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For months now I have been babysitting these beauties. They belong to a good friend who started out as one of my big brother's elementary school buddies and later became my colleague from 2001 to 2004 and again in 2016. COC is a fun guy and we share manny interests. We're both big foodies, like to travel to the same cities, annd are both petrol heads albeit he takes it a lot further as he still races in various cups. Obviously, listeninng to music is also something we have in common.
These 3 ways are made by Victor Sierra formerly of Sierra Brooks. Brooks being Kevin Brooks. Between the late 90's and early 2000's Vic and Kevin who he calls his mentor, did a bunch of crazy horn systems. Vic came home to the Philippines in I think 2004 and it was in 2005 that I got to meet him when I delivered some Lamm gear to a mutual friend in Cebu, the Princess City of the South. Beautiful place, wonderful people. My friend took me to Vic's place and there I lost my horn virginity. Not only was I shocked at the sheer size of his all ALE'D out personal speakers, I was shocked at how cohesive he had made it all. It was my first time to see a lot of things from Duelund caps to crazy looking tubes throughout the chain. Soft spoken for the most part but a real hoot when he gets going, Keith and I felt the visit all too brief.
Vic came home to take care of their family businesses and so he sold his then fledgling dynamic speaker company out of Utah to a South Korean concern and had to end his partnership with Kevin who he tells me has retired to Florida. I lost touch with Vic but I would hear that he was up to more of his crazy stuff like accidentally miscalculating his property lines thereby ending up with the ends of his built in horns in his cousin's property LOL Yes he did those out of the house built in horns in the US and he did that for himself too eventually. I bumped into him at the local show three Novembers ago and it was quite the reunion. We got to talking. He decided to join the next show and that is where the prototypes of the speakers above made their Manila debut. The next year he went big, (These speakers are currently his smallest creations) no he didn't go all out as that would have meant busting through the walls of the Dusit-Thani Makati but he did go plenty big with Field Coils. Make a long story short my buddy COC fell in love with them and had this pair built.
COC is still in the process of building his new house which will have two dedicated rooms. These will be in his mid-sized room which will be around 50sqm and the other loft type space will be around 85sqm and will have his pair of Ultra 11s. Electronics for his horns will be custom built by a builder whose name I can't pronounce from Eastern Europe. The Ultra 11s will have Constellation gear.
Anyway, it has been tough being without a big rig. My bedroom system is IMO very good but my vinyl and turntables are downstairs. Attempts to set up a smaller TechDAS were summarily vetoed by a higher power. As luck would have it COC's speakers were finished and he asked if he could listen to them in my room because he wanted to hear them in an acoustically built room. I said "Hell Yeah!" and Vic flew a couple of his guys to do initial set up and Vic flew in a couple of days later to wire everything up.
The wood work is impeccable. No surprise as Cebu City has a very rich heritage of fine wood working and artisanship and is home to world famous luxury furniture houses such as Kenneth Cobonpue and french owned Dedon. Driver wise the midrange compression drivers are hand built using parts from three different manufacturers, with parts custom machined to Vic's specs. The tweeter is a vintage piece, unmodified and the 10" woofer in the five foot front firing horn likewise minimally tweaked. The midrange horn is a shallow one meant for dispersion optimized for normal listening distances. Painstakingly calculated, built and finished not only is there a complete absence of horn coloration but also the annoying chuff turbulence inaudible from distance but you sometimes get when forced to listen to long throw horns from less than 10 feet. The XO as minimal as can be with just a single duey cap and a graphite resistor in each driver's path and Duey internal wiring.
Vic is full of surprises indeed. At the time the only tube amps I had on hand were a pair of 100 wpc Kronzillas. A bbit overkill for 107dB efficient speakers backed up by a pair of RELs. Well it had to do so I figured, ok, let's tube this whole system out. In came a KR P135 with 45 tubes and what the heck, an Allnic H3000 with Mullard Recti for Phono duty. All set up and we were enjoying spinning the black gold but Vic said he just needed to hear some of his own tracks which he was most familiar with. Just three songs he said, a jazz track, a violin track and a Jose Carreras track. Sure I said with my hand out stretched and he handed me three circuit boards held together with rubber bands. WTF? He asked if I had a SPDIF cable so he could hook that up to the CH C1. I know this guy well enough not to argue so off I went rummaging and I did that for him. He proceeds to plug a phone USB powerbank into his card deck sized, rubber banded boards, hooks up his transport, whips out his phone which turned out to be his remote for said rubber banded contraption and I'll bbe friggin' darned. Fabulous RB sound for what looked like 300 bucks tops.
