Speaker Oasis...Bionor

[beaur]

I am in Brooklyn so fairly close by. While I have seen/heard one of these in the wild it was some time ago and I am not expert on what they were like originally. If anyone is serious I could respond and try to get there for a listen/look.

Beau

Just as an FYI I received a reply form the owner saying there will be an audition today for those who have made serious offers. If anyone here is serious I can follow up but it appears there's is at least bait on the line.

Beau

 

[Exlibris]

I'm kinda in the Dave camp ie discovering the irreplaceable joy of SETs, and minded to find the best combination to suit them, Zus or horns. Indeed I'm spending a lengthy period of time investigating a bespoke set of horns to suit my particular room/musical interests/design ethos, that will take some time to possibly become a practical concern
BUT...the best sound I've yet heard from the Cessaro Liszts, indeed any horns (in my admittedly limited experience), was with Class A SS ie Bakoon 15W/ch, NOT tubes
The worst was the same speakers with 700W/ch Class D MolaMola
Meh was the Liszts with Tron 211s

This suggests to me to retain an open mind/be agnostic, on the whole subject of ribbons v horns v box spkrs, and the best amps to drive them

Ie despite my pleasure centres so drawn to SETs and the speakers most likely to work best with them, if I can love Liszts and Bakoon Class A SS, there should be no reason I should be reticent to the idea of ribbons where SS is the clever partner

Once I discovered SETs there was no going back. The 'problem' is finding a speaker I can drive. No, actually the problem is trying to fit a drivable speaker into my apartment.

 

[bonzo75]

I am in Brooklyn so fairly close by. While I have seen/heard one of these in the wild it was some time ago and I am not expert on what they were like originally. If anyone is serious I could respond and try to get there for a listen/look.

Beau

You should listen to it anyway. I don't know how to mod it to.230v. If it makes you melt, it's the real thing

 

[bonzo75]

With 6 days to go this will cross 20k easily

 

[Zero000]

"Shrewdly, Mr. Kurosawa has equipped his listening room with a wide variety of speakers of every kind—from dynamics to ‘stats to ribbons to horns—so I got a chance to listen to his electronics on just about every kind of transducer extant (with both LP and CD sources). Clearly the Technical Brain products are anything but picky when it comes to what they drive. In fact, the very best sound I heard in Japan (right alongside that of the all-tube Audio Tekne electronics driving Mr. Imai’s SP-9301S four-way horns) came from the Technical Brain solid-state amp and preamp driving what is, famously, one of the most difficult loads on earth: Apogee Duettas. One forgets how great Jason Bloom’s ribbon speakers were, and I’ve never heard them sound more realistic, more like the absolute sound than I did in Mr. Kurosawa’s Canadian-timber listening room. Reproduced sound may get different but it doesn’t get better than this."

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/art...n-part-four-solid-state-from-technical-brain/

That room looks like a disaster - way too much clutter. The chap doesn't know what he is talking about WRT driving Duettas, and the Duettas have gone yellow LOL. Heavy pipe smoker?

Not seen that web page for a few years.

 

[morricab]

Everything perverts, speakers pervert more than electronics.

In absolute quantity this is a true statement but in terms of destructive effect on the sound I do not agree. Electronic distortions are far more difficult to mask as our evolutionary systems did not evolve with them. Mechanical sounds are easier psychoacousticly to deal with.

 

[microstrip]

I am in Brooklyn so fairly close by. While I have seen/heard one of these in the wild it was some time ago and I am not expert on what they were like originally. If anyone is serious I could respond and try to get there for a listen/look.

Beau

Independently of condition at us 5100 it is a bargain - please bid 5200, get some pictures and I will then dispute with bonzo75 who gets it from you!

Even fakes go much higher than us 6000.

FIY please see the replica in these photos http://www.lencoheaven.net/forum/index.php?topic=6280.15

 

[Zero000]

I have owned Apogee Duetta's for some time. Listening to Paul Simon Graceland LP played at loud levels was an unique experience - I do not expect to reproduce it with any other system I will own. But with many other recordings they were far from being the best. And the few times they had magic it was at what people call realistic levels. But at "reasonable" levels they sounded just decent most of the time. All IMHO, YMMV..

Curious. I've just been playing it via TIDAL's 25th Re-issue on my Duettas and it sounds like junk. The track Graceland - the vocals are pretty badly affected by sibilance. My 2nd system says the same.

The first track sounds just dire.

YMMV indeed LOL.

No offense intended - take it light heartedly, please. Tis curious though.

 

[morricab]

With that statement you're inferring both that there's no real natural sound in the world and all electronics sound the same because they don't pervert.



Nothing to do with personal opinion or preference, nothing to argue there but you can't tell me that when all things are equal a SET & a high powered ss amplifier reproduce the same acoustic bass the exactly same or anywhere close to each other. I'll even take both perverted but the degrees are different.

david

Not even the degrees, the fundamental type of distortion is different. The SS amps are much further away in what is psychoacousticly acceptable.

 

[FrantzM]

Not even the degrees, the fundamental type of distortion is different. The SS amps are much further away in what is psychoacousticly acceptable.

Could you clarify this statement?

