Anyone else attend the California Audio Show in Oakland?
I went yesterday 7/28, heard some really good stuff, including:
Old Forge Studios room. The Soundkaos Vox 3F standmounted 3 ways were incredible! My favorites of the show. Tiny boxes and 35Hz on the low end had many of us looking for a subwoofer. The Wand tt and PureAudio electronics were excellent.
Tidal Contriva speakers speakers were my 2nd choice as favorites. Just a bit more expensive than the Soundkaos at $65,000, they were beautiful to look at and gorgeous to listen to, or vice versa. Open and airy, great bass extension, with the equally fine Bricasti amps and preamp, they would surely be even better in a larger room.
Aurender streamers and dacs also pulled me in. I’m looking for new gear, and they have a great selection. The combo dacs and streamers start at around $3500 and run to $22,000 for the W22SE, which was playing in their room.
On on the down side:
Audio Vision SF Room I didn’t care for the Naim/Rega/Focal gear. It sounded very shut in, muffled to me. Sibilance was not pronounced, and the Focal speakers sounded blurred.
Wyred4sound
I've never been a fan, so maybe I’m biased, but the new gear just didn’t add up to me. Disjointed is the word I come up with. The new W4S speakers were these hulking boxes, with drivers arranged in MTM configuration. The tweeters are ribbons, which I usually enjoy, but these sounded too laid back to me.
Agree. Old Forge / Sound Kaos / Pure Audio was the absolute best in the show. I think this may have even beat 99% of the rooms are RMAF last year (at least in my opinion and preferred sound).
I had the opposite reaction to the Tidal / Bricasti room. It seem really harsh and thin to me. Not sure what happened. Maybe a bad pairing between electronics and speaker. The Bricasti M28 sounded a lot better in the Sound Lab room, but the electrostatic panels are probably more forgiving speakers than the Tidal.
The Focal room was not bad. However, I did not get all the resolution and texture that should have been coming out of those speakers. Sound was very smooth without any brightness/harshness (which is hard to do with Focal), but it lacked the grit / bite / resonance from the voices and instruments. The whole setup was done with Nordost cabling which could be the culprit for hiding that high frequency texture/tonality. Silver tends to smooth out the grittiness in the sound.
I never really focused on Wired 4 Sound before, but I agree with your responses. I don't think it's the new Wyred speaker that's the problem. Ribbons are generally very high resolution and bright. I think it's just the sound of that Class D ICE in the Wyre 4 Sound. It sounded low resolution and boomy to me. I got the same warmer / rolled-off highs in the Unisinger room across the way, which also used Wyred 4 Sound amps.
You’re too kind! I must say the room was jammed full constantly and I needed to reprint the handout sheet as they were disappearing faster than cold spring water at a desert music fest!
Speaking of RMAF, I will have two systems at RMAF, one identical to the one you just heard in Oakland and a second featuring the Sound Kaos Wave 42 driven by tube electronics TBD.
I'm probably somewhat biased, since vinyl is my preferred source. That said, once again Zesto did a fantastic job with their room. I believe there was only one other room featuring vinyl; everything else was digital ... mostly streamers.
I really liked the rooms featuring Exogal - to my ears, one of the most natural sounding DAC's out there. The Exogal fed by Salk StreamPlayer, with Salk SS 9.5 speakers was very impressive. I had to catch myself to keep from clapping at the end of Coltrane's "Blue Train" demo!
Zesto did good, agreed. The Whammerdyne room was weird - it was one of those downsides. I'm not familiar with Whammerdyne, but the cut sheet suggests it is a non-conventional design. In any event, the room/speakers sounded really muffled. It could be that they were open baffle speakers, but it was one of the rooms that did not impress me at all.
It is it is horrible spot compared to Newport Beach .it was real stupid ,people went there because of vacation like area to getaway and then to relax and see the show. Oakland is the pits compared. many dealers agree. What thehell were the people thinking to move from a very popular venue to this ?
audioman58 I believe you have the shows mixed up. The Newport Show moved to Long Beach this year. The show in Oakland has been there the last couple of years(not a big show). I do agree with you they need to bring the show back to Newport Beach. It was at its best there.
