Favourite Driving song currently is Everything But The Girl / Walking Wounded / Wrong (track 2).  Of course it still sounds bad in the car (even with the 'sound plus' system - setting fader -2, bass -2, treble+2, SDV off, loudness off.  Final touch is Sport Button On - sound much better.

 

Favourite audiophile CD - Carol Kidd, All My Tomorrows.  

 

Audio System coming:

MBL 101E II speakers, 9008A amps, Weiss DAC 202

Runner-up audio system was:

Focal Stella Speakers, McIntosh amps, Weiss DAC 202.  

Prior System(s) Linn, all active for the larger system.  and of course the obligatory LP12 (basic)

 

Here's an email I did to a friend (who just bought some W.A. Sasha's) about the HK Audio show we went to recently:

 

Quite a few interesting things to listen to, in general the show was very crowded very hard to get quality listening time. Audio volume was generally played way too high the worst one was the Wilson showroom, they had the Alexandria X2 II,  we got really good seats almost prime seats in the middle and left after about 2 min into the first track.  They also seemed to be suoplementin the X2's base with these giant (person size) woofer boxes in the corners of the room.  Yes … very good … They could make the roof rattle! hmmm

Focal had their Stella's there.  The exact pair we've listened to previously with McIntosh amps.  Same good, enjoyable Focal sound, but of course it was impossible to get the prime seat in a room with about 30 people sitting and another 50 odd standing!   

Our most impressive was MBL,  They were demoing their 'little' 116F's, and the sound coming out was impressive.  It was a little hard to describe as their sound essentially radiates, and that's how 'free' the sound was.  So all of this 'radiation' produces such a delicious and captivating sound that you could do a blind test between speaker and something live, and really it would be a guess.  With that type of sound, it was like staging was a given – the speakers took care of that.  

We liked that sounds so much, that the store managed to arrange for us a listen to their 101E II.  Their bass isn't quite as clean as the Stella's (in general), but we did find that listening to Sara K or Carol Kidd, we managed to lose some of the (perhaps unnatural) bass that the Stella's did produce. Their voices sounded great.  Piano sounded very good (Lang Lang),  http://www.mbl.de/en/   We thought most of our music sounded better on these speakers than on the Stella's.  They were better at making an average piece of music sound better too.  They also handled the 1812's cannon's well.  We managed to get them to sound boomy on one drum piece that the shop had demoed in the show, but he did warn us that in the odd shaped room we had and that it would sound too boomy.  On the other hand Gaga sounded as boomy as natural.   You need a lot of power to drive them.
 

Other speakers we listened to:

 Avalon Time, nice, but nothing special.

Ascendo – my colleague has these but I thought they sounded tin-potty

German Physiks – similar 'open' soound to MBL, but felt like the cheaper China / knock-off version and lacked bass.  

Adam Tensor – mid-range and higher was interesting, sort-of like an old grammaphone sound to it, but they really lacked bass

 

 


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