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September 2010: RoadTour Living Voice. When owners Kevin & Lynn Scott had business in Switzerland and stopped on Lake Geneva for an afternoon chat in Vevey, I had profiled the Living Voice Vox Olmpian 5-way horn speaker project from afar exactly one year ago. Now it was time to visit their Definitive Audio showroom in the East Midlands of Blighty to experience the operation and first working pair in person. The 2010 Yacht Show in Monaco's Port Hercule would see the public unveiling of the first Vox Olympian production unit in late September a few weeks after my visit. As I learned, formal production benefits from certain extravagant refinements in overall finish and cosmetic trim... |
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August 2010: Going Passive - Again. Some lessons are learnt only to be again forgotten. Until they present themselves once more... |
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July 2010: Audio Meet Instanbul. Double-booking would prevent me from attending. But at the least I could notify you of the planned event... |
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July 2010: RoadTour Klangfluss. Ralph Werner visits German speaker company Klangfluss whose stylish omni designs have attracted a fair amount of attention... |
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June 2010: La Grande Castine. First proposed in October 2009, my visit with Jean-Maria Maumont and his partners in an ambitious hornspeaker project took place nine months later. The reason for the delay was a comprehensive redesign of the speaker's bass system, a top-to-bottom change of drive units and a revised support structure for the horns which had been steel tubing but was finalized as hot-molded wood... |
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June 2010: A talk with Paul McGowan... about wigs, synthesizers, clouds and a data base of 500.000 tracks... |
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June 2010: CanJam 2010. It's not your grandma's fruit jelly in a tin jar. It's Head-fi.org's annual meet on all things headphone. This year's venue was the Chicago Hyatt Regency O'Hare. Ken Ball, known to our readers as proprietor of Portland/Oregon's 32Ohm Audio store, attended to promote his own ALO Audio products as well as sample new gear by brands he sells in his store. Ken is a diehard enthusiast who knows all the important players and trends in this sector. Plus, he's involved in Cypher Labs. That's a new company which promotes portable D/A converters for iPods. The notion of a battery-powered iDecco for headphones had my fullest attention. Naturally Ken was perfectly positioned to break that story as well as ... |
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May 2010: Wojciech Pacuła at the Munich HighEnd 2010 show. |
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May 2010: Jörg & Ralph at the Munich HighEnd 2010 show. |
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April 2010: RoadTour Absoluta - Following an invitation from Nadia Marino to visit their facilities in Italy, I booked tickets for April 13 - 16 to follow up on my Milano Show report's informal impressions on this exciting new Italian audio company which combines tubes and bipolar transistors in wide bandwidth (300kHz) DC-coupled circuits. Absoluta Sound and Space components are very elegant of appearance and accompanied by impressive specs. An opportunity to look behind their scenes in Padua of all places wasn't something to be passed up... |
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April 2010: Klangschloss Greifensee 2010 - Anyone comparing this year's coverage to last year's will agree. Casablanca's famous line of rounding up the usual suspects quite applied. Event organizer Markus Thomann of Swiss loudspeaker house Klangwerk once again rented the country castle over the second April weekend and many of 2009's exhibitors returned, some even in the same rooms to temporarily transform the quaint venue into Klangschloss Greifensee or the Sound Castle on Zürich's lake... |
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March 2010: A Visit to Blumenhofer Acoustics. By way of answering how loudspeaker house Blumenhofer began, the gent of the same name pointed casually at the large bookcase in the rear of his listening space which is filled with numerous vintage audio treasures. One shelf contains an old Philips 712. The story goes that lightning struck the home of 13-year old Thomas Blumenhofer to send an old valve radio up in smoke. Papa exploited the opportunity to finally acquire a proper receiver—the very one on the shelf—and while at it, a nice DM3.000/pr of speakers. That was a quite princely purse in those days. Blumenhofer Jr. apparently was a very curious teenager. He... |
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March 2010: With the program. Finally. After publishing Wojciech Pacuła's reviews on the $10.500 Bladelius Embla and £10.450 Linn Klimax DS machines, I decided to grab this particular - ahem, bull by the horns myself. And squeeze while I was at it. Hard. To that end, I bought a nicely discounted 1TB iMac from our local dealer in Vevey (ca $1.300) and ordered a DAC2 Firewire converter from Daniel Weiss' professional line. My rationale for this decision was simple. Money, convenience, performance. In that sequence. Even though... |
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February 2010 - What's up, doc? I recently had a Kiwi visitor with a buncha cables in his backpack. He is an audio importer/distributor from New Zealand who amongst many other products handles the Acoustic System Int. LiveLine cables. He duly stripped them off their Teflon dielectric to pronounce them mo betta, then set out to design his own 'inspired by' variants. Because he's a regular reader who has converted many of our reviews into lines he carries; and because he had business in Vienna; he asked whether he could hear his new cables in my setup. I agreed... |
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January 2010 - ADN - While in the pages of the hifi press the 'Battle of the Aluminators' wages fiercely between Magico and YG Acoustics, a new player from Barcelona hasn't gotten the attention they deserve in this war on vibration. Enter ADN and their break-up matrix of integral scattering surfaces inside their enclosures. Unlike Eventus from Italy who accomplishes something very similar in MDF, ADN has gone solid aluminum... |
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January 2010 - Silverstone - It's no secret that I admire the work of Alvin Lloyd at Grand Prix Audio. I owned two of his Monaco Modular stands and only passed them on when my new room in Switzerland enforced a layout that would not accommodate the considerable depth of the Monacos on the sidewall where the hifi equipment had to go.
