Sorry, I was trying to edit my response to you and accidentally hit the submit button before I got beyond the number of speaker question.

Pale Rider, very cool, glad to hear how things are going. Some of your information here is good for me as well. My Ohm's also do the soundstaging nicely in regards to being off to one side or the other. I like not having to be locked into a tight listening/seating area and still be able to enjoy a good soundstage. Very good! I continue to read with interest. Tim

Tim,

Welcome to the forum!  You could always make the trip this fall to Decfest at Steve's place.

Mac5u/Mike, are you still planning on making the trip to Decfest as well?

ZYGI

Hi ZYGI,

First of all, I have been remiss in not posting about my visit to your place.  I had meant to do that after returning from my buisness trip to Orlando but one thing then another...anyway, I still plan to do a post about my trip but the details will be a little thin as my memory has faded a bit on everything we listened to that day.

I had planned on attending both Decfest and RMAF but now may only be able to attend one.  I'll make a decision soon.

I am still hoping to make it to DecFest this year, though work is doing its best/worst to interfere.

For now, I am just loving listening to the ERRs. Right now, I have R-men's I thought about you spinning. It's a 24/192 disc that is simply superb. The bass and brushes-on-snare contrast is amazing. Piano is lock solid. Just beautiful.

Tim, as a former Ohm owner myself, I enjoy the perspective you bring, and under the forum charter, it certainly seems appropos.

Tim,

 I see no problem comparing Ohms here either, there are probably a lot of people wanting to know the comparisons, so really its a good thing.  I've heard a lot of Ohms in the past. There was a company I used to buy all my speaker parts from in Phoenix, and they seemed to get a lot of Ohms in for repair. I have now idea of which models I was listening to at the time, it didn't really matter I guess, it was kind of the bar for what had to be better. Some Ohms do some things better than the ERR's but overall I think the ERR's as a whole do everything just right.

If you do come to Decfest, feel free to bring your Ohms with you, Doug that wrote his review on the ERR's had done this a couple of years before buying the ERR's. Not a problem at all, I hope you can make it!

I see no reason the ERR's will go anywhere, anytime soon. The radials/omni's have been a passion of mine for a long time.

PaleRider,

I do hope you make it out to Decfest this year, it would be great to meet you in person.

Mac5u,

In a way, I'm glad you memory might be a little thin on what you heard. Like Murphy's law goes. everything you listened to with the Torii-MKI was pretty bad. In fact this took me on a long spiral of trying to figure out WTF!  The tubes were on there last legs, with that said they didn't show itself in the normal way, it turned out to be very midrange heavy. Not sure why this happened or what it actually was but it had me running in circles for a month at least. Then when you listened to the desk top speakers (Trapeziums) at my desk, the amp was in mono, only playing the left channel through both speakers. I sat at the desk later that day, when I realized what you had just listened to, I was so embarrassed. Just perfect.

I remember Steve telling me of a time at his old shop, in the early days of the RL-series radials, he had a customer come by for a listen, and when the guy left, Steve realized that one of the Radial drivers weren't even playing. Just goes to show you it can happen to anyone, at any time. Usually at the worst possible time.

ZYGI

Ohm F's, very nice I am sure! I have never heard the F's unfortunately, and maybe it is a good thing! What I hear from folks that have, say the newer Ohm CLS drivers don't hold a candle to the F's when they are working properly. Maybe so, but I do feel the newer drivers are a more commercialized and rugged driver than the real Walsh driver. Shame Lincoln Walsh wasn't around to hear his design with the F and maybe even develop it further.

I have become very pleased with the omni/radial sound for sure, and even though I love the pair of Magnepan MMG's I have, I don't think I could part ways with any of the radial designs. They just seem to sound more natural and real to my ears, and a lot less picky about placement and listening position. More real-world speakers to me! Tim

Someday I hope to hear a properly restored pair of F's. One of my friends in Virginia has a pair, so maybe some day. I do think that for the day in which they were designed and made, it is somewhat a miracle they worked and worked as well as they did.