Apologies for my disappointment, but that was my first audio show and it was a bit of a let down for me. I was only there for an hour and I did not see/hear everything. I think I missed Old Forge.
Honestly the only thing I liked was the Bernhagen Porter, and for $50K it was not so impressive. Boom-y, not clear from the demo that it had a lot of sound stage and ability to handle a lot of detail. Pretty crisp and satisfying for electric guitar though. Rough-looking, which was kinda cool under the circumstances.
I came to hear the Audio Note UK speakers. They sounded surprisingly dull and pedestrian. I've been told it was a bad setup, but gee.... Maybe they made some poor source selections, but they just did not sound good in any way.
Had high hopes for the Sound Lab electrostatics. Ho hum. Al Green sounded thin and rough and while one could argue they had more bass than many electrostatics, it was boom-y, thin, and uncontrolled. Much prefer my pair of Acoustat Spectra 11s.
I heard a lot of thin-sounding, often distant or veiled-sounding gear that were fancy-looking and carried stupid price tags. All in a tawdry hotel. Glad I walked in when the front booth was unattended. No one questioned another fat, middle-aged white guy in a t-shirt entering the rooms. I am nostalgic for the days when we could listen to audio gear in stores. And let's not even get into the choice of music.
I was int he Fritz/Wyred4Sound room at Newport. Fritz and I talked shop, indirectly about W4S and their thoughts about building new speakers with their own brand.
They are brand new to the scene. It will take them a while to catch up unless they hire an outside designer.
I re-learned one thing I already knew - Nordost cables are in your face, bright and lack depth! I was surprised at how few good sounding rooms there were. The venerable Joseph Audio speakers were in one of the best. The only new to me speakers that sounded fairly good were the Salk. The Berkeley Reference DAC was really good, but I knew that. The free Reference recordings cd, some great deals from the Audio Nerd, and the benefitted charity made the ticket price worthwhile.
I think I must have missed the Old Forge room. I thought the best sound was in the Bicasti room on the Tidal speakers. I also liked the open baffle PureAudioProject speakers.
I was in the Martin Logan room for a bit. They had the biggest room, the biggest speakers, really serious electronics and Honest-to-God Master Tapes playing on a 1/2" professional tape deck, but the sound was decidedly ho-hum and I left.
I also liked the Sound Kaos system. I thought the loudspeaker design was interesting in that the crossover points were at 200 hz and 10,000 hz. This solves a LOT of problems.
What's also interesting in this $6700 loudspeaker pair is that this magic, wide range driver is from Tang Band and can be bought from Parts Express for about $57. But I'm a DIY guy and most of the people here buy their audio the way they buy their luxury cars.
What I'd do with this driver would be to mount it on an open baffle, add a couple of decent super tweeters, facing front and back, and add an open baffle bass bin. I'd put in a 12 db/octave passive crossover at 10k hz between the tweeters and Tang Band. Then I'd use the miniDSP DDRC-24 active digital crossover with DSP EQ at 200 hz.
There are any number of choices on what to do for a bass bin depending on your budget. The bass bin that Linkwitz used for his LX521 would be easy enough to do, but would cost you about $1100 for both sides.
With a bi-amp setup like this, you could run a tube amp for the high end and a good, inexpensive solid state amp for the bass bins and a system that would be BETTER than the Sound Kaos rig. Now THAT would be fun!
@auxinput@pumper24@russbutton If you could post your detailed impressions of Vox 3F speakers then that would be of great help. I request you to put them on a separate thread that I have started at below link.
The Sound Kaos Vox speakers were very high resolution and very natural sounding with a a lot of texture. Very neutral and surprising amount of bass. The high frequencies were not bright/harsh which was unexpected due to the ribbon tweeter. The ribbon tweeter is mounted on the top of the speaker and fires upwards, which may help explain this. However, it does mean that your rear walls and ceiling cannot have any acoustic panels which would absorb a lot of this high frequency energy. The two woofers are only 5", so you will not be pushing a huge amount of bass or amplifier power. If you have a smallish to maybe medium size room and you want really nice sound but do not need a huge amount of bass, these are excellent choices.
I cannot remember which model I actually heard (3F or 3A). They have different midrange drivers.