Moving along, we were having issues with the Kronzillas because we had so little wiggle room with the P135's volume control. At 10 o'clock you could be plastered against the back wall. Still when dialed in we were awash with triode goodness. The Kronzillas had absolute control of the woofers. The room was energized fully despite the fact that these speakers were made for a room with much less volume. COC would come by on his way home and we would just chill out.. Not being one to leave well enough alone, it was time to victimize Keith. That meant kidnapping his Lamm ML2.1s which were gain and power wise the better fit. Nice guy that he is, we swapped amps and that is how I listened to these for the last few months.
Was I enamored with the Horn and SET life? Yes I was but not because of the jump factor. Truth be told the VR-9s were every bit their equal in that regard as confirmed by a 3 minute drive to the nearest VR-9 owner the next gated community over. I didn't measure but I think I jumped exactly as high with For Duke's A-Trainn blatt LOL What it was was a purity of tone, a sweetness and truthfulness one might only hope to find by spending a TON of money more with other topologies and still have no guaranntees. The coverage was plenty wide for a party of 4 meaning those from the wing chairs could enjoy too. No head in a vice problem here. A full party was a different story however as the hot and cold spots of the listening room in underground club mode was quite apparent.
They could play anything and by that I never felt they felt restricted. If they suffered at all it was with heavily processed studio recordings where the saccharin was just that much more bitter as the directionality concentrated the artifice.
At the end of the day, I thought to myself that when the time comes and I just want to knock back all by myself and stop listening to fun but honestly nutter young fella music, this is a system I could certainly be happy with.
I see why COC is building up two systems and I do have that twinge of jealousy. I've said over and over that I plan to build a rest house out on a cliff overlooking Laguna Lake and that I want to have a vintage system there. Listen to some Coltrane while taking in the view. Gotta save, save, save then give Vic a call. For now however, it is time to say goodbye. Big Blues are almost home.
Many thanks to COC, Vic and Keith for the opportunity to have walked the horny side of life
For months now I have been babysitting these beauties. They belong to a good friend who started out as one of my big brother's elementary school buddies and later became my colleague from 2001 to 2004 and again in 2016. COC is a fun guy and we share manny interests. We're both big foodies, like to travel to the same cities, annd are both petrol heads albeit he takes it a lot further as he still races in various cups. Obviously, listeninng to music is also something we have in common.
These 3 ways are made by Victor Sierra formerly of Sierra Brooks. Brooks being Kevin Brooks. Between the late 90's and early 2000's Vic and Kevin who he calls his mentor, did a bunch of crazy horn systems. Vic came home to the Philippines in I think 2004 and it was in 2005 that I got to meet him when I delivered some Lamm gear to a mutual friend in Cebu, the Princess City of the South. Beautiful place, wonderful people. My friend took me to Vic's place and there I lost my horn virginity. Not only was I shocked at the sheer size of his all ALE'D out personal speakers, I was shocked at how cohesive he had made it all. It was my first time to see a lot of things from Duelund caps to crazy looking tubes throughout the chain. Soft spoken for the most part but a real hoot when he gets going, Keith and I felt the visit all too brief.
Vic came home to take care of their family businesses and so he sold his then fledgling dynamic speaker company out of Utah to a South Korean concern and had to end his partnership with Kevin who he tells me has retired to Florida. I lost touch with Vic but I would hear that he was up to more of his crazy stuff like accidentally miscalculating his property lines thereby ending up with the ends of his built in horns in his cousin's property LOL Yes he did those out of the house built in horns in the US and he did that for himself too eventually. I bumped into him at the local show three Novembers ago and it was quite the reunion. We got to talking. He decided to join the next show and that is where the prototypes of the speakers above made their Manila debut. The next year he went big, (These speakers are currently his smallest creations) no he didn't go all out as that would have meant busting through the walls of the Dusit-Thani Makati but he did go plenty big with Field Coils. Make a long story short my buddy COC fell in love with them and had this pair built.
COC is still in the process of building his new house which will have two dedicated rooms. These will be in his mid-sized room which will be around 50sqm and the other loft type space will be around 85sqm and will have his pair of Ultra 11s. Electronics for his horns will be custom built by a builder whose name I can't pronounce from Eastern Europe. The Ultra 11s will have Constellation gear.
