2003 Decware Zen Fest Report
 

The 2003 fest was our first and turned out to be such a success that we're seriously considering making it an annual event! There WAS a thread in our forums with many comments from people who attended.  You could find it at the following link: DECKSTOCK ZENFEST - however I accidentally deleted it, so this year we'll start another one!

Here is a general overview of what actually took place:

For me the event actually started on Thursday night, our normal jam night out in the studio where this event was to be held.  After a tedious week of preparation I felt like everything that had to get done was done and I could finally take a breather and relax for an evening.   Bob, our cabinet maker's plane got in that afternoon so he was here. Dennis, builder of all the Zen Triode Integrated amplifiers arrived with a keg and before you knew it, we had Heineken on tap!  My creative alter ego Paul came by and frankly at least 3 of us accidentally got plowed.

It took a few aspirins to shake off the haze on Friday morning, but by noon I was feeling fine.  The first people to arrive came from the Chicago area bearing custom made DECWARE T-shirts, all black with white lettering, they boasted the Decware logo on the front and my tag line "If the 1st watt sucks, why continue?" across the back.  Look for these in our catalog soon.

A simple trip to the gas station to get ice lead me on a ridiculous journey that ended at Krogers because I decided I wanted donuts.  A 40 minute wait behind 3 old ladies at the checkout proved to be a new personal best for me in the execution of patients.  When I returned a few more people were starting to arrive and a somewhat nasty cold front was showing sines of moving on promising a warm and sunny weekend.

As people began to accumulate on Friday evening, Bob and I started taking them up to the shop in small groups to spin some vinyl.  It was fun to show everyone our shop and blindfold them one at a time before allowing them to enter the listening room.  For this demonstration, which was mostly about imaging and sound stage, I used my original corner horns, a single Zen Triode Select amp and the ZP2.0 phono stage to drive it. This demo is very effective at unmasking the possibilities for sound stage depth and width, not to mention clarity, image specificity and the undeniable benefits of proper room treatments.

Each "victim" was placed in the listening chair blindfolded having never seen the room before and allowed to hear two songs and then asked to open their eyes. In every case you could see the human brain short-out as the reality of walls, speakers and close proximity caved in on them!  

Personally it was important  to me to let everyone experience this because this was and is my listening room.  I thought it important to let everyone hear my personal hi-fi system.  Even if they didn't care for it's signature, at least everyone would get some insight into where I firmly stand in my own preferences. There were a couple who didn't completely care for it, but the overwhelming majority seemed rather impressed.

At the same time people got to hear the corner horns we also swung the chair around and let them hear my Acoustat monitors.  These apparently also made quite a favorable impression on many of the people who heard them as you can tell from the forum comments.  And we can't forget the turntable.  My secret mission to demonstrate the purity of sound over that of a great DAC.  The Teres table combined with the Fidelity Research silver wired tone arm and low output MC cartridge made by the same company is a respectable force to recon with.  I could see it in the faces of at least 1/2 the people who listened that they got it!

Meanwhile back at the studio things were in full swing with perhaps 20 people setting around and at least that many different pieces of audio gear.  The acoustics of the studio are rather good, being on lively side.  This is a nice complement to my reference room that is slightly on the dead side.  I believe the studio to be probably more representative of a speakers actual performance than my reference room if you look at things from a real world perspective.

In that light, I was not too happy with my small 0.75 cubic foot Fostex cabinet as a stand alone design.  It just came of too dry for my tastes.  In my reference room, with the Vinyl as a front end, I think it's almost perfect.  In the same room, I tried the Lothx that Brad sent and didn't care for them - I thought they sounded a bit ragged around the edges.  After taking them to the studio, I actually liked them a bit better.  Apparently, the small Fostex cabinet went over reasonably well with those who attended and the Lothx didn't.  There were many little surprises like that throughout the event.

The new full size towers that I designed are working very well with the Fostex driver and I noticed over the course of the show that they were played considerably more than all of the other speakers there.  

One of the reasons this room can't be taken seriously as a representation of the average consumers listening/living room is the way we set it up for bass control. Besides building an 8 x 12 raised floating floor bass trap that all the gear sat on, we also put a pair of Imperial folded horns across the rear of the stage and set them up as subs. These also act like bass traps for the higher bass notes - no, more like bass sponges.  A low end of a speaker that rolls off above 50Hz gets all but lost from the trapping, but a speaker that tunes in at or below around 40Hz creates a nice sympathetic resonance with the subs that offsets the trapping.

The subs in themselves were a neat thing to demo.  They integrated well with 8 out of 10 speakers and convey a sense of weight that does not exist in small ported boxes. I'm sure everyone will remember them for a long time!

