Let me start this thread by saying that I am far from sure that I have the answer to the question that I have posed with my title. Fortunately, I think I have some idea, or at least the beginning of an idea. Let's also get it clear that if you wish to have any clue about what I am talking about, you must use MIT or Spectral/MIT signal cables to be able to even get into the ball park of what a Spectral can do. Please read my thread on Spectral cable and preamp compatibility to gain some background on this front from a number of Forum members.
As most of you are aware, Spectral is created in very limited quantities, built solely to order, and even then at very minimal quantities (8 pairs of DMA 400 amps/ month for the world). I believe that there only 5 Spectral dealers in the US, but not sure because it is hard to tell. I have an email out to the NSA for an update on this front!
My last 5 equipment purchases have been Spectral and MIT and have totaled $42k at retail and $25k with great deals on the MIT side, thank God. What I have gotten is both wonderful and a pain in the butt, not to mention financially annoying on the MIT side and a bargain on the Spectral side. In fact I am looking to make one more purchase, the yet to be released Spectral 300 Reference amp and only 2 months after getting a new Spectral 260.
So for those of you who do not get it and for those of us who think that we do, but clearly do not totally, what is it about Spectral? I can spit back what I know and hear, but bottom line the CIA could take lessons from Spectral about secrecy. Rick Freyer truly does not care what people think because he knows or at least believes he is right and is not driven by money because he had way more than he needs before he created Spectral. I do not know Keith Johnson and have never met nor spent time with him, but me thinks he answers to something higher than dollars as well.
It is my theory that they both love music and want to share their love and that is what drives Spectral. It is also my belief that their products do not appeal to anyone who does not share that passion. Sadly this conviction and passion are much less common in high end audio today than it was a decade ago, way less common than 2 decades ago, and certainly not even close to the field of audio when I first learned about it with my dad at a SF audio show when I was 8 (56 years ago).
So it is not surprising that my girlfriend Ginny, who I have written about recently in my Spectral threads, is the one who finally helped me understand the Spectral allure, despite the BS that goes with owning Spectral. At least she has gotten me farther along in my understanding than anyone else thus far.
Part of why I love Ginny is that she is totally passionate about things that matter to her, and does not let reason get in the way of her passions. She has known me and progressively tried to understand me during the latter parts of my recent audio upgrade episode, (DSM/psych diagnosis coming soon after my antipsychotics kick in.)
Another reason that I love this woman is that she loves music and goes for the music not the technology that plays it back. If only half the people on this site could derive half the enjoyment from our systems that Ginny derives from her $30 a piece Radio Shack outdoor speakers when she wants to hear music outside, we would be much happier and have fatter retirements.
Up until this weekend, most of Ginny's listening to my system took place not in my listening chair positioned perfectly in front of the speaker, but while sitting in my lap, her head not pointing the ideal way, with music not the first thing on her mind.
Up until a few days ago she thought my system sounded "great" and like any reasonable person looking at speakers you can see through powered by cables that should be connected to the runway lights at a major airport and not audio electronics, was somewhat afraid to touch the system because of its cost and foreignness to any sane individual.
Prior to my and her epiphany she made comments like "I have never heard anything like this before. It sounds better than going to many concerts. It is incredible." But, she kept her distance because of the Darth Vader impact of a system like this, even though by many of your standards, mine is just a real good mid-fi system.
Saturday, after a day on my boat, she was preparing some food in my kitchen which has 40" by 50" pass through to the dinning room, otherwise known in my house as the rear wave room and cable routing room, she asked, why I do not have speakers in my kitchen, like she does, and why I do not use my main system to power my outdoor system or my bedroom system? (BTW, if you have more than 3 systems in your house, you probably are at the right place on this forum!). I looked at her and said, "because I do not want to "contaminate" my main system and besides enough sound comes off of the back of my speakers, dipoles to us in the know folks, that I do not need speakers in the kitchen. Despite the weirdness of my use of the word “contaminate”, I knew in my gut that it was not an ill chosen word. I knew that word held some of the secret of Spectral.
