California Audio Show 2014

[cjfrbw]

First stop was Gary's Genesis Dragon Jr. room. Had a nice chat with Jack Roberts of Dagogo who was cleaning his records in the KL record toaster.

Genesis Dragon Jr. are gorgeous, with great fit and finish as one would expect. They definitely hearken back to the large Infinity panels of old. The also have three tweeters rear firing for mid/high dispersion.

I brought my 50c uncleaned thrift copy of Al Di Meola's "Casino" LP. Got to hear it before and after cleaning on the KL LP toaster. Noticed mostly lower mids and highs clearing up a bit.

I really liked the speakers. Sound image perfect size, not artificially expanded, but scaled very well with source. High frequencies and mids fast and subtle. When dynamic impact was in the source, the hit was there without compression. They really made my LP come alive, and could hear source differences in the various LP's played.

Amps were Genesis class D. I haven't really taken a shine to Class D in the past, but the high frequencies were good and these amps didn't have the dusky haze of earlier Class D amps I have heard.

What I really wanted to do when I went to the rest of the show was to drag Sony's 40th Anniversary VFET amp built by Nelson Pass down to the Genesis room and the Melody 101D directly heated triode preamp from the Melody room for the DHT preamp/VFET/Genesis Dragon Jr. combo. Alas, just wishful thinking.

Gary and Carol were wonderful hosts, as usual, and just about everything Gary says is a mini seminar on high end audio.

 

[cjfrbw]

This audio visual group from the Bay Area had a couple of systems, but the one playing was the big JBL speakers with nouveau-Levinson amplification. Sounded very good, indeed, probably better than any of the JBL horn demos I have heard so far, and easily filled the enormous room. Sound image a bit larger than life, which one might expect from the breed.

 

[cjfrbw]

Acoustic Zen were displaying solid state amplification and a distributed music system when I was there, no tubes visible, but still sounded quite good.

 

[cjfrbw]

What can you say about SoundLabs except WOW! If you have the gymnasium to house these guys you will get it all: dynamics from whisper soft to explosive, detail, speed, and subtlety.
The Ayre amplifiers were quite small aluminum blocks, but the vendor was a little hush hush about topology, couldn't say if they were D, AB etc. because I guess they are supposed to be proprietary hybrids. Sounded good, but maybe the old fashioned OTL amps generally used with stats might sound better.

 

[cjfrbw]

Wilson was displaying it's relatively diminutive Sasha II with ARC Ref 75's. One of the first times I liked this kind of Wilson, mostly with less demanding material. When he played a complex dynamic piece from Tosca at high volume, they began to sound a little wonky and I was suffering Maxx-Alexandria withdrawal. The room was very large, so it was probably just too much air volume for the speakers. Oddly, when I looked at the VU meters with my binoculars, even playing that loud, the meters were nowhere near the overload area, so it wasn't the amplification.

 

[rbbert]

Acoustic Zen were displaying solid state amplification and a distributed music system when I was there, no tubes visible, but still sounded quite good. View attachment 16869

They exhibited this way in Newport Beach also; a DAC with a wireless connection to a pair of tiny Class D "monoblocks", easily small enough to fit inside the speaker if desired. Sound good enough to challenge any number of preconceptions.

 

[cjfrbw]

Didn't spend a lot of time at the headphone exhibits, crowds etc., but got a chance to hear the wonderful Eddie Current 3 watt, paralleled 45 tubed amp with some planar magnetic HE-5, great sound. The solid state version probably has 75 percent of the sound quality at one fourth the price.

This is the best I have heard the Blue Hawaii Stax head amp, played with reel to reel, maybe because of the Shuguang Black Treasure EL-84's, but it sounded great with Stax 007 and 009, the 009 wasn't as tizzy as I remember in the past.

Still like my home brew transformer/Wavac/SR-5n bizarro headset better, the narcosis is deeper.

 

[cjfrbw]

Another exemplary performance by YG Acoustic and Loggie audio. Amps weren't the Ypsilons, but the sound was still a very coherent and intriguing, albeit not the voluptuary type but more the audiophile skeleton type done right. I love the power supply tubes that flicker during transients and peaks.