@auxinput thanks for the your impressions. You have raised one very interesting point of not treating real walls and ceiling because of top mounted ribbon tweeter. This would make it even more interesting case for Indian small homes where treating the room is not always possible. Do you remember anything about it's imaging and soundstage capabilities? Regards,Saurabh
I would say that imaging and soundstage are very good. However, many people chase after a "deep soundstage" and in my experience this has to do more with the preamp / amplifier that you choose -- as long as the speaker has good resolution.
If I remember, these speakers sounded bigger than you would think, mostly because the top mounted ribbon tweeter causes high frequencies to reflect off the rear wall and ceiling. Some speakers are engineering to have a 360 degree dispersion (such as the MBL speakers) and this gives you the impression of a bigger sound. However, it can cause slightly less resolution because you are hearing a smearing of all the waveforms. With the Kaos Vox, I don't think that's as much of a problem because it's only the high frequencies which are sent out with reflections.
@auxinput Thanks for your reply. Yes, I agree that having a top mounted tweeter would help in having large sound-stage. I have seen many of the very high end speakers such as ones from Von Schweikert Audio use an additional tweeter (usually ribbon) mounted on the back side of the speaker for the ambience/sound-stage. Hence top mounted tweeter seems to be a very clever design alternative to using separate back-mounted one. I just want to know all these clever designs are not causing any glaring issues in the overall sound of the speaker as having a clever design is one part but implementing them to have good sound is different story. I agree on the pre-amp/amp part regarding soundstage. IMO your entire upstream chain is going to decide how how well these sound as every component has contribution to overall final sound of your system. Thankfully I have Bakoon Amp 13-R (doing dual duty of headphone amp and stereo integrated amp) which is supposed to have one of the best pairing with these speakers as Martin from SoundKaos has designed the speaekrs with this amp.
I took a quick look at the Bakoon. It looks very high end, but it's a pretty low power amp (only 25 watts per channel). If you are looking at the Vox, I would go for the Vox 3a or 3afw as these are just a bit more efficient at 92db than the 3f. At 25 watts per channel, you want a pretty efficient speaker.
You probably have found the following review already:
It's a 9 page incredibly detailed review with tons of technical detail and internal/construction pictures. The cabinet construction is excellent in my opinion and they pack a whole lot into a very small cabinet. The two 5" woofers essentially make it a 7" three-way speaker. If you can afford the cost of the 3a, I would definitely recommend that over the 3f.
@auxinput Yes, Bakoon's Amp 13 R is a very well regarded amp both Headphone as well as stereo. So having quality amp for both Stereo and Headphone at this price makes it a good value. Also it saves on buying and matching pre and power amps as it is an integrated amp. So after considering all that and very small size & weight (just 5 kgs) it is an excellent choice for people like me who are short on space and still want high end stuff.
Yes it's a low power amp 25 Watts into 8 ohms and 50 in 4 watts, but its pretty stable even in difficult loads because of it's proprietary Satri Circuit which is kind of Current Amplification. Yes, I have already gone through the 6moons review along with all available reviews (Hifi Knights, Positive Feedback and HiFiStatement which is in German) http://hifiknights.com/reviews/speakers/soundkaos-vox-3afw/
https://www.hifistatement.net/tests/item/2813-sound-kaos-vox-3f?start=0 While I have gone through all these reviews, I always take them with a pinch of salt (no, actually with bucket-full of salt). Over these review I value the impressions/reviews from the real world users who provide much more honest thoughts. Since real world user impressions/reviews are almost non-existent, hence I have asked you to provide your feedback which would help me to decide whether or not pull such a costly trigger. Regards,Saurabh
FYI, Bakoon has changed their name to Enlium; the Bakoon amps are no longer available, new anyway. The new Enlium amp is due this month or next, I believe.
@larsman yes, Bakoon Korea has split from Bakoon Japan & now Bakoon Korea is Enleum. Their new Amp 23-R is essentially repackaged & renamed amp 13-R. Though I personally feel construction (chassis) of 13-R is much better than new one as old was CNC machined with transformer, power board in separate compartments also the capacitor bank for power section was slightly bigger than new one. This is the reason why the newer 23-R is at-least $500 cheaper than old 13-R. https://www.bakoon.com/product/amp-13r/ https://enleum.com/#amp_23r
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