Finally finished the first part of the blog post for Jack D.'s Lair Pt.1, Im already clocking in at 6000 words from the amount of knowledge and info I learned from this single session so I'm dividing it into 3 parts. The first part is The Lair, two would be the products and the third would be lessons for all of us newbies in this hobby.
For the full post with complete pictures go to http://hearhead.com/this-hi-fi-system-w ... lair-pt-1/
Thanks for reading!The needle drops and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here is starting; its taking shape. I’ve heard this record countless times but instead of simply hearing the synthesizer intro and percussion, the music seems to be unfolding into a ball of heaving ambience. Little by little the synth notes fall into place dropping like globs into a creeping Hammond keyboard fill. What started as a lumbering note morphs into a bowl of dense notes. High-pitched sine waves plink like wine glasses being rubbed at the lip. Everything joins the already massive globe of ambience the intro is creating.
The globe pulsates.
It’s gripping me.
The sound against my chest is building up – heaving as the music builds. A guitar player appears out of nowhere, launching into a blues solo. The bent guitar note, glassy and echo-laden, bursts the ball of ambience as the Hammond organ and synth scatter into the left and right channel. The guitarist takes shape – you can hear his fingernails scrape the guitar frets, his pick digging into the strings. You can feel him shaking the strings; you can almost sense his finger’s effort. A sense of height is achieved as you can hear a guitar amplifier to his side and the guitar above the amp. The drums and the other instruments intensify, stoked by the guitar solo. The bass locks in and joins the percussion. You can feel the outline of the drummer’s place as his deft hands tap through his snare, snaking to the toms and landing gracefully to the cymbals. The heaving ball comes back with a vengeance – the percussion gives it a growl. The instruments swirl as if in a duel.
In a fleeting moment you’ll see the band.
Or will you?
I nod to the fellows at my back and giggle like an underage schoolgirl.
Me: “I think I got high on that, just a little”
Them: Hahahahahaha (with a knowing smile).
I spend an entire afternoon like this: smiling, getting high on music, seeing phantom images and getting fooled and toyed around by an audio system built from the ground up – room included. It’s a crazy afternoon as I’m constantly seeing images triggered by my ear (what the hell, right?) and listening in disbelief to the audio equivalent of winning the lottery. It’s an insanely fitting description of an afternoon I spent slack jawed in awe and with my brain throbbing with new data and lessons. I shouldn’t be surprised though, as my host welcomed me with these words:
“Welcome to the lunatic fringe!”
I’m with JackD, Phil C. and Dafos (local audiophile veterans) in Jack’s underground drool inducing hi fi man cave affectionately called, The Lair. This is a subterranean audio bat-cave (if Batman was an audio nut) acoustically planned and treated to the minutest detail – and that’s just the room! Even the airflow of this basement is managed to favor the best sound possible. You can’t hear an air conditioner compressor trying to be part of the band in this setup. The noise floor is obviously managed as well as an inky black silence will greet your ears during breaks. The room’s noise floor is managed well enough that it toes the line between quiet and the deafening silence of a studio control room. But, I’m getting ahead of myself, what I was invited here for was because of a rhetorical question I posted in a forum a couple of weeks ago.
“Does vinyl have something that can bond people together?”
Jack seems to have taken kindly on my poor soul and invited me to “hear the deep end of the analog pond” and to really see how far vinyl can go as a source. Is the vinyl revival fueled by hype or does the format really have a definitive sound that will render you legless, looking for a couch and yearning for an ear massage. With a Techdas Airforce One Table, a Techdas Coi Cartridge, Valvet Soulshine Preamplifiers, Lamm m2.2 Monoblock Power Amplifiers and Von Schweickert VR9 Mk2, the answer is a fist-pumping yes.
Already featured in several publications, The Lair is the physical culmination of years of planning, experience and passion for the reproduction of music represented by PureSound Inc.—a company Jack co-founded with kindred partners in audio. Discontented with the range of choices locally available to the discerning audiophile, Jack and his partners started with the distribution of loudspeakers to show the absolute joy music can bring to one’s home. PureSound gradually evolved into a boutique audio company with an impressive roster of brands for people willing to indulge in the best sound possible for their music. The company also provides their advice and expertise from simple audio needs to a full-fledged from the ground up build of an audiophile system. PureSound fully commits to provide an almost spiritual experience of music by also providing advice on acoustic, mechanical, electrical and interior design for their range of products to execute true system integration, set up and calibration to further optimize the listening experience. It may be another story of how passion breathes life into a company, but PureSound has that rare combination of passion coupled with technical knowhow and backed with expertise (Jack also holds an international degree in sound engineering).
