Great Pineman!

Ahhh! Mahler's 2nd ...  one of my favorites. Glorious with my Mini-Torii in a nearfield setting when my AC power supply is behaving decently. I can only imagine how good it must sound with the 'oomph' of a ZMA. Congrats!

Congrats gentlemen! These are my second favorite speakers (afther HR-1s!) You'll love them I think.

Yeah, I think your little amp will run these newer ERRs better than my little amps ran my older model--not quite enough steam. I'm not a speaker switcher (or amp or girlfriend switcher!), and the HR-1s are THE speakers that I want all the time, but the ERR are nearly there. . . I have and could live with them as my only speaker, and they have a special thing that on other speaker I've ever heard has. And the new ones are probably even more so. You'll have a lot of fun!

Hey thanks a lot pineman!!! I'd appreciate anymore info you can add about your system or maybe answering a few of my questions. Such as how big is your listening room? I would like to buy a set of ERRx's and drive them with a ZMA. You mentioned that you were quite impressed with the sound at low volumes. Low volumes is exactly what I had in mind and in a small listening room. It is in fact a converted bedroom. I was planning to put a loveseat in there and put an area rug on the center portion of a hardwood floor. The room is maybe 14 X 16 feet and will be my listening room. Kind of an above ground man cave. I was going to use that new digital set-up of Steve's as a source first but add a turntable eventually. My Dad has a Thorens TD-160 with an SME tonearm I was going to get rebuilt but a VPI Prime would certainly work too and be much easier in the long run.  I really picture myself using this and a good headphone amp too. That is how I listen now, using tubes to drive a pair of Sennheiser HD-600. Any comments anyone can add, certainly, I'm all ears. I thought your insights were wonderfully helpful so far and thank you for them.      

Al

Welcome to the forum...

My listening room is 12 X 16, and all the speakers work well in that size room. The ERRx's can work very well in an even smaller room and still give a good sound stage. Depth beyond the front wall, with the speakers being less than three feet in front of you. Width of sound stage wider than the room with the speakers almost sitting side by side. And near field  listening can give you detail at low listening levels that I know very few speakers can pull off, all while giving you a very nice sound stage.

Hope this helps,
Zygi

Al, my listening room is 13 x 21, with the speakers firing in the short direction. This room has wall to wall carpet, 8 foot ceilings and no treatments. I had the ERRx's about 3 feet off the back wall, until I read something about trying to make the reflected signal path at least 11 feet long. So I pulled the speakers forward, and now they are about 5 feet off the back wall and about 8 feet apart. It seems the soundstage opens up as you create more distance between the speaker and the back wall.  

On that note, my impression is that my ERRx's are at their absolute best when reproducing music which was either recorded live, or was recorded to sound live, i.e. as a performance, with musicians and instruments located in a performance space.  Symphonic music sounds incredible, as does jazz. Chamber music, small ensemble performances, are utterly sublime.  There is something about the way the reflected sounds make my brain perceive the sources as located in space.  You have to hear it to appreciate it.

Conversely, recordings which consist of electronic sources or signals sent directly into the board do not create quite the same spatial magic through the ERRx's, at least not to my ears.  Perhaps because these recordings were created in a studio, with an engineer listening to a forward-firing pair of monitors, reflected sounds aren't such an integral component of the overall experience.  I think my older rock studio recordings fall into this category.  Don't get me wrong, they sound very alive and detailed; it's just that a wall of electric guitars and keyboards doesn't give me a spatial experience in the same way that a jazz combo or a string quartet does.

As for the speakers being forgiving, I would hesitate to use that term.  The ERRx with ZMA will reveal levels of detail in the music which may have not been heard previously. But a poor recording can sound worse, and a poor performance may be harder to overlook (you can really hear when a musician is pushing or dragging time). Regarding sound quality, I have come across a few older poor quality LPs which sounded so harsh it was hard to listen to them.  To be fair though, this might be more a function of my cartridge (2M Black) than the amp/speaker.  

Lastly, as to listening at low levels, the ERRx's just amaze me, offering the kind of detail I associate with headphone listening.  Here again, I can't say how much of the magic is due to the ERRx's versus the ZMA.  I just know there is a lot of magic.

As I've gotten older my musical tastes have shifted more towards classical and jazz, and I am 100% pleased with the ERRx's; if I was 25 years younger and listening to more rock music, I might want to audition some forward-firing speakers with the ZMA.

Al, I have been thinking about the idea of how a poor recording sounds on a great system. Today for Haydn's birthday, I put on some old vinyl recordings of Haydn piano sonatas recorded by Artur Balsam in 1957. The piano sounded thin and brittle, not nearly as rich as, say, Glenn Gould's recordings from the same period. But then I sat down and really listened, and... there was that soundstage, that spacious quality which the ERRx's do so well. And there were all the details and dynamics from the ZMA.  So even though the recording sounded thin and tinny, I found myself enjoying it -- on its own terms, as it were. Perhaps a beautiful performance can transcend the sonic quality of the recording.  

The addition of the ZDSD has solved this issue for me. With recordings you guys just mentioned from CD, I turn the Reference Output Volume down to -18db from -20 and turn the Input Volume down -.5 to as much as -4db. You can turn the Master Volume up and bright an brittle is gone! More density and tonal balance is provided. Furthermore, with Steve's Tranny Custom Output on the ZDSD.....nails it.

PS-my ERRx are coming by the end of April!  





Listening Room:
Room Treatments from Michael Green & Home Brew
Sony as Transport
Illuminati D-60
Decware DSD DAC / Recorder (@ -20 Ref Level @ 16/176.4)
Kimber Select KS1030 IC RCA
Decware CSP3 w/Jupiter Caps (NOS/Platinum/Telefunken 6922/CCa/7308 for input tube)
Kimber Select KS1030 IC RCA
Decware Zen Mystery Amplifier (NOS/Platinum/Matsushita / National PCC88 / 7DJ8 in A12 an B12 inputs)
Kimber Select KS3033 Speaker Cable
Vintage Polk SDA1 Speakers in Stereo (91db)
XLO Pro Power Cords to CSP3 an ZMA
PS Audio P3 Power Plant / Pangea AC-9SE from wall to P3
(Transport, ZDSD an CSP3, Regenerated/118, 119 an 120v are used/Multiwave off...ZMA on HC Output)

Decware SE84CS (NOS Svetlana SV83's from 1980's-not the New Sensor knock-offs) ...when SE Pentodes run in Triode/Decware Style...needs to be in the System!



*****Decware ERRx Speaker's coming in 3 to 4 weeks!********

**Acoustic Zen Adagio's x-over's Modded/Full Range with Mundorf MCap Supremes-on Tweets/5 or 10k cross**....should have in a week-finished

*****Pending: UFO MOD to my Decware Super Zen CKC

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, their is so much retchet' compressed stuff. Especially, 1983 through 1995 recordings. However, with the adjustments above as I mentioned.....you can get closer to the Artists because you're loving the Music....then move on. Just like when, I go out to Live Performances....I leave my Audiophile hat at home an enjoy the Music/Performance.  I also bring my Etymotic Research ear Plugs too!

It is interesting, some nights when I play some reference recordings, from Reference Recordings....Prof Johnson. They so ruin me for the night through my Decware, I can't play anything else that evening.....it can't measure up.

Happy Easter.