I do think the newer Ohm's are very good though, and not to take anything away from what John S. at Ohm does do with what he has now. They do that thing for me, but am always looking or listening for other designs. I don't make changes to my system often, very rare, but the ERR's might have to be an exception at some point.

I can imagine with the ERR's, there wouldn't be much to not like. But  do think radials/omni's certainly aren't everyone's cup of tea for sure, but they seem to be for me!

Lon,

Very interesting your anecdotes and great experiences. I enjoyed reading it. So far you are an entertaining guy

"Juan, your English is excellent!"

He,he, I try to do my best. Sometimes is a compromise between time spent vs perfected typing and I've to choose in a balance way.

"In regards to the live recordings:  I don't have any room treatment so that may be a reason why I don't feel that live recordings are particularly compromised."

No, Lon, just the opposite. As an example, live records sound specially good on headphones. I encourage you to have at least a pair, for instance, the Hifiman HE6 hooked up to the Torri Mk3's binding posts (cos these headphones require speaker amps to bring the best out of them). Or an AKG K1000 earspeakers.

Apart from that, I noticed you purchased a PS combo recently. I have been interested in the PSA DAC + bridge as a music server while ago as well. It's a future acquisition for sure for my part. Very few companies sell something like these type of sources (Linn, Naim for instance). Control your entire music library with an iPhone or iPod touch is very rewarding and convenient. No external digital connections to deal with jitter and expensive cables. Just an NAS storage with lossless, perfectly ripped CD's and HD files. Inverted phase, native mode (non oversampling), etc.. So great.

Greg,

The AKG K1000 are here. They are simply a must have. Physical impact very similar to speakers, very dynamic and musical, amazing soundstage very similar like very near field monitors, ... I like them so much.  

Lon's comments about headphones are interesting. If I had to "work" in them, I suspect they could become quite tiring. And now that I have my ERRs, I am obviously not listening to headphones all the time. But headphone are what got me back into hi-fi, and while the enclosed headphone experience is, in its own way, unnatural, it can be very rewarding. Case in point: binaural recordings. When I had my first pair of Sennheiser HD414 headphones as a kid, I also had a binaural album Sennheiser had produced to show off the (at the time somewhat unusual) open air design of the headphones. And it was impressive.

Today, there are some very good binaural recordings out there that can only sound good on good headphones. Here is one a friend recommended to me just this week, and it is indeed impressive: Ottmar Liebert's Up Close.

I am also a confirmed computer audio guy. And as a PS Audio fan, I am very tempted by the Perfect Wave combo Lon has (hey Lon, I know you know it's really a computer, too ), but it's still both more and less than what I want. I am not seeking the perfect disc player, because I do believe discs are a dead-end.  As physical media, discs will fall, as all things can, but so can any storage mechanism. Still, as digital resolution and fidelity improve, and vendors find more immersive ways to enjoy album art and liner notes (holographically projected album art, anyone? No?), and as bandwidth delivery systems continue to widen, environmental and financial pressures will drive to non-physical delivery of audio and video. (The Sonore is getting closer to what I am thinking about as the next step up from the mini and external RAID that now houses most of my music. But it's not quite there yet, and it's really a bridge between old and new; one day, Cortez will burn all the ships.)

I love the Blu-Ray experience, and the Oppo is both a very fine video and audio device. But it's a disc-based delivery, and in the end, what counts is what is on the screen and coming out of the speakers, not the disc itself. Any data file delivery of sufficient fidelity will do the trick. Apple is already heading down the path of disc-less delivery. They accomplished their most recent system upgrade without discs, their top selling laptop has no optical drive, and neither does their new mini. Hard drive makers are getting killed by the combo of flash and SSD. We've gone from revolutionary floppy drives to disc-less environments in about 30 years. With 32/384 A/V files on the horizon, optical discs are all but dead. We know something even better than Blu-Ray will be developed, but I am betting that something won't be a disc. And it won't take another thirty years.