I arrived at the Lair a little past 2pm and Natalie Cole’s Still Unforgettable was playing as introductions were made. As my ears were slowly digesting the sound, Jack gave me an apt analogy for the impetus behind building such a room. The motivation would be very similar to building a high performance racecar from the ground up, spec by spec. After building the perfect racecar, you tweak it to be drive-able. In essence, you build a system ground up, with as much (or even above) emphasis on the room and the quality of your source as with your gear and then tuning everything to be more musical and less clinical.
The turntable used for the session was a thing of beauty. The Techdas Airforce One boasts of LP playback with virtually no inherent vibration via a vacuum hold down suction of the LP aided by a clamp while propped up by an air bearing suspension system. The whole science behind the AF1 is lost in my head but JackD taps the LP while playing and not a sound emits from the speakers to illustrate the solid isolation of the Turntable.
The mounted Techdas Coi cartridge is a thing of beauty with its unique egg shaped housing fashioned from Duraluminum.
Andrea Bocelli’s Passione LP is up next. As it plays and my ears started getting accustomed to the sound, I noticed that all the components seem to dissolve into the sound – seamless and unobtrusive. I’m actually finding it hard to articulate what I heard and what I mean by dissolving into the sound, but bear with me.
The usual case with most improperly setup and haphazardly tested high-powered amplifiers and high-end setups, is that you can actually hear a bit of incoherence from your music. The bass doesn’t integrate and the mids are either upfront or too laidback. This incoherence is usually present in particularly complex passages like orchestral stabs; you’ll hear the amplifier bloat the low mids softly. Preamps compress the upper highs subtly and mismatched tweeter crossovers usually sip the body out of mid highs gently when stressed. This is often the case when system matching is neglected. Let me emphasize though, that these occurrences are all very, very subtle, and what I mean by components “dissolving” is that the system integrates with each other seamlessly. You can’t hear the amp, preamp or the tweeters stressing out making them secondary to the actual experience of music.
The Judd’s Heartland played up next. We leave Bocelli’s mid sized auditorium and were transplanted into a big honkytonk bar and The Judds’ country vocal harmony plays effortlessly. No hint of sibilance or strain is present in the voices; again very neutral. I’m not saying coloration is an evil thing some manufacturers actually have a trademark “colored” sound and honestly it’s also pleasant. The thing with Jack’s setup is you get a real sense of what neutral is and I’m not even sure if the word “neutral” will do the system justice, as it neither sounds dull nor glaring. Every part of the performance’s sound is snapped into place. There are no wayward cymbal decays or ghost bass frequencies that smear the low end.
We spin a Japanese print Beatles Lovesongs LP next. Both the system and the copy blew me away. Listening to the Beatles analytically is a tricky thing. While no one doubts the Fab Four’s musical genius, some of their recordings are tricky to play – the voices sound compressed and the bass is all over the place. With a superior copy and the Lair’s dynamite system, listening to the Beatles became an entirely new experience. You can hear the voices and their positions and the yelling parts don’t clip as much, the bass energy doesn’t go all over the place too.
By the time we played Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here my ears were accustomed and the volume level settled into a comfortable loudness. Jack got a very “regular” copy of Wish You Were Here, not some unobtanium-limited-release-remastered-by-the-grand-warlock-of-so-and-so copy, just a regular vinyl copy you can probably still buy second hand. As the needle spins, this record, aligned with my now accustomed ears started my descent into aural (and visual?) madness. I was given the center seat to hear this vinyl album and hearing just became an understatement. Imaging, Pace, Rhythm, Attack, Timing, Sound staging, Accuracy, Shrill, Warm etc. and what have you. Pardon my French but F*CK ALL THAT NOMECLATRURE. When you can actually “see” the image before you, your mind stays still and you let the music take over. All those terms falls apart as your brain gets tricked so many times that it’s seeing an image rather than actually hearing a sound.
So this is what high fidelity is; this is what a glimpse of vinyl heaven can give and it’s pretty tasty.