Anyway, it has been tough being without a big rig. My bedroom system is IMO very good but my vinyl and turntables are downstairs. Attempts to set up a smaller TechDAS were summarily vetoed by a higher power. As luck would have it COC's speakers were finished and he asked if he could listen to them in my room because he wanted to hear them in an acoustically built room. I said "Hell Yeah!" and Vic flew a couple of his guys to do initial set up and Vic flew in a couple of days later to wire everything up.
The wood work is impeccable. No surprise as Cebu City has a very rich heritage of fine wood working and artisanship and is home to world famous luxury furniture houses such as Kenneth Cobonpue and french owned Dedon. Driver wise the midrange compression drivers are hand built using parts from three different manufacturers, with parts custom machined to Vic's specs. The tweeter is a vintage piece, unmodified and the 10" woofer in the five foot front firing horn likewise minimally tweaked. The midrange horn is a shallow one meant for dispersion optimized for normal listening distances. Painstakingly calculated, built and finished not only is there a complete absence of horn coloration but also the annoying chuff turbulence inaudible from distance but you sometimes get when forced to listen to long throw horns from less than 10 feet. The XO as minimal as can be with just a single duey cap and a graphite resistor in each driver's path and Duey internal wiring.
Vic is full of surprises indeed. At the time the only tube amps I had on hand were a pair of 100 wpc Kronzillas. A bbit overkill for 107dB efficient speakers backed up by a pair of RELs. Well it had to do so I figured, ok, let's tube this whole system out. In came a KR P135 with 45 tubes and what the heck, an Allnic H3000 with Mullard Recti for Phono duty. All set up and we were enjoying spinning the black gold but Vic said he just needed to hear some of his own tracks which he was most familiar with. Just three songs he said, a jazz track, a violin track and a Jose Carreras track. Sure I said with my hand out stretched and he handed me three circuit boards held together with rubber bands. WTF? He asked if I had a SPDIF cable so he could hook that up to the CH C1. I know this guy well enough not to argue so off I went rummaging and I did that for him. He proceeds to plug a phone USB powerbank into his card deck sized, rubber banded boards, hooks up his transport, whips out his phone which turned out to be his remote for said rubber banded contraption and I'll bbe friggin' darned. Fabulous RB sound for what looked like 300 bucks tops.
Moving along, we were having issues with the Kronzillas because we had so little wiggle room with the P135's volume control. At 10 o'clock you could be plastered against the back wall. Still when dialed in we were awash with triode goodness. The Kronzillas had absolute control of the woofers. The room was energized fully despite the fact that these speakers were made for a room with much less volume. COC would come by on his way home and we would just chill out.. Not being one to leave well enough alone, it was time to victimize Keith. That meant kidnapping his Lamm ML2.1s which were gain and power wise the better fit. Nice guy that he is, we swapped amps and that is how I listened to these for the last few months.
Was I enamored with the Horn and SET life? Yes I was but not because of the jump factor. Truth be told the VR-9s were every bit their equal in that regard as confirmed by a 3 minute drive to the nearest VR-9 owner the next gated community over. I didn't measure but I think I jumped exactly as high with For Duke's A-Trainn blatt LOL What it was was a purity of tone, a sweetness and truthfulness one might only hope to find by spending a TON of money more with other topologies and still have no guaranntees. The coverage was plenty wide for a party of 4 meaning those from the wing chairs could enjoy too. No head in a vice problem here. A full party was a different story however as the hot and cold spots of the listening room in underground club mode was quite apparent.
They could play anything and by that I never felt they felt restricted. If they suffered at all it was with heavily processed studio recordings where the saccharin was just that much more bitter as the directionality concentrated the artifice.
At the end of the day, I thought to myself that when the time comes and I just want to knock back all by myself and stop listening to fun but honestly nutter young fella music, this is a system I could certainly be happy with.
I see why COC is building up two systems and I do have that twinge of jealousy. I've said over and over that I plan to build a rest house out on a cliff overlooking Laguna Lake and that I want to have a vintage system there. Listen to some Coltrane while taking in the view. Gotta save, save, save then give Vic a call. For now however, it is time to say goodbye. Big Blues are almost home.
Many thanks to COC, Vic and Keith for the opportunity to have walked the horny side of life
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