Updated the website last night.

The old website is and will remain available at the link in the lower right-hand corner of most pages on the new site.

Still quite a bit to do, but after borrowing from some of the best luxury and shopping sites , we are hopefully more fully representing the quality and wonderfulness of the few extreme high-fidelity products in the world [obviously there is more to come].

Now YOU have a friend in the high-end audio porn business.

This new design requires a lot of photos. Although we have over 100K photos of audio equipment, finding the best ones, and showing them in this no-holds-barred bald manner, is laborious and really somewhat intimidating.

The deep dark secret is that although I work really hard long hours compared with most, and I have a passion for the subject , I know almost nothing about photography and just a wee bit more about Photoshop [though I am learning more each day]. Though sheer quantity of the photos I can find nuggets with quality.

But this has got to change, and I need to step it up a notch or two in the ‘get cool photos but with quality lighting, perspective, and detail’ department. I would just so LOVE to really present awesome visual eye-candy for this equipment that were commensurate with how awesome the equipment is.

Somehow I just just need to channel Danny Kaey AND Albert Porter … and myself… and At The Same Time [can you IMAGINE the type of person that would then be me? ]

—–

Anyway, lot of products are missing from the Components menu, and a lot in the menu have no pages yet, and no Galleries except the home page is up yet,… and Systems? We got plans for that category that should be pretty cool….

We’re going to be updating the blog over the next few… time units.

We’ve been getting a lot of spam, that I have to keep deleting, and it is annoying.

In order to prevent bots from submitting spam the question on the Comment form has changed. Please be aware of this and don’t just type ‘human’ .

The Twitter feed on the right will now display the feed from Audio Federation on Twitter, not Spintricity. Now we just have to think of what to say over there that is not completely redundant like what everyone else says over there….

Many more changes coming, but mostly to make the blog a little more modern, more upbeat, more groovy

[We received this email yesterday… Thought it might be of interest. Curious how many audiophiles read audio porn on the Apple i-things, but …well… some might.]

We are a team of HiFi addicted journalists and have released a new,
interactive HiFi and consumer electronics magazine.

It will be published weekly and can be downloaded for free, using the
HiFi-Vision App.

The international consumer electronic magazine focuses on HiFi, TV, Home Cinema and High End. You can choose either the German or
English issue. As the App store offers both versions, HiFi Vision serves both the national German as well as the international CE market.

HiFi Vision provides you with reviews, product tests, news, workshops
and many more hifi-related topics.

The app supports smooth scrolling and comes with an amazing “Push
Notification” functionality that reminds you if a new issue is published.

Stay tuned and download your HiFi Vision Magazine now at
www.hifivision.net or directly at

http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/hifi-vision/id424509961

Daniel Muer / HiFi Vision Team

—————

Facebook: “HiFi Vision EN”
Twitter: “hifivision_en”
E-Mail: info(at)hifivision.net
Internet: www.hifivision.net

[It used to be free until late November or something… ]

By August 31, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. EST $0.00
September 1, 2011 at 12 midnight EST through December 30, 2011 at 5 p.m. EST $100.00
December 30, 2011 at 5:01 p.m. EST through January 13, 2012 $200.00

Registration

A whole site dedicated to used vinyl and the prices they went for on ebay.

PopSike

Coooool…

Thanks Fred!

We were listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Tin Pan Alley (plugging the Audio Note M9 directly into the wall is significantly better than through our [usually only somewhat problematic $60, sounds better than most $2K+ … OK, $5K+ …power conditioners], power-strip) and wondered just where Tin Pan Alley was.

I thought it was next to Hells Kitchen in Manhattan. Neli thought it was a euphemism for skid row.

But we was wrong.

From Wikipedia Tin Pan Alley:

“Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City-centered music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The term is also used to describe any area within a major city with a high concentration of music publishers or musical instrument stores - a good example being Denmark Street[1][2] in London’s West End. In the 1920s the street became known as “Britain’s Tin Pan Alley” because of the large number of music shops, a title it still holds: the Tin Pan Alley Festival is held there each July.”

So now we have to listen to the lyrics all over again… and try and figure out what they REALLY mean. Oh man. The pain. The PAIN.

IBM Details World’s Fastest Graphene Transistor

“Lin cautioned against thinking of graphene as a substitute for the silicon-based microprocessors used in today’s computers, at least at anytime in the near future. One major roadblock is that graphene does not work easily with discrete electronic signals, he explained. ”

“Instead, graphene is better suited for making analog transistors, such as signal processors and amplifiers. Today, such circuitry is largely made from GaAs (gallium arsenide), though GaAs offers nowhere near the same electron mobility, Lin said.”