Perusing various CES 2010 show reports, I came across an on-line video on the Wilson Audio site which showed what clearly was a new GPA stand. Named after the famous English race track which hosts the British Grand Prix, it showed a quite different and far more versatile stand system than the one I was familiar with.... |
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December 2009 - Different - In this hobby's consumer rather than DIY division, most put all their eggs in one basket. In each component category, they buy the very best they can; often in stages due to the required investments. Their not unreasonable hope behind it all is that just as with any other appliances, they'll be properly set. Until things begin to break down that is and require more repairs than they're worth. But unlike with cars, refrigerators and washing machines (CD players and cartridges certainly excepted), hifi machines generally don't break for many a decade. When they do eventually, it usually happens a lot later than most original owners hold on to their gear. That should be excellent news. Why then can't we leave good enough alone? |
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December 2009 - RoadTour Brascchaat - During the MEOW 2 opening of the cat sleeves exhibition in Belgium’s Antwerp, we ran into several interesting people. Besides music lovers, musicians and artists, we also met Koen Vaessen. Many interested in audio might recognize the name Vaessen Audiodesign as a loudspeaker brand. Next to smaller box-shaped models, Koen also produces this unique large egg-shaped 3-way system. Not knowing better, we figured Koen made a full or at least part-time living from producing loudspeakers but... |
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December 2009: Saadhana 2 - "On the loudspeaker front I believe you already have heard that we've made some big changes thanks in large measure to you. After
your last review of the Saadhana came out, I had to put on my thinking
cap again and went to work on the Saadhana's bass module. 6
prototypes and 3 months later, I succeeded when I finally went to a unique 3-driver isobaric system. We then worked on the Maarga's bass module as well, which now has a 2-driver isobaric system that does a
lot better than the older single-driver quasi transmission line design.
We also upgraded both the amplifiers to deliver a lot more power
as well. Bass performance is substantially different as a result... |
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December 2009: RoadTour Antwerp 2009 - Throughout history, Antwerp has been a fascinating city. From its earliest 250 AD description by the Romans to today, the city on the banks of the Scheldt river has always been in the news because something special occurred there. And we’re not talking politics. Belgian politics are so complicated and fragile that it's is hard to fathom there are any. Need an example? How about a country of 10.5 million who talk in three official languages and are governed by six governments consisting of 49 ministers and 10 secretaries to keep things running. No, the really interesting things happen on a different platform altogether - that of the cultural arts... |
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December 2009: Guangzhou AV Fair - "It was the first time we attended and it was certainly a positive surprise for me and a bit of an eye opener. The most noticeable things were the number of rooms that made a presentation and the sheer volume of attendees." Those had been my exact sentiments a year ago. Because few Westerners have the opportunity to see for themselves, I decided to... |
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December 2009: RoadTour Soulution. A visit with Cyrill Hammer of Spemot AG who produces the Soulution Audio brand shed interesting light on this company. |
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December 2009: Algahorn. The emailer was Victor from Aural Design, a Singapore importer/retailer with whom I occasionally share notes."After two years of R&D and numerous prototype cabinets, my customer and friend has 'perfected' a back-loaded horn for what is known as the most exotic single driver manufacturer known today, Feastrex from Japan. The horn enclosure is handcrafted from a mixture of HDF and Ply and optimized for Feastrex's 5-inch driver range which includes the NF5 Naturflux, the NF5 Monster Alnico and the field coil versions... |
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November 2009: RoadTour Nagra. A visit with Matthieu Latour and the Nagra Audio facilities seven short kilometers north of Lausanne on Lake Geneve was long overdue seeing our Editor's residence in Chardonne is just a few exits east on the motorway. Just as many people recognize the name 'Rolex' without necessarily knowing much about the company, so Nagra is a mythical name associated with highly regarded products. But how many have seen what goes into their products? Over 10 pages and well more than 100 photos, find out about the forthcoming new Nagra 300B integrated amplifier, the just-completed MSA Mosfet Stereo Amp now shipping, scale of operations, engineering resources and much more... |
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November 2009: A visit to Renaissance Audio. Based on an invitation by Roald Mikkelsen of
