CurtPalme.com Home Theater sales, calibration, service, and discussion forum. Hundreds of free manuals & setup tips.
   


 
Sign up and receive the latest newsletters by email!     Join the Forum discussions!    
    Site Map  
Home Products
For Sale
FAQs, Tips,
Manuals
Referral
List
Photo
Gallery
Links Contact
Us



My CES 2007 Report

   (Page 29)

Back to Special Reports Index

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
 


 

AUDIOPHILE EQUIPMENT

Over at the Venetian/Sands was the Audiophile section of the CES show. Don’t get me wrong, I like good sounding audio as much as the next person, and can appreciate high quality equipment and speakers. The problem with a lot of what is shown in the high end area is so far over the top, I can’t justify the amount of money being spent on the equipment. Each room that I went into was playing some obscure track of a pan flute or oboe being played that I personally would never listen to, through $50K+ speakers and $30K+ speakers, and oh yes, the $5000 speaker cables and line level cables (oops, call them ‘interconnects’, not RCA cables!) are mandatory.

Many of the demo rooms had 10-12’ ceilings in them, and were almost square, so the reverberation in the rooms were high, and precious few manufacturers paid any attention to putting some sound dampening material in the rooms. To me, many of these demo rooms sounded a lot worse than they could have. After about 20 demos of high end speakers with cabinets treated with JoJoba oils and the wings of the tsetse fly found only in deepest Africa, I got tired and left the audiophile exhibit area. Funny enough, at least two rooms used 1979 vintage Technics reel to reels as an audio source (see the Audio Federation links below). I happen to own four of those reel to reel machines, so I guess that makes me 4 times audiophile as the person that only owns one?

I was witness to one speaker cable demo though that deserves mentioning. They were in the same room as Bryston amplifiers (which are indeed well built) and a power conditioning/distribution unit shown below. I’ll leave out the name of the cable company since I don’t remember it anyways, and I don’t want to get sued..:)

The premise of the speaker cable was that based on some theory given by Nikolai Tesla many years ago, they were able to actively treat the speaker cable to have ZERO capacitance over it’s length. Furthermore, they were able (according to them) to switch their active treatment of the cable on and off, so you could hear the difference. Oohhhkaaay, I’ll buy into this theory for now. However, let me geek speak for a second: Every cable has capacitance, that’s the nature of cable. In theory, if you have too much capacitance in a cable, speaker, cablevision or line level, you WILL affect the sound or picture going through the cable. Too much capacitance, and you lose the high end frequency response (the treble in audio, the fine detail in video content).

However…. Most cables have such little capacitance that even 100’ of said ordinary cable will not affect the sound quality whatsoever. According to this rep from this cable treatment company however, the differences heard in the ‘before’ and ‘after’ the active treatment were profound.

The rep told the 6 or so in the room that he would play 45 seconds of a CD through the Bryston amps with the active treatment on, then he’d stop the CD, start it over with the switch in the ‘off’ position. Fair enough.

So I listen once again to some female singer that I’ve never heard of singing some piece of music that I’ve never heard before. It starts softy, then builds to the chorus. As the chorus starts, he pauses the CD, goes over to the amplifier and turns off a switch. After about 10 seconds, he turns the CD back on again, and the chorus starts. Well wait a sec. For the most part, the music with the active treatment was soft acoustic music, now he’s switching off the active treatment at the start of a loud passage. He didn’t start the CD over to replay what we’d already heard.

After he did this twice, I asked him why he didn’t turn the active treatment on and off on the fly, without stopping the CD. The rep tells me that there is a decay and rise time as the active treatment turns on and off. Well fine, but if the difference is that profound, should we not hear a change in frequency response or the soundstage as the unit is turned on or off? He didn’t answer.

After the demo, all other 5 guys in the room claim to have heard a difference… except me. I let the other guys leave before I told him that I didn’t hear a difference. He also told me that the speaker cable that they used had minimal capacitance to it in the first place, but changing it to have zero capacitance still made a difference, and he was sorry that I didn’t hear it. I guess I’m just a poor uneducated guy that can’t possibly have good hearing…

Interestingly enough, I had a conversation with a rep from an audiophile speaker company that agreed with me. A poorly built audiophile type speaker cable with massive capacitance (yes, they are out there) can actually cause unstable audiophile amps to blow up, and that while their company uses good quality cable within their speaker cables, they don’t subscribe to the audiophile claims that the speaker cable companies claim. They use high quality copper cables in their expensive speakers.

So, go ahead and buy into some of the outlandish claims that some of these audiophile companies say they do to improve your system. I still say that a well thought out audio or video or home theater system with careful attention paid to power distribution and room acoustics/treatment will do more for your viewing and listening experience than $100 cork dots put on your back wall…

So here’s some pictures of the audiophile stuff…

Bryston: Canadian made, well built with a 20 year warranty.

The power conditioner/isolator company that was at the same room that Bryston was:

 

While the picture doesn’t really show it, that Toroid transformer is one of the largest that I’ve ever seen…

Got tube? If you’re a REAL audiophile, I guess you need tube equipment. There was lots of it at the show.


Far better coverage of the high end stuff is can be found here.

... Previous Page

Next Page ...

 
 

© Copyright CurtPalme.com. All Rights Reserved.