So being in love, a music lover and jazzed by a wonderful day on the boat with Ginny, I asked her what she wanted to hear so I could humbly (yeah sure) demonstrate my audio insight. She asked for Chris Botti, who I did not know, so I put on a hi res Spotify fed from my Mac Retina via USB to my Meitner and played some of his music and then amazingly for me, kept my mouth shut and let her discover for herself.
What follows is why people like me and likely you, buy Spectral and its bastard sibling MIT. The music played through a MIT equipped Spectral system or components makes you fall in love with the music and not the equipment. Luckily, Ginny is very passionate and likes to kiss me when she is passionately moved. I walked into the kitchen to see if she needed any help and she came over and gave a passionate hug and kiss and whispered into my ear, "You are right. I get it, kind of. The sound in the kitchen is great. You do not need extra speakers."
Smiling that my lover was getting more understanding about something that means a lot to me, I went upstairs to take a shower as she continued to listen to Chris Botti and work in the kitchen. While I was in the shower, I experienced something new. Slowly the music got a bit louder in several increments, until it went away with only bass playing. I calmly walked downstairs, something us senior audiophiles do rather than our younger aged rants, and saw her sitting in my listening seat with an impish grin on her face and saying "I hope that I did not do something wrong." She also went to say "for the first time I really get your system and your love of it. It is incredible. I love it and could not resist getting to know the experience better.”
That is when I got it. Spectral's stunning sound partnered with weirdness, in my case my amp shutting down due to weird impedance power interactions that get triggered by upper range powerful trumpet playing at volume. Bet you cannot guess what instrument Chris Botti plays! I said to Ginny, demonstrating that you can teach an old dog new trick, "I do not want to even explain to you what just happened other than to tell you it is no big deal and that is why I am looking at spending more money on a bigger Spectral amp with even more resolving power.
We listened to Chris Botti, not the Spectral, for the rest of the day and night. During that time, Ginny made several comments, really more passionate proclamations, that she was truly moved by what she heard, as she was several weeks earlier with Diana Krall and found herself wandering back to the listening seat to just sit and listen.
Last night we went to a wine bar in NYC to hear a female jazz singer. Whereas Ginny was previously focused on the music and not the technology, last night she was somewhat comparing what she heard live to what she heard on my system through the Spectral and its pain in the ass friends, the MIT's. She talked about how she wished I had seen a previous performance by the same singer that was more “alive”, as she put it, than what we were hearing. Kind of more like what I heard on your system.”
So this is my take on what makes Spectral equipment so special and unfortunately why you need to use MIT cables to achieve its specialness. We all know that Spectral equipment is extremely high bandwidth and has minimal filtration, making it both highly vulnerable to oscillation, also highly vulnerable to passing “the truth”, regardless of whether the truth is good or not so much.
From what I can gather, because it is largely shrouded in secrecy, more so on the MIT side than the Spectral side, the MIT’s are essential to help this unregulated beast (the Spectral) deal with weirdness of the audio world at both the input and output sides. Without them very weird reactions occur between the Spectral amp and whatever it is connected to.
As I and many others have tried to obtain from MIT and Brisson what is going on in those very expensive MIT interfaces, but have had trouble because MIT works hard to “almost tell you what is going on, without really telling you anything, it appears that there are numerous focal Zobel Networks that are frequency centered, otherwise known in MIT speak as a “point of articulation”. The more points of articulation and their center frequencies, the more they tame the interaction with the outside world and thus more opportunity for the true talent (Spectral) to shine. Although pretty clever on Brisson’s part to take someone else’s invention (Zobel’s) and use it to his advantage and to no doubt make a substantial fortune in the process I just have a hard time with their absurd price.
Fortunately, as I have learned, as have many others on this site, Shunyata power products work great with Spectral amps, especially if you are using a Triton, since it is a variation of a star ground system and essentially a very high quality minimal interference system that somehow makes an improvement way beyond I could have imagined based on other much less impressive and frequently more expensive power systems. As a matter of principle, I am not even going to try MIT power products.