I know a lot of my audiophile friends revel in the vinyl experience, including the tactile and audio-visual relationship between disc and album art, etc. I don't begrudge them that at all, but I don't actually miss all my LP albums. I enjoy album art, but my iPad is fine for those purposes. And I suspect the vinyl vector will remain with us for some time. But it will eventually join wax cylinders. I believe vinyl has survived in part because it has taken relatively long for digital to reach mere adequacy, with many false promises and detours along the way. But digital is still younger than vinyl already was when I was born. Analog technology development simply cannot keep pace with Moore's Law and all the benefits that theorem implies. What the Sonore or Auraliti do for reasonable prices now, will be bettered by devices costing half as much in three years. And of course, there will be just as much, if not more, junk than ever. But the cream of the crop will continue to be amazing.

Someone here, or maybe on the Hoffman forum, commented on just how far we have yet to go in reproducing live music in our homes. So true. What we settle for now is a facsimile experience. Even small-scale stuff, like solo vocals or small group chamber music, is still radically different live than recorded and heard at home. We are getting closer all the time, but we have far to go. Long term, only one storage paradigm can hold the amount of information necessary to replicate or approximate live music. And it's not analog. The vinyl groove cannot be made infinitely long, nor can the cartridge needle be infinitely small. Whether it is the reproduction end or the recording end of the process, we will always be testing the limits of a physical, "meat" universe.

Recorded music is much like mapping. The only perfect analog map is a full-size replication of the terrain being mapped. However, digitally, we can store and recreate the actual terrain down to the most minute detail (already happening courtesy of the redoubtable, perhaps evil, Google Street View)—subject now only to storage space and the resolving power of the recording instrument and the viewing device. My iPad doesn't feel the same as a nice map, but it is way more accurate, with a nearly infinite capacity for improvement. Sounds familiar.

P.S. Sorry for the rant. Back to my valves.

Quote:


Greg, this is going to be an interesting ride you take us on, Greg.  Like Tim, it will be interesting to hear your thoughts on the ERRs and OHMs although it is quite unfair to anyone or any piece of equipment to rely on audio memory.  Still, looking forward to how this all comes together, especially with the center channel speakers inserted into the mix.

Quote:


ZYGI, you know, even though your equipment wasn't working as it should have been the day that I was there, it still sounded pretty good to me.  OK, I wasn't completely blown away but after leaving your place, I figured it was just the first time hearing the older Torii and it was my first experience with the both the ERRs and the Turning Point speakers so I figured I would just need to hear them again and temper my expectations.  That afternoon by no means dissuaded me from looking further into them.

What struck me then, and still to this day, is how you could take a room of modest size and make it into a very comfortable listening room with very good acoustics.  Your room treatments probably took what you considered a sub-par listening experience and made for me a very enjoyable one.  I can only imagine how the music must sound now!

Quote:


Greg,  I am with you that music and movies delivered via disc will, in the not-to-distant future, be [almost] a thing of the past.  There will always be those who are comfortable with disc players but I think it will be more difficult to find that content delivered that way.  I still have a Super-VHS camcorder that works just fine, but finding tapes for it is difficult and digital camcorders make it virtually obsolete.

However, like Lon, I am not eager to embrace the world of computer audio.  I know I should just get over it and get on with it but the thought of doing so is a little discouraging.  The middle ground for me might be something like the Olive products, although going that route has its own limitations and, at the end of the day, it is not [yet] a priority for me.

Lon, agreed on all counts. I like the idea of the Perfect Wave's source control capabilities, though I have the Oppo's volume control,, and its DAC section is very, very good. Less resolving than my modded PSA DAC with the Audiophileo, but musical. So, once I have the Ultra set up, the Oppo lets me play couch potato well. Devices like the PW, the Sonore, the Auraliti, the Oppo will keep converging and expanding our options. I actually think the PW DAC & Bridge are on my "next possible" list, because they should be much more effective ST serving my music from the NAS into the Ultra. The Oppo is good, but the PW combo should be great.