 

[cjfrbw]

Zu Audio just gets better and better from show to show that I have been to. The guys said they had very little lead time to set up this room, but still were getting fantastic sound from a pair of Nelson Pass First Watt SIT amplifiers. It is IMPOSSIBLE to believe that you are listening to ten watts, the SIT amps are just so coherent and large imaging, with outstanding tonality, transient decay and dynamics. I wanted to come back and hear the tube amp, and also spend more time listening to the SIT amps, but just forgot because I got caught up with the Sony demos and the SIT's brethren VFET amps.

 

[cjfrbw]

I am sounding like a skipping record, but this Dynaudio demo room also sounded really good to me.

 

[cjfrbw]

OK, I'll say it, I won't designate a "Best in Show" sound because there were just so many good sounding rooms to me, rooms that any audiophile would be proud of and representing good synergy.

However I WILL say that my favorite was the Sony exhibit this time.

I was astounded when walking in to see a big ole hunk of amplifier aluminum with VFET emblazoned across the front. I thought, aha, Sony is going to start manufacturing VFET devices again! Seeing this amp was worth the whole visit to the show.

Unfortunately, no, Sony is not making VFETs again (yet?). The amps presented at the Sony display are VFET "unobtanium" since Sony must have gone into it's dusty warehouse and pulled out a bunch of the older VFETs and gave them to Nelson Pass to construct their 40th anniversary VFET amp. They have no price and are not for sale. Nelson Pass made only five pairs.

I am hoping that this means Sony is considering the manufacture of these devices again with another VFET amp product line.

Without a lot of circuit knowledge, they appear to employ about six push pull pairs of VFETs per side of the amp, flanked by a four non-VFET transistors, maybe voltage regulators or FET drivers.

I meant to look at the back of the amps, to see if they were stereo that could also be doubled up in mono, but I forgot. Sony was running the demo pair as monoblocks and the Japanese representative said they were 200 watts per channel.

This means that the VFETs are run very conservatively, because a pair usually is good for 30 watts push pull, and twelve pairs should easily put out 360 watts with a 3db overhead, doubling the power on transients.

I am currently running three VFET amps from the late 70's in my main home system, a Yamaha B2 for my bass panels, and a pair of Sony TA 4650s for my surrounds. They have successfully replaced my previous tube amps in those positions with a marked improvement in overall sound quality. With the main speakers (active crossovers) the trick is to interleave directly heated triode preamp stages in-between the transistorized stages, as observed by Six Moon's Srajan Ebaen's brainstorm that the best amplification now is probably SIT amps with Directly Heated Triode preamps. I agree with this observation. On my Analysis Epsilon midrange ribbon, I also now run a non-Vfet Nelson Pass M2 First Watt amp driven from a mercury vapor rectified 26 DHT tubed preamp. Sublime.Who would have thought that certain transistor amps and DHT tube drivers would be one the best audio synergies extant. I am a hard core tube guy, and pulling me away from my precious tube amps is no mean feat.

These VFET beasts were operated with the Nelson Pass transistor preamp, I think the XP 20. However, I think if you could get ahold of these VFET amps and run them with a directly heated triode preamp like the Allnic L5000, you would just be done, as long as your speaker du jour was 4 ohms or higher.

How did they sound? I just went back over and over and spent a lot of my listening time at the show in front of the Sony-Pass display.
They just do everything right, space, location, size, dynamics, tonality. The upper midrange is very natural and DEEP. I got synthesesia and started thinking of colors as I heard upper midrange and high frequencies. Similar to listening to my Yamaha B-2 VFET full range through my bass panels, only more and better. The Pass-Sony VFET amps were butt glue for me, the kind of dreamy, forever sound that I like. I would just love to hear them with a DHT preamp link. Source material was DSD and Hi Res digital, so I would also like to hear them with vinyl. The turntable wasn't functioning in the display.

Editing note: I found the Pass monograph on the VFET amps and read it. Yes, they are monos with 24 devices in push pull pairs per mono block. The power rating is for Class A, apparently, rather than AB, thus the conservative rating (very Nelson Pass-like). I am surprised they are Class A, because I put my hand on them and found them to operate warm but not really hot hot hot. They did have some kind of shutdown during one of the demos, so maybe hair trigger safety circuitry?
Also, by way of attribution, I gather this was a project Nelson Pass embarked on his own by obtaining a supply of the old Sony VFETs and not a joint collaboration, at least not at first.

