click to enlargeFrom Laszlo:
"Saturday 17 February 2024
I think for most people music is no more than background noise. You put in your ear buds and stream some stuff paying no attention to who’s playing and call it good. You’re “listening to music” or so you think. Discussions such as this are of no more value to them than discussions about hydroponic systems for the moon. So what follows is for those who actually listen to music in the foreground, who know who’s playing, who want to hear every note, and who actually care.
My friend and fellow audiophile, Keith Mundy, recently completed a one year project of building his music room. He started with plans created by an acoustic engineer from San Francisco who meticulously measured the room and designed a complex wall system involving sound absorption, diffusion, and reflection systems to optimize its acoustics. This involved intricately milled strips of wood, undualting forms to attenuate and diffuse sound waves of a specified lengths, as well as hidden dead air spaces under the surface treatment to act as bass traps. Keith assembled the entire project alone. All four walls and ceiling received this treatment.
He then purchased the top-of-line Sound Lab Majestic electrostatic panels which stand eight feet high and fit them into heavy tubular metal frames that he made himself for extra stability. I had listened to some music in this room a few months ago and was, needless to say, impressed. It was as good a listening space as I have ever encountered. His amplification which consists of two Sanders Magtech monoblocks of 1000 watts each being fed a signal from the Sanders solid state preamps. Roger Sanders designed these specifically to complement his electrostatic speaker systems. Hence, the combination of speaker and amps should have been producing the best possible sound. And quite honestly to your average music fan this system is an ultimate. But something bothered me: the music seemed to have a bit of a bite to it, a slightly harsh, edgy quality which I attributed to the transistor based amplification. So I suggested that I bring over my Decware all tube amplifier which I had been using for about three years in my home system. Keith said go ahead and finally on Saturday the 17th of February we were set for the test.
Just disconnecting components from my stereo rack and removing the surprisingly heavy Decware Mystery amp from the awkward bottom shelf was quite a chore. The amp itself has massive transformers on one side and vacuum tubes on the other making it a dangerously unbalanced load. Fortunately I managed to manhandle it into my Ford Escape with no problems. When I carted it into Keith’s music room we set it up near his preamp and attached interconnects. But before melding it into his system, we worked our way through a set of CDs I had brought along for the sake of revealing various audio characteristics of his system as is.
We began with the “heavy” stuff. First up was Aaron Copeland’s Billy the Kid. Track 6 on the version I brought (Colorado Symphony with Andrew Litton conductor) has several prodigious drum whacks interspersed with trumpet hockets. This is a true test of bass response. Keith’s system passed. Loud and dynamic. Next up was track 18 the final movement of Rodeo, a delightful piece of Americana which was decent enough though still a bit edgy.
Next up was Han Zimmer’s score for the movie Thin Red Line, Terrance Malik’s version of the battle for Guadacanal in the Pacific War. We played tracks 6, bass drums simulating cannon fire and 7, an elegiac impression of a battleship underway. The bass was again impressively powerful and the battleship smooth sailing.
Next we went to human voice with Leonard Cohen’s album Thanks for the Dance, track 1 Happens to the Heart. Cohen’s voice is a breathy deep bass and is more in the category of speaking than singing. It came across as you would expect from a really good hifi system but with a bit of graininess. The full tonal range was present but it somehow fell a bit short in musicality.
The final piece, and perhaps the most revealing, was from Diana Krall’s The Look of Love, track 7, Dancing in the Dark. This is a sensual experience sung as if to a lover lying in bed next to Krall: no deep bass, no piercing treble; just an alto woman’s voice and violins. On this track the issue of harsh and edgy was brought to the fore by the string accompaniment. They sounded like a simalcrum of what real strings sound like, making you say to yourself, “Oh yes. Those are supposed to be violins. The imitation is not bad.” But the true test is her voice. To reveal nuance and subtlety you must have everything just right. Krall sounded decent enough but just a bit two dimensional.
Before I go on to the comparison with the Decware Mystery amp, I want to say that my criticisms of the sound of Keith’s system have not hurt his feelings. Indeed he agrees whole heartedly with me on all points. More on this later. Also it’s important to note that prior to this comparison but after my first listen months before, Keith once again had the acoustic expert over to integrate four Pure Sound Audio subwoofers in the system (!), one behind each speaker and one on the side wall and one on the back wall. Each of these is an active ported 15” woofer shunted through a JL Audio CR-1 Active Subwoofer Crossover set at 100 hz. Hence no signal below 100 hz is sent to the Sound Lab speakers. All bass is exclusively played by the self powered subs.
We hooked up the speaker cable to my amp and turned it on. We went through the same music list starting with Diana Krall and working back to Copeland. Keith’s immediate response to Krall was “I see what you mean about the strings. They sound real. And Krall is embedded into a black background in a way that highlights her voice beautifully.” We quickly determined that in order to match the volume level with the Sander’s amps we had to increase the signal level from the preamp by quite a bit. With Keith’s amps it showed a digital “80.” With mine in place we had to turn that up to “90” or “92.” Keith had assumed that at 40 watts per channel we’d hear a dim and distant sound. Haha! What a surprise There was power to spare.
As for Leonard Cohen, he was present in the room with us. Each vowel was full and rounded. A certain paperiness had disappeared.
The bass drum whacks on Billy the Kid were as powerful as before with the 1000 watt amps but the sound image had greater density. This was also apparent on the trumpet hockets which now sounded like real trumpets rather than close imitations. Likewise on Thin Red Line simulated cannon fire was as solid as with the 1000 watt amps but the battleships steaming along were more beguiling. They were hypnotic and I wanted to hear more but we had to get through our comparison in a timely manner.
The whole time these excerpts were playing Keith and I kept looking at each other in disbelief. How could this be? How could a weak little 40 watt amp produce music so prodigious and real? Of course neither of the amps were playing deep bass. But even above 100hz there’s plenty of demanding midbass and the Decware handled it even better than the Sander’s powerhouses. On the level of charts and graphs it made no sense. But our ears were not lying.
Finally I suggested we play a track from the latest Stones album, Hackney Diamonds. This is complex music with many layers of instrumentation and voices. I asked Keith to cue up track 11, Sweet Sounds of Heaven, which has a duet with Jagger and Lady GaGa. On my home system I had difficulty hearing their voices in proper balance with the guitar tracks. Now the voices were no longer recessed. They were standing on stage right in the room with us. Bass guitar was impressive not oppressive. There was a flow and a musicality that made me think that we were hearing exactly what the sound engineer wanted us to hear. The elaborate room treatment, the giant speakers the exquisite electronics had conspired to produce not a reproduction of sound but direct experience of an event. I had encountered the holy grail of audio.
Keith looked at me once again. “Now you’ve done it. Looks like I’m going to have to get a tube amp. My wife will kill me.”
-Laszlo"
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