Friday night was to be our scheduled cable wars but some of the key players wouldn't be arriving until Saturday so we just listened to different gear combinations all night. I don't believe anyone who came on Friday actually brought any electronics, so the original Zen Triode amp (SE84C) ended up being the work horse most of the evening.  Since so many people buy the tweaked version of nicknamed the "Select" (SE84CS) I think many were a little surprised by the original's good performance and musicality.  

Things finally wound down to a stopping point sometime after 2:00 AM and completely de-stressed I think everyone got a good nights sleep.  

Saturday things started rather interesting for me.  A couple of the guys ended up crashing here at the house, specifically down in the boys room aka basement. Now, If you remember from the "tour of High Fidelity's place" here on the web site, this is the room where I let a spontaneous urge get the best of me some years ago and built a concrete horn around my furnace.  While it has not been in service since shortly after I finished cracking my basement with it, it does still live and breath down there.  In fact, it naturally amplifies all low frequency sounds to where you can hear and feel it throughout our house.  And this is relevant to what?  Consider what happens when your sitting on the toilet in the morning and suddenly a bass note from hell rips through the floor and your not sure what caused it!  This is apparently what happens when a grown man snores in the same room with the horn.

By noon, things were in full swing again and new people began to show up as did more gear and speakers!  The day was spent in a relaxed rotation of gear and more personal ventures to my listening room at the shop for those who didn't get to hear it on Friday. By Friday night the weather was perfect, and we all feasted on great food done on the grill - no to exclude Paul's fresh caught catfish that we fried.  BTW,  said to be the worlds BEST catfish, for this years fest, Paul has caught 538 keepers!

As promised, Saturday evening around 11:00 p.m.... we put our toys away and committed to some live music.  I knew Dave, who played a variety of acoustic instruments including the Hurdy-Gurdy, came prepared to entertain everyone so at least we would have something decent to record.  Oddly enough none of the 20 some other musicians who randomly show up at our jams were anywhere to be found so Paul, Dave and Myself got left holding the bag.  We played two short sets doing nothing but free form blues (with perhaps a little more kick) and let Dave have the hour between sets where he inspired all of us with his Hurdy Gurdy using weed whacker string, his fiddle, a banjo, small bag pipes and a very cool leather drum for which I can't remember the actual name.

We ran 4 hours of tape, recorded live two track analog using two Crown PZM mikes with preamps and a single vocal mike located up by the stage feeding the monitors.  None of the instruments, ie., Paul's bass, Dave's Gibson 335, or my Drum kit were miked.  I thought this would give people a chance who were there to evaluate their gear on a recording they actually attended.  We later found out Sunday evening that the recording came out very well.  I'm going to transfer it to CD and make copies available to everyone who attended.

After the live music, things shifted back to listening for a few more hours, I guess about 4:30 AM is when it died.  I hope they weren't too smashed to witness the magic hour because I was in bed long before that.

Sunday morning (while Paul was still passed out on Dave's Violin) those who didn't have to leave went out to breakfast, I think about 12 of us.   After making a lucky waitress (who was very good btw) the new record holder for best tip, we returned to the studio and played with gear and helped people pack who had to leave.  We also took this opportunity to listen to a variety of cables in a blind A/B scenario. The results were productive in that everyone got some insight from it.

Sunday late afternoon we decided to play the tapes from Saturday night and I have to say for me that was probably the highlight of the whole event. Not only did it sound respectably good, everyone got a real charge out of seeing themselves walking around on the video.  For some reason all the jokes told during the recording were twice as funny on playback!

As for the gear we manufacture everyone got to hear the SE84CS or Torii with my corner horns and the RL-2's in my listening room.  They also got to hear the ZSLA-1 with the ZP2.0 phono stage driving my Acoustats.  The new signature monoblocks (SV83S) and soon to be available matching preamp were very well received.  The Zen Plate ZSP-1 was used frequently throughout the event with a variety of amps.  The SE34-I was run for a few hours on Saturday.  The Decware modified Pioneer 343 DVD player with a tube output was used exclusively as the only digital source for the entire event.  Everyone obviously liked it our it would have been swapped out for something else I'm sure.

A speaker that I didn't mention was a 0.35 cubic foot two-way cabinet using $10.00 worth of drivers.  Power handling is 10 watts, efficiency 94 dB.  This was a demonstration to illustrate how easy it can be to get great sound out of a little Zen Triode amplifier without spending any real money on speakers.  It was very effective, and frankly I'm considering adding them to our product line some day. These little speakers sound warm and track a bass line down to 45 Hz so they still sound very good without a sub - which is how they were demonstrated.

Right now I'm still waiting to see what pictures show up as those who brought cameras start to post in the forums.  I took a few shots myself, so watch for some to be appended to this page in the coming weeks.

Cheers and our heartfelt thanks to all those who attended - we had a wonderful time and especially enjoyed meeting everyone and having enough time to get to know everyone a little better.

Steve, DeVon and the staff of Decware.