[thanks, Florian ]

John Barnes, a local dealer (Audio Unlimited), passed away unexpectedly last week.

John ran a high-end audio dealership out of a house in the middle of Denver, and was our unwitting inspiration for starting Audio Federation. Audio Unlimited was our primary [only] competitor in the Denver ultra high-end audio market [less so in recent years] but John was always friendly, down to earth, and good-natured about it all.

I would run into John at shows, all the RMAFs and sometimes CES, and he’d always make a few jokes about the number of photos I was taking or whatever and a few jokes about the magazine coverage of these shows [he did pretty darn well at this… harrumph], the state of the Denver market [nobody is happy about it, let’s just say], and other things that made us relative newbies [not so much anymore, this is our 10th year] feel comfortable and welcome.

Thanks, John.

Todd, a friend of ours is producing an album and he brought up several versions of each of the songs on the album to hear what they sounded like in high fidelity.

We played them mostly upstairs on the Emm Labs XDS1 CD player [the Audio Note CDT Five and Fifth Element digital are currently being enjoyed in the Bay Area for a week or two], the Audio Note M9 preamp, the Audio Note Ongaku integrated amp and finally into the Marten Coltrane Supreme speakers.

The way I understand it, 16 tracks went into the mix, where their equalization and relative volume etc were played with and condensed into 2-channels and saved onto a 1/2 inch tape and at the same time onto a ‘mix CD’. The mastering engineer then mastered the 1/2 inch tape in several different ways, each time, apparently, in response to feedback from the musicians and our friend the producer. This particular producer, Todd, goes to great lengths to try and use the right technologies to try and preserve the original performance, live in this case, and not rely ONLY on tape and tubes and not ONLY on DSP software and hard disks.

So, today, what we heard was, song by song, the original Mix version of the song and two to three masterings of the song.

The Mix version was always cleaner with better separation and containing more delicate nuances - revealing more inherent emotion and musician technique than the masterings of the song did.

The masters… the mastering process is more brute force than the mixing process; there being only 2-channels instead of 16 - equalization and compression affects more than just one instrument, for example. So some mastered songs were digital sounding [too much treble?], hard sounding or dull sounding [too much compression? top rolled off too much] but some masters really were better.

Sometimes the bass would be diminished somewhat, bringing the vocals and harmony forward making it more accessible to the listener. Some masterings seemed to increase the air a bit, capturing the emotion and suspense at the very end of various phrases song by the vocalist [cool that this is how many people put emotion into their voice, at the very end of words and sentences]. Some mastered songs seemed to have much more PRaT than their pure Mix versions [which I suspect was do to slight compression of the frequencies of the main melody line - but I liked it!]

So what I learned here was that slightly different masterings have a big affect and can take what I would consider a good song and make it very engaging and involving or make it boring and brash. Just shows how much trust we put into not only the musicians, not just the studio and mastering technologies, but in the mixer, the masterer, and the producer of these albums - that they will deliver to us audiophiles something decent that we can now try and reproduce to the best of our abilities.

I also learned that, personally, although I prefer the clean Mix version [it is much more real], it took less time, and was easier, to ‘get into’ and enjoy some of the mastered versions. The music was first rate, IMHO, and I would call it a blend of bluegrass and… honky-tonk? folk?

Anyway, this was a great way to spend an afternoon.

We have three pairs of these legendary amps for sale at used prices. This is kind of a preview notice before we put them up on the general classifieds sites and announce their availability to the general public.

You all know what kind of rave reviews these 18 watt amps have received in the ‘press’ and we have driven the $350,000 Coltrane Supreme speakers with them many, many MANY times with great satisfaction. Articulate, clear and natural sounding, great separation, good tone - an AMAZING bargain at their $29,990 full retail value compared to the 99% of the competition [which might be saying more about the outrageousness of the competition pricing strategies than the price of these amps, but…] and at their ‘used price’ a freaking otherworldly-ish good deal…

Lamm ML2.1 amplifier

Lamm ML2.1 amplifier

One pair is a trade-in by a fella who upgraded to the $139,290 Lamm ML3 amplifiers.

One pair is a trade-in by a fella who upgraded to the $105,000 Audio Note Ongaku integrated amplifier.

One pair is our dealer demo pair we have had on the floor for several years. Not sure if we are going to upgrade to the new, somewhat more expensive Lamm ML2.2 or the ML3 [would prefer the ML3, but we are kind of strange that way ].

Send us an email or call Neli if you are interested!