It is definitely for near field listening, almost like big headphones. And he certainly wanted his rig to be very sensitive to the smallest changes. He also had to pay for all that, and though he might've been able to afford better equipment he probably just didn't want to spend huge amounts, what he has is already very expensive, even with deep discounts. I remember reading his reviews of the Continuum Caliburn and Ypsilon phono stage and Ypsilon preamp. Unlike in other cases he was flying out of his pants, he was in awe when listening to those pieces. So he got two of them out of three. I would expect him to have all Ypsilon electronics, I don't know why he didn't do it.
" I would expect him to have all Ypsilon electronics, I don't know why he didn't do it."
He has very expensive equipment. The Dartzeel is not cheap by any means and the Ypsilon are probably twice the price. I am sure money came into play as to why he didn't get all Ypsilon gear. I have almost 60K invested in my system and that is probably just the price of his amplifiers.
It's interesting that at the beginning of the video he says it's nobody's business where all his money comes from. Yet he goes to great lengths of explaining what he owns, what he does not, and that he went to a bank to get loans to pay for equipment. If it's nobody's business, why does he explain how he acquired this stuff???
@mr. m. It's called "put your money where your mouth is." I see nothing wrong with what he said so I respectfully disagree with you. Fremer is very fortunate to have a system of that caliber.
"why does he explain how he acquired this stuff??? "
Because he was explaining that he has that equipment because he likes it enough to pay for it, even if he has to get a loan to buy it, that he does not have it because the manufacturers gave it to him. Believe it or not, there are people who believe that high-end audio is a huge scam, a conspiracy in which audio reviewers conspire with greedy manufacturers to fleece unsuspecting audiophiles out of their hard earned money.
To begin with, he made that video and wanted us to see it, maybe wanted us to discuss it too, so we are discussing it. But where is Michael himself? Michael, why not all Ypsilon ? And what did you do to your Studer ? $30k for Tara speaker cables ? They can go f...ar away from me.
*G* Y'know, at the end of the day, it just makes me feel OK that my 'listening space' ISN'T PERFECT....nor will be anytime soon. *S*
Yup, Nice equipment. Considering the 'owner', I'd be shocked if it wasn't. I'll give Mike 'major marks' for posting the vid...it's a real 'enlightenment' to see that 'his space maybe wasn't what you'd expected'....;)
Great videos I’m glad the Sterophile crew is creating these. Jason Victor made a great comment at the end of his about the amount of joy he gets out of his system and he hopes others are also able to find this. Great comment.
Just one recommendation for Mike F, get a leak sensor under that water heater!
Hi, I actually own Michael's last Tara Lab's speaker cable's, the omega gold that he upgraded from, the actual pair, I'm very satisfied with the sound, I am surpised that he has such a small room for the system he has , out of all cable's out there, I can understand why he has not found better than Tara Lab's, but like he said, an audio system is personal preference, however, I own a complete loom just like Michael does, I have always come back to Tara Lab's cable's after trying an enormous amount of other's on the market, I have been useing Tara since their conception of their company, to each their own , so many flavors , There is something for everyone, cheers🥃🍷🍸🍹🍺🎼🎶🎵.
I like fancy Chinese words. plenty of gear made over there, perhaps we should have more or perhaps less respect. If I live in that place I would be constantly tripping over power cords and I surely would forget where I put my martini....
"Do you agree with his choice ?" respectfully, whether I agree or not, or whether any of us agree or not, it was/is HIS choice. And I'm not sure if all the posters watched the entire video, but Mike is upfront about what he owns and what he doesn't. It is none of our business how he pays for it.
@inna -I heard those beautiful DartZeel mono's at the LA Audio Show, along with the matching DZ preamp with Evolution Acoustics speakers and separate crossovers with a Studer RTR playing Frampton's "Lines on my Face", and it was just sublime. You can probably find other comments I made about that system if you search my username. -I've also heard the Alexx speakers very recently and they are really good, but not my favorite though I do love the smaller Sabrina.
Nothing against DartZeel or CH phono that he also has. Sure, it is not our business regarding his money and prices he got. It would've been even less of our business had he not mentioned the money subject from time to time. And he didn't do it in a confident manner. In any case, I wish he'd explained his equipment choices. Maybe he couldn't so he didn't. Up to him, but his video is very disappointing. Playing with Beatles records was not convincing either.
I am not at all sure the point of the video was to convince anyone of anything. On your suggestion I watched for about 6 minutes, then I I put some music on and opened another bottle of red wine and relaxed....
Whatever that was about, it is just a New York way of saying hello and acknowledging the other, as surprising and uncomfortable as this might be. And I am only partly kidding.
Great kit, but I am surprised that he has such huge speakers in a near field set-up. I appreciate he says that this is his workspace, and a tool, but surely to make a tool operate properly it must be put in the conditions to make it work - you ain't gonna use an F1 car on a rally track...