And yes, hard drives fail, and so do SSDs, but less so. That's why I have two separate RAIDs and cloud backup. We will benefit from increasingly fail-safe storage. In reality, the PW is doing that for you transactionally already. It is converting optical disc storage (that can also fail and be easily damaged, like LPs) to information on the fly and buffering it. Eventually, we will have truly fail-safe storage and fully integral data delivery. As long as I can pass that information through my valves, I will be happy.

Heh, Michael, pics will definitely be provided.

Yeah, I know it buffers only a few seconds, but that paradigm of "separate the read and interpret functions" is probably just the beginning of far more robust buffering. I was speaking abstractly.

I have everything in place, with the exception of one center channel speaker and the still unfinished ZenStyx. I am only using one center speaker for now. But the racks are set up with the full complement of all the amps, and the mid-fi system, along with the Comcast PVR, Apple TV, Wii, and related stuff and the two PS Audio Power Plants. A little bit of cable management, and it will be well set. Small funny diversion: when I powered everything up, my SE84ZS did not want to start up. Checked the Power Plant sockets, checked the DRS cord, and finally checked the hideaway fuses, and voilà, no fuses! Not sure how she passed bench testing, but it was a quick and amusing fix. As it is right now, it is a delight. And I think I can make room for that PW DAC/Bridge.

This will be the first of several pics. Obviously, I have some finishing to do here, what with cable management and the second ERR in the center to get done (though 3 across the font looks cool):

Is it kind of weird photo effect or I'm seeing fatter ERR's on the sides?  



PD: I think I didn't tell it before, the ERR's sound better with the grills off, and I don't like that so much...

Greg, the PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC IS only two channel output, so not sure that will help. I think you need what I think they call an "AV Processor" and I confess I know nothing about those, my whole experience with video playback is just two channel. I've never had a 5.1 or 7.1 set up. I guess your Oppo doesn't have an input?

Hey sounds like a good solution on the horizon. I'm about to head out on a motorcycle ride to my brother's wedding in Ohio and back, so I won't be online much.

Here are the two items I bought to enable full use of the Ultra as a preamp front end for my HT system. Note that these would NOT be necessary if you use the Ultra only as a front end for an HT and one or two other 2-channel sources. (Steve, if you found some other way to solve this, please let me know.) But I have two other sources (HD cable and Apple TV) that have 5.1audio worth putting through the Decware system. Yes, I could run their HDMI outputs straight into the Panasonic flat panel, but the sound coming out of flat panels generally, and the Pannys specifically, is so atrocious, and it seems quite a waste to have this sort of audio system and not get the full benefit of it.

Note also that, if any one of your sources, be it the DVD, Blu-Ray, or something else, also has control center input capabilities, you might not need this adaptation. I bought two items from HDTV Supply:

1. A 2x1 5.1 channel switcher. A 3.1 would have been more convenient, but it's not mandatory. Depending on physical layout and cabling, This will permit me to have two 5.1 sources running into the Ultra. When and if I decide to add a third, I will get one more of these. Biggest downside of these: no IR remote control. I have looked all over for one with IR, asked the vendors, etc. No luck.

2. A 4x2 HDMI-7.2 matrix switcher. This is what lets me separate the 5.1 audio channels from the HDMI supplied by the Cable and the ATV. Note that it is possible that this unit will be all I need. The folks on the phone and email—who were all great, BTW; HDTV definitely has my business for the future—sent me the user manual, and walked through it with me. We think it might be possible to plug the Blu-Ray audio out into the 4x2, along with the HDMI from the cable and the ATV. If that works, I am set, an I have remote control.

Granted, this won't be quite as automatic as the current Denon system, because everything there is remote controllable. It's pretty cool to touch one rectangle on the Harmony remote control screen, and everything turns on and is ready ro go. But quality has its price, eh?

