Rockport Sirius III (somewhere north of $50K)
Koetsu Onyx Platinum ($7,500); Nordost Quattro Fil ($2,000/2m pair)
NBS Monitor 1 interconnects ($3,000/4-foot pair) and NBS Monitor 1 speaker cable ($3,000/4-foot pair)
Accessories ($2,500)
System total: $176,850
by Larry Alan Kay, The Absolute Sound, June/July 2000, Issue 124, pg. 65/67
(Note: Rather than a feature review, this piece introduced the reviewer's complete reference system, the end result of 30 years of High-End audio involvement. The Avantgarde TRIO features most prominently in this system and in many ways became the fulcrum around which the acquisition of ancillary components hinged.)
As designers of audio gear solved more and more of the problems that plagued hi-fi from its beginnings -- tonal balance has become more accurate, frequency range more extended, noise and distortion reduced, detail increasingly revealed, initial transients quicker, decays more natural, and imaging, soundstaging and transparency improved -- an interesting secondary quandary presented itself.
Many of us felt we weren't much closer to the feeling of the real thing, to capturing what the music and musicians were communicating, than we had been before all that "progress". We were hearing more, but what we were hearing still was not much more like real music.
So, recently some of us have turned (or returned) to some additional matters. One of these has been a more detailed examination of dynamics. Earlier, the examination of dynamics seemed limited to the question of how loud components could get before they hit a ceiling and crapped out. With the advent of digital silence (and vastly improved analog gear), dynamic behavior at the pianissimo end of the spectrum could be reexamined.
Lowering the noise floor of our individual components, and our entire systems, revealed previously unimagined subleties in our recordings. The matter of the coherence of dynamic behavior across the frequency rmnge (were there anomalies in bass or treble, for example) also became important. So did the interaction of dynamics and transients. More recently, the attachment of correct dynamic (and transient) behavior to specific instruments (all of which have different dynamic and transient profiles) at their specific locales in the soundspace has begun to occupy us.
Perhaps it isn't surprising that reexamination of dynamic scale has been accompanied by a quest for realistic physical scale, as well. If you've got the space and you can get your hands on the gear, it's easy to graps that listening through the wrong end of the aural telescope, with everything miniaturized, will never simulate reality. No, we want our performers and their music life-size. And we want, insofar as possible, to melt away the confines of our listening spaces and replace them with the recordings' soundspaces, be they studios, clubs or concert halls. And with it, we seek envelopment. Rather than feeling that we listeners are at one of things, looking at the acoustic bubble in which the sonic event is taking place, we want to be inside it, with no sense of separation.
At the same time that we want to go to the musicians in their soundspace, in another sense we want the musicians to come to us. We want to believe that they're here, brought back to life. That requires a sense that the musicians and their insturments are makng the sounds, not that a hi-fi rig is remaking them. We want immediacy, intimacy, "thereness", action, aliveness, jump. To get that sense, we have to make all this gear sound as if there's no gear at all. We want each component, and all the components, to become invisible.
Finally, the question of tonal accuracy. This is more than a question of tonal blaance or frequency extension; it is a matter of tonal intensity and density. Regardless of hue, is one instrument's coloration acrylic when it should be acrylic, while another's watercolor when it should be watercolor, the next's chalk when it should be chalk? When the sonic light subtly shifts on one part of the sonic oceaon, does the system shift with it, while not shifting where it shouldn't? Is it happening with proper depth and intensity, or has the sonic field been deracinated?
After 30 years of involvement with audio, enormous expenditures of time and energy, constant trading and upgrading, expenses well into six figures, and innumerable missteps, what do I have? A system that to a large extent meets all the criteria and goals I've been discussing. While there's always room for improvement, and I'm sure improvements will continue to come from quarters known and unsuspected, this system gets me closer to live music than I thought possible just a few years ago, much less three decades. And here, with a few brief comments on the individual components and their synergies, it is:
Speakers - Avantgarde Horn Trios. I've started here because everything changed for me when Jon Valin turned me onto this large, ugly/beautiful , unconventional speaker system. I had tried electrostats and other planars and gone about as far as possible with cones in boxes (Wilson X-1s). The Avantgardes are as detailed, tonally true, fast, and transparent as the best electrostatics, and possess exquisitely responsive and wide-ranging dynamics - far better than the best conventional cone-in-cabinet rigs. With sufficient room size and painstaking attention to set-up, they image and stage superbly, especially as their radiation pattern avoids excitement of sidewall reflections. Bass, which comes from separate, self-powered, more conventional woofers, was problematic, with little bottom octave, until the recent introduction of new units. Mine aren't fully broken-in and optimized but I can this: bingo! These speakers are incredibly sensitive: 106dB/watt/1 meter. Since we're typically cruising along at less than 0.5W, and the bass has its own amplification, our concerns with amps are purely qualitative, not quantitative...
... It's been a mind expanding, at times ridiculous effort over many years, but I'm a happy listener indeed these days. Good listening to you, too.
by Larry Alan Kay, The Absolute Sound, June/July 2000, Issue 124, pg. 65/67