As for "not getting great sound" in a room like that...
Some of the best sound I've ever heard were large speakers in small rooms. (That includes mine, but I've heard higher end speakers in other small rooms). Often a small room means the speakers end up closer to nearfield, taking out some of the room. That's also how I listen to my floor standing speakers and they usually sound much better than demos even in larger, dedicated high end audio store rooms.
Of course not every large speaker will work in every small room. But, so long as we aren't talking about someone placing speakers haphazardly in a reflective tile bathroom or something, someone who knows what he is doing can render terrific results in atypical rooms.
But that’s not the argument. The argument is whether you can get good sound in a small room with a huge number of LPs and other clutter. I say you can’t. It’s the old entropy problem beaming down at you, in spades. ♠️
Fremer does not seem like a dumb guy to me. He has heard a great many systems, probably more than anyone here. It’s his job. So don’t you think that he would know that he could get better sound with a nice pair of monitors, maybe a sub, and a low power tube amp at a small fraction of the price of his current system, if that was the case?
I think he owns the equipment he owns because he has listened to a lot of gear in his room and he likes the sound he gets with the big amps and big speakers best. Better than all the high priced monitors and SET amps and headphones he has heard. That seems the most likely explanation to me.
Or has listening to all that vinyl addled his brain and he no longer behaves rationally?
Michael Fremmer is doing one thing with his system/room that goes against convention, and is very smart. He is using a big speaker in a smaller room. He has thought things out and arrived at what I consider the correct conclusion. Most it seems don't. (I didn't bother to read all the posts here, but I caught a general sentiment regarding room size over the course of discussion.)
If I had listened to the purported authorities, and the talking heads about rooms and speaker size I never would have had such glorious experiences as I have over the past decade or so.
tommyc is on the right track, "Fremer does not seem like a dumb guy to me. He has heard a great many systems, probably more than anyone here. It’s his job. So don’t you think that he would know that he could get better sound with a nice pair of monitors, maybe a sub, and a low power tube amp at a small fraction of the price of his current system, if that was the case?"
Kudos, Michael, you know what you're doing. It's wonderful to select the path less traveled and be richly rewarded. :)
I'm guessing there is more base absorption happening with all the racks of records, etc than we think so the room is probably bigger than it seems in the video. Any idea what the ceiling height is in that room of his?
There is no doubt that provided you can get enough distance away from a large three way for driver integration and still have at least 3 feet behind the listener to any wall then the bigger more dynamic speaker is going to be better!
The only issue with small rooms and big speakers is the bass. Too many big Wilsons, B&W, Focal and countless others have a big bass hump which sounds awful in a small room. Also there is a natural bass boost from the roo below 60HZ - so a 6 db per octave roll off usually is better than flat or boosted bass hump.
Shadorne, your point is valid about the bass hump. The Vapor Audio Joule White (reviewed) has a circuit which addresses that, and it's quite significant in its effect. It's a valuable feature of the speaker which I use depending upon the system. I can see some being put off enough by the bass hump that they would opt out of the larger speaker. Personally, if I had to live with it versus a less capable speaker, I would. Thankfully, I do not have to. But, a great deal of bass contouring can be done by treatments, amps and cables, much less the source. It's not like a person is stuck with wretched results simply because of a bass hump.
We have people thinking they should expect ruler flat response and supposedly "perfect" results. Not gonna happen in probably 95+% of rooms. Of course, you can simply cut out a ton of low end! Problem fixed. Except for the fact it's not as convincing a reproduction of the real music experience. :( Who needs LF? The music lives in the midrange, right? Ugh. Like putting a speed governor on a race car.
Someone will mention subs with a smaller speaker, but you are still stuck then with the compromised mains.
You also bring up a good point in regard to driver integration. Everyone is different in how accepting of less coherence they are. Having used coaxial and full range speaker drivers I can appreciate that caveat.
@robd2 made an interesting point about the records with the room acoustics. My concern with large speakers in small rooms is the issue of bass. Simply put when we go lower in HZ the wave becomes longer - that is why bass is so hard to damp and control. In addition to this a small room simply won't go low -I though that is a scientific fact (or have I got that wrong?) - I always thought the whole point of large multi driver speakers is largely their dynamic range - in particular the bass.
