel with one of the smaller octagonal walls. [See photos].

And it works! In my experience it works as well or better than putting them in the corners in rooms that have corners. There is bass reinforcement, but it is tight bass, unobtrusive bass. And there is still quite a bit of imaging and soundstaging - and almost all positions in the listening area, from wall-to-wall, have a good sense of a center image [all except where the one of the speakers is pointing right at you].

Anyway, for all of you who have octagonal rooms and Audio Note [or rear ported] speakers - you should really try this

“We are pleased to announce the release of a line-stage preamplifier model LL2.1 which is a direct replacement for the LL2 preamplifier.

The LL2.1 features the following upgrades and modifications as compared to the LL2:

· addition of a built-in remote on/off for LAMM amplifiers

· introduction of the attenuation for gain reduction by 15 dB

· some new parts

· new knobs

· slight changes in schematic diagram

Here are the links to specs and description.

US retail price is $5,990 (deluxe version); $5,690 (regular)

This preamp is in production and available immediately.”