With this protection in place, kind of like an audio body guard to smooth interactions between something special (the Spectral) and the real world, the true talent, the Spectral, kind of operates in an unprotected mode because the body guards (MIT’s) will take care of things.
The net result is that you get a combination of BIBO (beautiful in-beautiful out) and GIGO (garbage in-garbage out), otherwise known as reality. Unfortunately there is much more of the GIGO than BIBO in the recording world today, because the dollar is king and there is not nearly enough passion to go for the BIBO on a regular basis.
However, if you are basically passionate about sound, when the BIBO happens and makes it to your soul, you are changed and “have to have it”. Almost no other amp does it better than Spectral and certainly not at the cost of the Spectral products, as long as you ignore the MIT side. Lamm amps do the same thing and better than Spectral, but they are so out of my price range that for me they essentially do not exist.
So I guess it is like joining an incredible golf course with a huge bond for entry. Pay the price to be one of the lucky and then enjoy repeatedly. Get over the bond (the MIT’s) and go on to enjoy the unrestrained beauty of the Spectral, but be sure to keep the body guards around to protect the Spectral.
Unfortunately, the MIT’s are only so good, although excellent, at protecting such a talented piece like the Spectral and you have to put up with idiosyncrasies like weird impedance curves that the talent, the Spectral, does not like and thus protects against by shutting down when they go below 1 ohm.
As my mom continues to tell me, when you are in love, you have to put up with imperfections to get the incredible.
For me, the Spectral falls into that category, which is why the word “love” is used so often in association with Spectral driven experiences. It is like my love for Ginny, I know I want more of it, even though she regularly reminds me that she is “not easy”. Neither is the Spectral, but I have to have it. Anytime when I experience Ginny and the Spectral in concert with each other, I truly know why I love audio.
Thanks to the Spectral, Ginny understands me a bit better and clearly gets my passion, important to me and to her alike, and that is a benefit I never expected when I bought it. The MIT’s she still thinks are absurd and to some extent I agree, but they enable my love affair with the Spectral and luckily I can afford to close my eyes and enjoy the good the Spectral makes possible.
As most of you are aware, Spectral is created in very limited quantities, built solely to order, and even then at very minimal quantities (8 pairs of DMA 400 amps/ month for the world). I believe that there only 5 Spectral dealers in the US, but not sure because it is hard to tell. I have an email out to the NSA for an update on this front!
My last 5 equipment purchases have been Spectral and MIT and have totaled $42k at retail and $25k with great deals on the MIT side, thank God. What I have gotten is both wonderful and a pain in the butt, not to mention financially annoying on the MIT side and a bargain on the Spectral side. In fact I am looking to make one more purchase, the yet to be released Spectral 300 Reference amp and only 2 months after getting a new Spectral 260.
So for those of you who do not get it and for those of us who think that we do, but clearly do not totally, what is it about Spectral? I can spit back what I know and hear, but bottom line the CIA could take lessons from Spectral about secrecy. Rick Freyer truly does not care what people think because he knows or at least believes he is right and is not driven by money because he had way more than he needs before he created Spectral. I do not know Keith Johnson and have never met nor spent time with him, but me thinks he answers to something higher than dollars as well.
It is my theory that they both love music and want to share their love and that is what drives Spectral. It is also my belief that their products do not appeal to anyone who does not share that passion. Sadly this conviction and passion are much less common in high end audio today than it was a decade ago, way less common than 2 decades ago, and certainly not even close to the field of audio when I first learned about it with my dad at a SF audio show when I was 8 (56 years ago).
So it is not surprising that my girlfriend Ginny, who I have written about recently in my Spectral threads, is the one who finally helped me understand the Spectral allure, despite the BS that goes with owning Spectral. At least she has gotten me farther along in my understanding than anyone else thus far.
Part of why I love Ginny is that she is totally passionate about things that matter to her, and does not let reason get in the way of her passions. She has known me and progressively tried to understand me during the latter parts of my recent audio upgrade episode, (DSM/psych diagnosis coming soon after my antipsychotics kick in.)