MF system makes me uneasy about everything I think I know about hi-end: I thought that I have an excuse for Not going after Wilsons because I cannot afford one of those castles in Malibu Colony... But... coming from the Academy mind-set I have this "the authority" variable. And Mikey is The Authority to me, so unless I can walk into his den and get unimpressed, there is not much to discuss. As a sidetracking note: the Dude looks amazingly fit for an audiophile: I followed his ramblings 15 years ago and reverted back to analog, after watching this interview I am thinking about extra workouts ;-)
I haven't heard MF's system but have heard quite a few megabuck systems in inadequate rooms (too small, large, irregular, bright, ETC) to know that he is not getting anywhere near the sound he has paid for in that space. I would posit that a system costing a quarter as much in a dedicated room sized to the speakers would sound twice as good. I'm sure many of us have been around long enough to recall how Stereophile and TAS would periodically profile the room and system of each reviewer so that readers could reasonably contextualize their conclusions. This should be standard practice--not a solution to the problem of reviewer/listener bias/preferences but it would certainly go a long way to helping all of us make purchasing decisions where an in home demo is not an option.
The video reveals that Mike is much more passionate about LP's and phonograph playing equipment than the rest of a system. As to the size of the room and bass reproduction, though the area he has the speakers in---back behind the aisles of LP racks---appears rather small for the Wilson's, the room itself is not that small. If the LP racks were to be removed from the room, it might appear much larger.
I don't know how much those LP racks affect the propagation of bass frequencies, but I believe that is more determined by the dimensions between the room's walls---left-to-right and front-to-back, and perhaps it's floor-to-ceiling height. It may be that the long bass waves just pass over and around the racks, as if they weren't there. But the position of the speakers so close to the corners of the room can't be a good thing.
Please bear with me a second. Not only is it bad for the sound to have SO MANY records in the room - or CDs, or books, any media - but it has NOTHING to do with absorption of Acoustic Waves or any such thing. The odd thing is that some of us have known about this for a very long time, at least 20 years, yet the average Joe Audiophile never heard of it. That’s probably why I have Advanced Audio Concepts in my name. 😃 It’s a Peter Belt (RIP) thing. Stereophile magazine even has two of Peter Belt’s products on their recommended components list. Come on, people! Wake up and smell the coffee! ☕️
“The great sound was in the room the whole time. You just couldn’t hear it properly.”
Odd that MF ears are so golden he can hear huge differences in gear and even ordinary bits of wire but the clutter in his room apparently doesn’t matter. I guess he hears only what he believes. Perhaps there is no money in promoting room acoustics so it isnt a focus?
Fremer addresses the replies he has gotten to this video in the Jan. Stereophile. He mainly talks about people criticizing him and Stereophile because they don’t do blind listening tests, but there is something he says that is applicable here:
"When I review a speaker I put my listening skills on the line in describing the sound I hear. The measurements come afterward and then I get to see them in print in the magazine. Do you want to try that?"
No one here gets their opinions tested by actual measurements. Fremer does and usually passes the test. So that gives him credibility, more credibility than anonymous posters who opine that they get way better sound quality for a fraction of the price without ever having heard Fremer’s system. So, I just have to say that I find it hard to believe that Fremer spends more money, lots more money, for worse sound. Especially when he has audio professionals in his room from time to time. I think someone would have told him by now that his speakers are too big for his room and brought by a pair of smaller speakers and demonstrated that they sound better.
So, as long as we are all just speculating, I have to give Fremer the benefit of the doubt. I say if his system was not working in that room and he could get better sound at a fraction of the price, he would do it. So until someone produces evidence to the contrary, I believe that Fremer has that system because it sounds the best of the options he has tried. Sounds best to him, of course.
I do not follow Fremer all the way to his conclusions about wires and tweaks.
But he is for me one of the most trustworthy pair of ears when it comes to describing the sound of a speaker. Over and over through the years I've found his descriptions of the sound of a speaker I have heard to be extremely accurate.
And given that he does all his reviews in his room, that would seem to say something to me about his ability to get a good indication of the qualities of a speaker in that room.
I have found that when building many systems of cost ranging multiples of 2, 3 or even four times the cost that making a cost-effective system sound as good as a much more expensive one is fiendishly difficult. Even making a rig half the cost sound as good or better is exceptionally difficult. The idea that diminishing returns kick in early is bunk. Unless you have handled such systems ranging in price from low to high, I don’t expect you to understand or agree.
Clutter makes surprisingly little difference in the overall sound in the room. I have cleared the room, and I have had extra components on the side and cables in the back. Perceptually there is a negligible difference. One might think the difference would be large, but it is not. However, I can easily hear the distinction between switching a couple power cords or a set of interconnects.
MF knows what he is doing; you guys do not understand it. :)
I like what I know of Michael Fremer, indeed I once emailed with him and he was very nice and helpful. But that has nothing to do with what I think of his system or listening space, both of which I would enjoy immensely ...I am sure.
It is interesting to me how divergent a view some here (and elsewhere) have of the system, the space and the man. Some of these views are quite unkind in tone. Bugs me that some adults act like that.
He most certainly did not. He has paid for almost everything in his system. Unlike Johnathan Valin who reviews the best stuff and keeps it on long term loans forever. Where did you get that info from?
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