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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: The ultimate worst best things in audio.

Post Subject: The hostages taking or the collapse of SET idea.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 1/20/2015

What I hate usually and in audio in particularly is the situation when a professional know that s/he is able to deliver a satisfactory resale and s/he subordinate and enslave everything to this believe. Pretend you are have a house with a single restroom and suddenly you have the toilet is broken and not operational. Now your plumber comes and he insists you to pay $19.000 to fix the toilet. You know that it is ripping off but you do need to use facility and you sign the reaper contract. Instead of taking your money to fix the toilet and go away your plumber inform you that now you need to listen his lecture about relationship between water and gravity, to sigh 5-years serve agreement for him to maintain your satellite dish and to committing your family to eat sushi for 11 years from the plumber hands. The point is that because you have money and eagerness to spend them it does not mean that your plumber shall load you with a bunch of misrepresentation of own intelligence, or namely to take you’re as a hostage of own need to make you a victim.

One would ask, what all above philosophical associative masturbation has to do with Lamm/Verity room at CES 2015? Well, in my mind the setup of the room is exactly that: in a desperate desire to obtain under psychological distress as much as possible money from a perspective buyer the organizers of the installation went over denying any common sense and reason building actually not a sensible playback installation but rather offering to publish a toilet plunger with a dozen of Faberge Eggs attached to it.

Before I explain what I means I need to make a very important note. The installation in Vegas as the CES 2015 hotel room is perfectly fine. In there different manufactures show off own dear, sell the demo unit, feed media frenzy…. They pay a lot of money for those rooms and it is perfectly sensible that they would like to capitalize on investment and pile up as much commodities in the rooms as they can. My critical comments are not regarding the room but, as I mention in my initial post, it is regarding the similar systems that designed in private listening room around the world. There are plenty of them out there and my fundamental architectural disagreement with this type of installations is the purpose of my post.

I degree with "rowuk" with his characterization of Verity as bad bass reflex with plastic cone driver. The larger Verity are very fine speaker. Sure Verity is restricted by many factors where very contemporary (but good) drivers and leaky enclosure not the last factors but altogether they are fine acoustic system. The use of is Verity is a choose, not a foolishness but foolishness is something that I am trying to strike.

Now, we have Verity Lohengrin with 95dB sensitivity that dives to 4R by bass driver. The 95dB sensitivity isn't is an average sensitivity of all of those box loudspeakers, all of those Wilsons, GM Labs and the rest of them? Would it sensible to presume that something like Lamm ML3 for $150K should have enough power able to drive an average sensitivity acoustic system in average size room and particularly if a preamp is used and gain is not an issue? Apparently not. The show after show you see the ML3 used in multi-amping configuration with top handled by ML2. The presumption is that even if one heavy load ML3 and use the min tab (max power) the upper region presumably is too heavy loaded particularly for dry and defused upper range of high voltage tubes. Here is where a pair of $40K ML2 comes to save the Lohengrin upper range. Well, do you know how much of ML2's design capacity is use to drive Lohengrin upper range? I would estimate that is it 5%. Do you know how much ML3 design capacity used to drive Lohengrin's bass? I would estimate 15%. Moreover, if the ML3 was designed specifically to deal ONLY with Lohengrin's bass then it would sound 500% better and cost 85% less. The very same is with upper range. The whole ML2 might be $3K-$5K amp if it needs to drive only Lohengrin's upper range and it will sound drastically more interesting, even forgetting the double transformation in the Lohengrin's tweeter.

So, in the configuration as it offered we have $200K amplification that delivers by design a compromised result. Essentially we have a toilet plunger with Faberge Eggs attached but the plunger not truly blow the toilet and you need occasionally stick your hands in the toilet ball to do what plunger can't. To me it is reticules and in a way too cynical. The people who smart and who make a lot of money to be able to afford those sorts of toys are not idiots and they might be severed with more respectful system design solutions. Well, from a different perspective might be it is not the case and many wanna to appear wealthy audio people that I know ARE idiots and to have Faberge toilet plunger is exactly what they deserve?

Well, I do not know how you but what I seen the picture of Lohengrin bi-amps with ML3 and ML2 I made a faced like my toilet would need that plunger very soon…. It is know that most of the "audio journalists" have very under-developed listening intelligence. The admiration that they expressed looking at the picture of above of that CES room does saddest that they do not have an understating of a difference between looking and seeing.

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

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