Renaissance Audio AS and Mutjaba Hussain, the Norwegian Trafomatic Audio importer, we traveled to Bergen on the West coast of Norway to report on the official unveiling of the relaunched Trafomatic range and a surprise product announcement in another category... |
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November 2009: Ballerina Sweetspot. The world's first purpose-designed listening chair? From Sweden of course... |
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November 2009: ISSA 2009. Terence Wong covered the event on site in Singapore. |
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November 2009: Athens Hifi Show. Running from October 30 - November 1, we have nine pages of impressions of this event. |
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November 2009: RoadTour ModWright. A combination of professional photography by Marco Prozzo with commentary by Dan Wright about his new facility and showroom. |
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October 2009: HighEnd Swiss. Held from October 24 - 26 in the Mövenpick Hotel Zürich-Regensdorf, here's our 6-page report. |
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October 2009: The perfect digital source? If someone well heeled were to ask you for the 'perfect digital source' component, what would you recommend?
I haven't heard Ayon Audio's latest CD-5 yet but the specs look intriguing. First off, it's a one-box player. Separating the power supply into a second box often nets dividends and Ayon did just that with their former CD-3 range topper. But... |
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October 2009: 32Ohm Audio. Street jive:
To foreigners, American slang is most peculiar and slippery to fathom. Hot shit. Cool as shit. Which is it? Things used to be all manner of things. Hip. Far out. Radical or rad for short. Awesome. Righteous. Foxy. Bitching. Bodacious. Bad. Bonza. Boss. Cah (cool as hell). Tight. Sick. Slick. So active. Amped. Banging.
In-between the same things rocked, later they went phat. But unless you or your kids partake in current street culture, who the heck knows what they're now? Whatever. I haven't, in a long long time, come across anything as grooviliciously kewl a hifi concept and much-needed life jacket as Ken Ball's brand-new... |
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October 2009: Viet Nam 2009. Tiet Tuan Luong reports from the Viet Nam 2009 HighEnd Show. |
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October 2009: RoadTour Octave. This big-city ignoramus had no idea about an airport close to Baden-Baden. And why would he? Too young to retire, with the first €1,000,000 in the bank still far off, he has a casino just a few bus stops away from his Berlin residence on the Potsdamer Platz. But the destination of this trip wouldn’t be the famous spa resort. It would be Karlsbad, home to Octave Audio whose boss Andreas Hoffmann had invited us a while back – since last year in fact when he’d visited us to assure himself perhaps that his V80 valve integrated was properly served by our fairaudio audition room... |
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October 2009: Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. Steve Marsh picks out his most interesting discoveries. |
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October 2009: Helsinki HighEnd Show. Kari Nevalainen shares his highlights of the event for the third year in a row... |
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October 2009: Hi-Files Show Serbia. The Hi-Files Show in Belgrade, Serbia took place for the third time over two weekends, September 26/27 and October 3/4 in the conference rooms of the Holiday Inn hotel. Hi-Files editor in chief Ljubiša Miodragović
approached us with a request for syndicating his own show report to help popularize this event beyond the borders of his country. As he writes, "... the first weekend featured high-end systems of Dynaudio Sapphire with VTL amplification but also Opera Tebaldi with Unison Research Pre+DM amplification and CDE as source. The third system had the Monitor Audio Platinum PL300 speakers with NAD Masters series electronics but we also have to mention the very attractive performance of Shanling and Usher... |
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October 2009: New manufacturer Eon Art. Joël Chevassus travels to Avignon to report on a novel marriage between class D and tubes and a fetching motto of an ancient code of arms... |
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September 2009: Top Audio Show Milan 2009 A-Z. I wasn't planning to attend. A rare chance to see friends in Milan at the same time spontaneously changed that. For one brief 'hifi business' day, I found myself roaming the hallways of the Quark Hotel. Quite unlike last year's report which, as my first of this event, was deliberately comprehensive, this one isn't. Rather, it strategically overlooks most rooms I covered last year to primarily focus on new companies. Well, at least new to me. I also spotted certain new products by familiar companies I found promising. Those are included too... |
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September 2009: Advertorial. Synchronicity works at all times. No sooner had my Living Voice Vox Olympian industry feature published than a reader advised me about a poster on the UK Hifi Wigwam forum. Murray Johnson had authoritatively identified the piece as an advertorial paid for by Lynn & Kevin Scott. Since he clearly knew something about this I did not, I inquired as to what amount had been paid and what account it had been wired into. I had some bills to pay. That's when he apologized... |