Another reason that I love this woman is that she loves music and goes for the music not the technology that plays it back. If only half the people on this site could derive half the enjoyment from our systems that Ginny derives from her $30 a piece Radio Shack outdoor speakers when she wants to hear music outside, we would be much happier and have fatter retirements.
Up until this weekend, most of Ginny's listening to my system took place not in my listening chair positioned perfectly in front of the speaker, but while sitting in my lap, her head not pointing the ideal way, with music not the first thing on her mind.
Up until a few days ago she thought my system sounded "great" and like any reasonable person looking at speakers you can see through powered by cables that should be connected to the runway lights at a major airport and not audio electronics, was somewhat afraid to touch the system because of its cost and foreignness to any sane individual.
Prior to my and her epiphany she made comments like "I have never heard anything like this before. It sounds better than going to many concerts. It is incredible." But, she kept her distance because of the Darth Vader impact of a system like this, even though by many of your standards, mine is just a real good mid-fi system.
Saturday, after a day on my boat, she was preparing some food in my kitchen which has 40" by 50" pass through to the dinning room, otherwise known in my house as the rear wave room and cable routing room, she asked, why I do not have speakers in my kitchen, like she does, and why I do not use my main system to power my outdoor system or my bedroom system? (BTW, if you have more than 3 systems in your house, you probably are at the right place on this forum!). I looked at her and said, "because I do not want to "contaminate" my main system and besides enough sound comes off of the back of my speakers, dipoles to us in the know folks, that I do not need speakers in the kitchen. Despite the weirdness of my use of the word “contaminate”, I knew in my gut that it was not an ill chosen word. I knew that word held some of the secret of Spectral.
So being in love, a music lover and jazzed by a wonderful day on the boat with Ginny, I asked her what she wanted to hear so I could humbly (yeah sure) demonstrate my audio insight. She asked for Chris Botti, who I did not know, so I put on a hi res Spotify fed from my Mac Retina via USB to my Meitner and played some of his music and then amazingly for me, kept my mouth shut and let her discover for herself.
What follows is why people like me and likely you, buy Spectral and its bastard sibling MIT. The music played through a MIT equipped Spectral system or components makes you fall in love with the music and not the equipment. Luckily, Ginny is very passionate and likes to kiss me when she is passionately moved. I walked into the kitchen to see if she needed any help and she came over and gave a passionate hug and kiss and whispered into my ear, "You are right. I get it, kind of. The sound in the kitchen is great. You do not need extra speakers."
Smiling that my lover was getting more understanding about something that means a lot to me, I went upstairs to take a shower as she continued to listen to Chris Botti and work in the kitchen. While I was in the shower, I experienced something new. Slowly the music got a bit louder in several increments, until it went away with only bass playing. I calmly walked downstairs, something us senior audiophiles do rather than our younger aged rants, and saw her sitting in my listening seat with an impish grin on her face and saying "I hope that I did not do something wrong." She also went to say "for the first time I really get your system and your love of it. It is incredible. I love it and could not resist getting to know the experience better.”
That is when I got it. Spectral's stunning sound partnered with weirdness, in my case my amp shutting down due to weird impedance power interactions that get triggered by upper range powerful trumpet playing at volume. Bet you cannot guess what instrument Chris Botti plays! I said to Ginny, demonstrating that you can teach an old dog new trick, "I do not want to even explain to you what just happened other than to tell you it is no big deal and that is why I am looking at spending more money on a bigger Spectral amp with even more resolving power.
We listened to Chris Botti, not the Spectral, for the rest of the day and night. During that time, Ginny made several comments, really more passionate proclamations, that she was truly moved by what she heard, as she was several weeks earlier with Diana Krall and found herself wandering back to the listening seat to just sit and listen.