Let me know if you have any questions. (NOTE: cross-posted in Ultra forum as well. Hope that's okay.)

Michael, thanks for the suggestion. I will check it out, but if I remember correctly, they don't disable the preamp segment, though, do they?

Anyway, the problem is two-fold: (1) the Ultra only has one set of 5.1 inputs, or inputs that accommodate all 6 audio channels of a surround system; and (2) an increasing number of A/V sources deliver hifh quality video signal through HDMI, while the component outputs often do not deliver as good a video signal (my Comcast/Motorola PVR, for example), and even if they do, the audio is typically 2-channel.

Thr Ultra is well designed for a single 5.1 front end, such as a Blu-Ray, plus three other 2-channel sources. The mixing capabilities provide ample redirection capabilities for putting that two-channel signal wherever you want it. But it's not the same as having multiple 5.1 or even HDMI inputs. In my system, I have the Blu-Ray player, which has a 5.1/7.1 and a 2.0 output, and I have the cable PVR and Apple TV. So, I need to get all those signals into the Ultra (or the Blu-Ray player, though the Oppo has no device switching capabilities).

The 4x2 HDMI matrix switcher seems to do a good job of extracting the 5.1 signals, though there is a bit of brittleness to the sound (which could all be from the source device).

The only problem I am now having is getting the Center channel to perform correctly. Even with a 5.1 signal, the only way I can get the Ultra to send out a signal is to flip the Norm/Mixed switch to Mixed. I turned out at first to have a bum (non-Decware) cable. Replacing that solved the zero output problem. But I am still not getting quite what I expect. I will get that one figured out or I will ring up Steve. It should be easy to test: pull the Matrix and input the Oppo directly to the Ultra.

Greg, thanks again for another pic and for the explanation.  I now understand better the issue.

PR, What Denon do yo have?

Thanks,
Lin

Pale, all looks very nice indeed! I am sure you will get all your bugs worked out in due time. When you tire of messing with all this multi-channel junk, I will gladly take a pair of those ERR's off of your hands! Hah! Just kidding! Again, very nice setup there! Enjoy! Tim

@Tim: thanks, they are very involving speakers. And something like the SACD of  Pink Floyd's DSOTM is pretty amazing.

Bob, I have tried to decide whether to be symmetrical or not here. I actually want to get the set up re-arranged so nothing is on either top shelf. This one of those "compromising with video" problems. If I had no viewing screen, both Toriis probably would be on the top shelf: easier to tube roll, even better ventilations (though there is plent of air flow through the racks), showing them off, etc. But with the width of my wall acting as a bit of a boundary, I cannot move the racks completely to each side of the screen. So, I raised the screen just enough to remove it from the line of sight of the top of the rack + 4 inches. Something with very clean lines like the all-black Oppo works pretty well, but the Toriis, with their prominent AC lines and ICs, are a noticeable visual distraction. If you are the one person sitting straight on to the plasma screen, you're fine, but anyone at an angle gets a bunch of Torii silhouette as part of their visual experience.

When the racks first arrived, and I set them up, I briefly thought: "Should have gotten the 36-inch height," because the lower 6 inches wold have been much easier for non-obsrruction of the video. But I soon saw the 42-inch version was indeed necessary. I could live without the extra shelf in a pinch, but not without the height. Tubes and cords need clearance. If I only had two Toriis, no problem, or maybe an Ultra and one Torii, or two SE amps. But I don't. I have the Ultra, 2 Toriis, and 2 SE amps.

I have considered putting the two Power Plants up top, but they are neither the true feature of the system, nor matched. One other factor was limiting the length of analog cable runs. I wanted to keep the Ultra and front end Torii, close to each other, and the Oppo (with its analog outs) as close to the Ultra as possible. I first tried to put all amps, preamp, and Oppo on the same rack, and that did not work. Ah well, it will get sorted.