Well for Sean it might have been more of a Bogus Journey since he’s the one who schlepped a good portion of his audio equipment to my place over the course of two days. The result was that Sean and I just spent the last 8 hours or so geeking out on audio stuff.
We set up the equipment (tube preamp, 2xtube amps, Oppo 981 and 2xM80s) in an empty room (Sean has the pictures). You’ll see the room has bare walls with blinds as window treatments. We listened to a lot of different stuff we both brought but I’m only going to list what I remember of mine:
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of The Moon SACD
Bangles - SACD
Boston - SACD
Vivaldi - The Four Seasons: Spring SACD
Carl Orff Carmina Burana: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi SACD
Bliss - Quite Letters
Nena - Nena
Dire Straits - On Every Street
The Manhattan Transfer - The Definitive Pop Collection
I’ll try to just hit some highlights. Sean’s tube amps worked flawlessly and sounded great with the M80s. I can’t comment on tube vs . . . since we didn’t use anything else. With nothing absorbing sound in the room the ambience was fantastic and only occasionally did certain bass frequencies sound either overbearing or rumbling. I found the folding chairs I had were to high and we both ended up sitting on the floor for a better presentation.
I knew of certain tracks with distinctive sibilance (Bliss had one) and listened for that. It was noticeable and IMO enhanced by the room. We also demoed that track with my Sennheiser 600s and while the sibilance was still there it was less noticeable. Later we demoed that track in my HT room and the curtains also seemed to lessen the sibilance.
We tried two different version of Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi and though we were comparing two completely different presentations the SACD version did seem both more articulate and dynamic to me.
The real stand out was The Manhattan Transfer’s “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. A simple A Cappella piece that sounded so 3d it was freaky. I think Sean nailed it when he said it seemed like you could reach out and touch it.
We took a quick break for some Panda Express (time was factor) and then migrated to the HT room where we set up again (Sean’s tube preamp, Odyssey amp, 2xM80s and 2xSeans Odyssey ? Speakers, Oppo 981 and an A/B switcher.
Oops ran out of space on this page and have some Panda Express to finish, back soon.