Last night we went to a wine bar in NYC to hear a female jazz singer. Whereas Ginny was previously focused on the music and not the technology, last night she was somewhat comparing what she heard live to what she heard on my system through the Spectral and its pain in the ass friends, the MIT's. She talked about how she wished I had seen a previous performance by the same singer that was more “alive”, as she put it, than what we were hearing. Kind of more like what I heard on your system.”
So this is my take on what makes Spectral equipment so special and unfortunately why you need to use MIT cables to achieve its specialness. We all know that Spectral equipment is extremely high bandwidth and has minimal filtration, making it both highly vulnerable to oscillation, also highly vulnerable to passing “the truth”, regardless of whether the truth is good or not so much.
From what I can gather, because it is largely shrouded in secrecy, more so on the MIT side than the Spectral side, the MIT’s are essential to help this unregulated beast (the Spectral) deal with weirdness of the audio world at both the input and output sides. Without them very weird reactions occur between the Spectral amp and whatever it is connected to.
As I and many others have tried to obtain from MIT and Brisson what is going on in those very expensive MIT interfaces, but have had trouble because MIT works hard to “almost tell you what is going on, without really telling you anything, it appears that there are numerous focal Zobel Networks that are frequency centered, otherwise known in MIT speak as a “point of articulation”. The more points of articulation and their center frequencies, the more they tame the interaction with the outside world and thus more opportunity for the true talent (Spectral) to shine. Although pretty clever on Brisson’s part to take someone else’s invention (Zobel’s) and use it to his advantage and to no doubt make a substantial fortune in the process I just have a hard time with their absurd price.
Fortunately, as I have learned, as have many others on this site, Shunyata power products work great with Spectral amps, especially if you are using a Triton, since it is a variation of a star ground system and essentially a very high quality minimal interference system that somehow makes an improvement way beyond I could have imagined based on other much less impressive and frequently more expensive power systems. As a matter of principle, I am not even going to try MIT power products.
With this protection in place, kind of like an audio body guard to smooth interactions between something special (the Spectral) and the real world, the true talent, the Spectral, kind of operates in an unprotected mode because the body guards (MIT’s) will take care of things.
The net result is that you get a combination of BIBO (beautiful in-beautiful out) and GIGO (garbage in-garbage out), otherwise known as reality. Unfortunately there is much more of the GIGO than BIBO in the recording world today, because the dollar is king and there is not nearly enough passion to go for the BIBO on a regular basis.
However, if you are basically passionate about sound, when the BIBO happens and makes it to your soul, you are changed and “have to have it”. Almost no other amp does it better than Spectral and certainly not at the cost of the Spectral products, as long as you ignore the MIT side. Lamm amps do the same thing and better than Spectral, but they are so out of my price range that for me they essentially do not exist.
So I guess it is like joining an incredible golf course with a huge bond for entry. Pay the price to be one of the lucky and then enjoy repeatedly. Get over the bond (the MIT’s) and go on to enjoy the unrestrained beauty of the Spectral, but be sure to keep the body guards around to protect the Spectral.
Unfortunately, the MIT’s are only so good, although excellent, at protecting such a talented piece like the Spectral and you have to put up with idiosyncrasies like weird impedance curves that the talent, the Spectral, does not like and thus protects against by shutting down when they go below 1 ohm.
As my mom continues to tell me, when you are in love, you have to put up with imperfections to get the incredible.
For me, the Spectral falls into that category, which is why the word “love” is used so often in association with Spectral driven experiences. It is like my love for Ginny, I know I want more of it, even though she regularly reminds me that she is “not easy”. Neither is the Spectral, but I have to have it. Anytime when I experience Ginny and the Spectral in concert with each other, I truly know why I love audio.
Thanks to the Spectral, Ginny understands me a bit better and clearly gets my passion, important to me and to her alike, and that is a benefit I never expected when I bought it. The MIT’s she still thinks are absurd and to some extent I agree, but they enable my love affair with the Spectral and luckily I can afford to close my eyes and enjoy the good the Spectral makes possible.
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but seriously, the repair wait time is now much longer than two weeks and closer to two months. Ouch Russ, stop it. 