 

[cjfrbw]

More Sony-Pass pix:

 

[cjfrbw]

The Magico room, displaying the S5, was more diminutive than previous CAS setups but the sound, again, was very good. I have "liked" all the Magico speakers that I have heard without necessarily "loving" them because with some amps they could sound a bit stark. It seems that Magico put a little more lower midrange flow into this one, which may be less accurate but is aurally more pleasing. A very nice speaker, although I did not hear it real loud, so no clue as to dynamic capabilities.

 

[cjfrbw]

I wish I had photographed the door info, even the CAS booklet doesn't mention Tannoy speakers, this was an AV guy/audiophile and he was showing streaming hi def video from you tube and the internet with compressed music. He had a tubed old school VTL pair of mono blocks, but they weren't used when I was in the room, just the solid state and streaming stuff. The Sim2 projector has done wonders with UHP bulb color correction, reds, blues and whites were almost xenon-like. He also showed a mesmerising Amy Winehouse concert in hi def, and the compressed MP3 music sounded good, not really compressed at all. The Tannoys sounded pretty good, too, not as throaty as a lot of Tannoys I have heard.

It may have been one of the SF Audiovision rooms, they had a couple I think.

 

[JackD201]

I'm really happy you survived the surfing so you could share this Carl

The VFET/SIT stuff is very interesting. There's a company in Japan called Digital Do Main (No typos ) that are reportedly making their own transistors for their amps.

 

[audioarcher]

Thanks for the pics and commentary on the show Carl.

 

[MtnHam]

"What can you say about SoundLabs except WOW! If you have the gymnasium to house these guys you will get it all: dynamics from whisper soft to explosive, detail, speed, and subtlety.
The Ayre amplifiers were quite small aluminum blocks, but the vendor was a little hush hush about topology, couldn't say if they were D, AB etc. because I guess they are supposed to be proprietary hybrids. Sounded good, but maybe the old fashioned OTL amps generally used with stats might sound better."





As the Sound Lab dealer exhibiting the Majestic 945PX electrostatic speakers at CAS5, I need to say that I am not an Ayre dealer, and thus not the "vendor". Ayre, on their website, give details and specs on the MXR's, but say nothing as to it's class. We simply use them because we believe they do an excellent job. Many attendees commented they felt we had the best sound at the show.

The Majestics are the largest of all the Sound Lab models, and indeed are too large for many homes. However, the Ultimate, Millennium and Audiophile models all fit nicely in the usual sized listening room, and deliver all the same qualities of the larger panels.

 

[puroagave]

View attachment 16888

there's something sexy about seeing all those metal case TO-3 type transistors...call it old school or whatever, I dig it.

 

[rsbeck]

Thanks for the pics and the write-up. I enjoyed the show. Lots of interesting stuff. I found myself returning and spending a lot of time in the Acoustic Zen room. I found the Crescendos really captivating and the sound in that room held me more than any other room.

 

[garylkoh]

Genesis Dragon Jr. are gorgeous, with great fit and finish as one would expect. They definitely hearken back to the large Infinity panels of old. The also have three tweeters rear firing for mid/high dispersion.

I really liked the speakers. Sound image perfect size, not artificially expanded, but scaled very well with source. High frequencies and mids fast and subtle. When dynamic impact was in the source, the hit was there without compression. They really made my LP come alive, and could hear source differences in the various LP's played.

Thanks, Carl. It was great to see you again. I'm glad you enjoyed the speakers.

What was a real treat was we had a recording artist come with her master tapes and she got up and sang together with herself. That was truly music coming alive!!

The other WBF member who came to hang out was Ron Party - who was lucky enough to be sitting close enough to the singer to hear her voice.

I had a great show - more so because of the great friends who came over and hung out with us spinning music. The California Audio Show is one of the smaller ones in the US, but this just gives everybody more time to spend more time in the rooms that they liked.

I was told that there were other great rooms. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to go and visit with Tom and his Soundlabs. I was told that it was magnificent. Because Lyn Stanley was in my room at the end of each day talking about her album (and I was in charge of putting the tape machine to play), I couldn't go and visit. But everybody who came to tell me how good the Soundlabs were sounding said the same thing - "Gary, next year lend him your 1,440W amplifiers!!"

Other people came and told me to borrow the Pass-designed VFET amplifiers next year

Guess you can't please all of the people all of the time.

In all, from the feedback received, some people (not everybody) thought that we had the best sounding room. Congratulations to all exhibitors, and the organizers. I look forward to the show again next year.