 

[microstrip]

Curious. I've just been playing it via TIDAL's 25th Re-issue on my Duettas and it sounds like junk. The track Graceland - the vocals are pretty badly affected by sibilance. My 2nd system says the same.

The first track sounds just dire.

YMMV indeed LOL.

No offense intended - take it light heartedly, please. Tis curious though.

Yes, even at that time the vocals sounded very poor and edgy in the CD. I remember my disappointment the first time I listened to it. But the LP is great sounding.

 

[microstrip]

Independently of condition at us 5100 it is a bargain - please bid 5200, get some pictures and I will then dispute with bonzo75 who gets it from you!

Even fakes go much higher than us 6000.

FIY please see the replica in these photos http://www.lencoheaven.net/forum/index.php?topic=6280.15

The twin brother: http://soundpit27.exblog.jp/iv/detail/?s=21477239&i=201311%2F16%2F49%2Fb0262449_21525768.jpg

 

[thedudeabides]

The SS amps are much further away in what is psychoacousticly acceptable.

And the basis, proof of your assertion is?

 

[Zero000]

Yes, even at that time the vocals sounded very poor and edgy in the CD. I remember my disappointment the first time I listened to it. But the LP is great sounding.

I was puzzled when I played it. I actually have the LP but the analogue rig is out of the room at the mo. I do remember that sounding good.

I Googled the Thorens Ref Chinese copy. I remember raising a thread on it. It was in 2011. The copy cost £15K and it did look like the genuine article. One wonders if some are being passed off as that. If they ever sold any, that is.

 

[morricab]

And the basis, proof of your assertion is?

Research on the specific topic of amp distortion and audibilty. Look up Ceever and Geddes papers for starters. If you don't understand what you are reading I can explain but do some reading first. Geddes looks at mechanisms within amplifiers that cause amps to deviate from linearity and correlates with listeners. Cheever looks at the hear mechanism and masking and derives a metric from this that is also amplitude dependent.

 

[thedudeabides]

Audibility is subjective since everyone hears sounds differently.

But I appreciate research that tries to explain a subjective experience in an objective manner.

Suspect many SOTA SS amp designers would likely disagree.

 

[FrantzM]

Research on the specific topic of amp distortion and audibilty. Look up Ceever and Geddes papers for starters. If you don't understand what you are reading I can explain but do some reading first. Geddes looks at mechanisms within amplifiers that cause amps to deviate from linearity and correlates with listeners. Cheever looks at the hear mechanism and masking and derives a metric from this that is also amplitude dependent.

Links to these, would be much appreciated.

 

[morricab]

Audibility is subjective since everyone hears sounds differently.

But I appreciate research that tries to explain a subjective experience in an objective manner.

Suspect many SOTA SS amp designers would likely disagree.

The research shows that people hear more the same than different and that there aspects of distortion that are clearly more offensive to most listeners than others.

Naturally with all biological systems there will be some exceptions but Geddes got a quite high correlation.

Conditioning will also impact what people consider "natural" sound.

The mechanics of hearing are basically the same in all people as are the brain functions that result in masking so it is not surprising that a good correlation is possible if the distortions are audible.

 

[morricab]

Audibility is subjective since everyone hears sounds differently.

But I appreciate research that tries to explain a subjective experience in an objective manner.

Suspect many SOTA SS amp designers would likely disagree.

With regard to SOTA SS amps, it used to be that their goal was to push the level of distortion down to a level where it was "inaudible"...except that it really wasn't because the main cure for distortion, negative feedback, apparently doesn't work psychoacousticaly as expected. That has to do with how it creates and shifts the harmonic order from low to high and creates a pattern never seen in nature. The pinnacle of this was Halcro and is now probably Soulution or a few others out there. However, there are several others, like Pass and darTZeel that have gone with much less negative feedback and you can see this clearly in STereophile measurements. This has sonic consequences as well but interestingly seems to be at least as well received. NONE of them have anything close (except perhaps the Pass Class A amps) to what Cheever (and much earlier Jean Hiraga) would have considered a "natural" harmonic progression.

Keith Howard also did an interesting test where he wrote some computer code to add distortion to a digital music file. He could put all kinds of patterns at many different levels to simulate amplifier distortion. You can read this article online at Stereophile. He found that the undistorted file sounded the best but the least destructive was a monotonic pattern with alternating even and odd harmonics in an exponential decay of level, which is the pattern of a good SET. The worst was the all odd order distortion, which is typical of a Class AB push pull amplifier with negative feedback. DarTZeel has a picket fence of low and high order harmonics at about the level regardless of order (see Soundstage measurements for this amplifier by googling NHB108 and soundstage review).

So, while the SS designers can disagree (Nelson Pass actually seems to more or less agree though) the results of tests indicate that they should pay more attention to psychoacoustic properties.

 

[morricab]

Links to these, would be much appreciated.

http://dancheever.com/main/cheever_thesis_final.pdf

http://www.gedlee.com/downloads/Distortion_AES_I.pdf

http://www.gedlee.com/downloads/Distortion_AES_II.pdf

http://www.stereophile.com/reference/406howard/#oYgmJM1yF3xlQvjy.97