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September 2009: Living Voice Vox Olympian/Elysian: I recently had opportunity to chat with the affable Kevin and Lynn Scott of Living Voice and Definitive Audio UK. They were in Switzerland on business and graciously took time out for an informal meet on Lac Leman. On my upfront agenda was learning more about their ambitious new Vox Olympian flagship speaker. As it turns out, the Olympians' appearance in the fall of 2009 was preceded by endless prototypes over 6 years—20 prototypes alone for the trumpet—two former commercial hornspeaker models called Air Partner and Air Scout and a very hi-tech component rack named G8... |
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August 2009: Metaphorically speaking... - When audiophiles describe sonic differences between different CD players, amplifiers, speakers or sonic properties of a single machine, they make extensive use of metaphors such as "bright", "warm", "deep", "airy" and "soft". They have good reason to do so. Apart from certain onomatopoetic terms, ordinary languages such as English, Finnish or Swedish contain very few literal expressions that would be suitable for describing sounds. However, a skeptic can seriously doubt whether the chosen metaphoric expressions are informative at all. After all, a sound cannot have a property of being literally warm or soft. A sauna can be warm, a pillow can be soft. |
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August 2009: Hong Hong Audio Visual Show 2009 - It was Christine Han of April Music. She apologized for being late getting back. I'd had some tech questions for engineering about an upcoming review of their new 500 Series CD player and integrated. Had 6moons covered the just concluded hifi show in Hong Kong? We had not. In fact, our man Linnman stationed there had to resign. A new baby boy keeps him too busy to spend time writing about hifi. Christine however had just returned from the show. For entertainment, she e-mailed me a few of her photos. They were taken on the quick. Her job as marketing manager of April Music had her very busy in their exhibit... |
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July 2009: Reverse RoadTour - Jean Hiraga in Chardonne. A legendary audio reviewer brought his Altec 604-based loudspeaker to Chardonne for an informal 5-hour getting-to-know-them session. |
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July 2009: RoadTour Quest for Sound. About a half hour north of Philadelphia airport, one man never rests. Steve Monte of NAT distribution and QFS should not be a new name for most our readers as in the past he's brought to the US brands like Consonance/Opera and more recently Raysonic, JAS and Mark & Daniel, all recognized broadly for performance and value alike.
Quest for Sound in Bensalem, Pennsylvania is about an hour's and a half drive from where I live but I like to take the trip once or twice a year just to get a chance of chatting with Steve. I rarely come back empty handed when it comes to news or review ideas. What I like about Quest for Sound even beyond the gear is that each time I go, I step back in time by 20 years and rejuvenate. ... |
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July 2009: Roadtour Geithain. Geithain. You don't know this tiny town of about 6,000 souls south-east of Leipzig? Their webpage calls its 800-year existence a "secret tip for culture/history buffs". Though not likely in the context of swank city walks, certain hifi fans will have heard of Geithain when discussing pro-audio speakers. In broadcast plants and recording studios, Musikelectronic Geithain GmBH or ME Geithain for short is a domestically quite dominant A-list player. Geithain chief Joachim Kiesler punned that the ARD is by now 80% fitted with his speakers. Perhaps we should pay a visit and start counting?... |
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July 2009: Roadtour Marten Design. Mike Valentino travels to Sweden for a look-see at this speaker design house... |
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July 2009: Swansong for an ugly duckling. The e-mail was from papa. Well, not really. But that's how his many DIY fans refer to Nelson Pass on the DIYAudio forum. The thread on how to build a FirstWatt F5 from scratch has developed into 174 colossal pages by now. Which segues smoothly into today's note. In his typically terse e-mail, the man had indicated that the last of the F5s were trundling out of his kitchen workshop and that a new product was nearing completion... |
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July 2009: Seven Years and still Here. The verflixte 7th year. The human body is said to renew its cells in 7-year intervals. The esoteric traditions talk of seven chakras or energy vortexes which connect the human body to different vibratory dimensions. In relationships, the number seven is believed to signify the arising of unresolved issues while astrology looks at one's 49th year (7x7) as a time of enforced emotional and issue-based house cleaning when stuff one hasn't handled or procrastinated on catches up to present itself unavoidably. 6moons launched in June 2002 out of a very small... |
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