We played LP upon LP and I gladly settled into a quiet lunacy. Yup, crazy is par for the course here. How do you explain suddenly darting your head to check if that string instrument really is at the left side, how do you explain your mind playing visual tricks on you through sound? Even the lighting changes moods and colors in this Lair and helps in your descent into the lunatic fringe. Funny is that all the characteristics of vinyl are present. Warm, Detailed and 3D sounding sound is here but it’s like lifting the veil to have a clearer view. The sound is detailed and crisp in the highs, the lows defined and gut busting but still warm.
A Propius Classical LP is up next and the room transforms into an auditorium for a full-blown symphony. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington come up next and were in a smoky jazz bar / studio. A solo acoustic vinyl LP plays and you can see the fleet fingers of a guitar player. Blue Note artist Jose James comes up next and we’re in a studio listening to smooth R&B. The room transforms with each vinyl spun and the system seemingly reconfigures itself to deliver the best possible sound of the LPs.
One of us whips out an SPL app on his iPhone and we measure the loudness. Damn! That measurement hovers at around 90db! That’s as loud as a jackhammer and a subway train, yet were not even fatigued with listening. In fact we want more.
By the time the next break comes in, my mind is saturated with superior sound. Talk comes sporadically about vinyl cleaning, cartridges and tables. Listening for me turns into a master class of vinyl information that I store in my memory as rapidly as I can. By the time they launch into the finer intricacies of vinyl playback my mind is swimming as I’m way in over my head and the three kind experts I’m with seem to speak in tongues.
Phil glances at his watch and we’re all surprised that it was already past 6 pm! What seemed like 45 minutes was actually a four-hour listening session! As we prepare to leave and say goodbye, the talk while on the way out eventually morphs into a vinyl and mastering conversation that anchors us to the entrance of Jack’s house for a good 30 minutes.
When goodbye part two finally happens I walk to my car with a satisfied smile. As I start the engine, I suddenly remembered that I was armed with 1001 questions for Jack and The Lair but I failed to ask them. I was too dumbfounded by what I heard and in a sense a four-hour session more than answered all my questions but spawned a thousand more.
So does vinyl have something that can bond people together? Yes!
Can vinyl deliver an aural orgasm? Yes.
Can you explain why? No, and I think that path will lead to more questions than answers.
This was supposed to be a vinyl “introduction” to the fringes of analog wonder, but the funny thing is that The Lair’s system sounded so good that it made me think that maybe good sound should be format agnostic. Meaning, music should be enjoyed in all forms and formats and that the final arbiter of how good a system will sound is the intelligent matching of components and the room itself.
The experience and the information shared around the session also framed the current vinyl craze in a more proper perspective. With the proliferation of the mp3 format, tinny earphones and a surplus of poor quality speakers that emphasize aesthetics and miniaturization, vinyl (in even the most basic of set ups) will out deliver the current mp3+earphone experience of most people. Most people got used to music functioning as wallpaper. So maybe it’s a question of quality sound being missed rather than the vinyl format being superior to everything. Hence, the vinyl resurgence maybe a positive backlash from the domination of the sub par mp3 format.
This is a good thing.
Vinyl can introduce you to a world of good sound but its not the end all and be all of musical enjoyment. I hold the format in very high esteem but (as displayed by The Lair) the other half of the coin in experiencing a moving musical experience is the knowledge and execution of your set up. There is more than one path to musical bliss and the other formats coupled with the right frame of mind can also deliver (as proven by the people behind The Lair). I’m predicting that vinyl and digital audio will co exit in the future. In fact, I’m currently thinking of exploring a proper headphone setup (which in theory would be a much cheaper way to at least approximate what I experienced sound-wise) and dipping my toes in digital audio—but that is another journey.
A big shout out and a heartfelt thank you to Jack D. for sharing his home and knowledge. You sir, are magnificent! But most of all thank you for having the balls to take your passion for analog to the most insane of fringes and exposing yourself to the edge of lunacy to push the vinyl format. Thank you to Dafos and Phil for sharing their expertise by just simply talking, complete with audiophile rumors hahaha.
But seriously (at the risk of sounding like a hippie on acid), my gratitude is immeasurable for showing me what kind of mystical and esoteric magic a little black wax can provide!
As Pink Floyd would say, “Shine on you crazy diamond!”