Good things with sound. My Etymotic ER4s died (after how many years of solid use?) — sent them off to the US for repair and the nice people at Etymotic simply replaced them with the current version. They sound excellent, and the new anti-microphonic cables are much better than the original ones. Much walking around London with downloads from Thinner’s archive on scene.org as background.

Also, managed to get a pair of ex-demo Vivid B1s. The equally nice people at Vivid even reconditioned them by replacing all the drivers before shipping them. And they sound amazing. Shame that they’re so ugly (sometimes form-follows-function doesn’t make for loveliness), but in this case, it really doesn’t matter…

This component is unique in that it is the only vacuum tube driven surround sound processor in the world, utilizing Dolby Pro Logic II, created by the legendary Jim Fosgate.

No shit.

I’ve been reading a lot about early surround recently. Fosgate most definitely has bragging rights as The Man. Not only did he develop the coolest decoders, he went on to design Dolby Pro Logic II and now makes crazy stuff like the 5-channel tube pre-amp shown above. Respect.

All of which is preamble to mentioning that I’ve just installed the Pro Logic II upgrade to the AV32R. It’s at least interesting and kind of fun — the surround channels are much more discrete than with Tag’s matrix system, which I’ve used a lot, so it will take a little while to get used to. And I think I need to recalibrate the speakers for it. Off to the shop for a new battery for the SPL meter…

Recently won a Tag McLaren AV32R on eBay. Admittedly there’s very little official technical support for these now, and given that mine is the single processor model, there aren’t really a whole lot of upgrade options, even should I find someone to install them for me. And the VFD display, being a VFD display, is a bit tired. But it’s all about the sound, and the sound is excellent.

I’ve been most surprised to find that I’m actually using their proprietary DSP when listening to music, as most DSP programs for spatialising stereo just turn the music to mush. The AV32’s gets the balance just about right — using the centre channel to firm up the soundstage, while adding just a whisper of depth from the surrounds. Originally I’d intended to just use the AV32 for multichannel content, and continue as before, feeding my music direct over balanced XLR from my music player to the Bryston. At the moment I’m routing through the Meridian 518 into the AV32 — the sound is just too much fun. Maybe I’ll get bored of it. Doesn’t matter. Cat Power’s The Greatest is luminous, with real space around the rhythm section. And that’s what it’s about.

Busy week. Have been in Amsterdam (lovely) and South of France (also lovely). On Sunday we went to a hifi show in the wasteland hotels near Heathrow airport. Many average or averagely good things, and we ended up short of time, so didn’t get to see everything. But the standouts, by far were the Avantgarde Duo and Vivid speakers. The Duos demonstrated (at least from vinyl, through decent valve amplification) the most transparent sound I’ve ever heard. The Vivids, on the other hand, seemed ready for absolutely anything — not as ætherial as the Duos, but as happy with every nuance of solo vocals as they would be with dance music or theatrical cinema effects. Spectacular. And the Vivid team were really nice people. Laurence Dickie himself (most famous, maybe for the Nautilus) was running the demo.

For a couple of years, my main CD source has been my Theta Data Universal Transport — a laserdisk/CD player from the early 90s. Fed through a Meridian 518 for dejittering and upsampling to 24-bit, it has always sounded good through my Yamaha DSP-AX1 amp. But recently, I’ve started to feel it’s been missing something at the top end. Conversely, CDs played on my Arcam FMJ DV27 have sounded mechanical, with a lack of warmth in the bass, and overbright, unrefined treble. Assuming that the Theta’s failings at the top were probably simply masking the limitations of the Yamaha’s power amps, I decided to try a different, discrete, power amp, to see if it would make any improvement, keeping the Yamaha patched in for surround decoding and DSP.

I’ve had a Bryston 9B SST THX surround power amp on loan from the Cornflake Shop for the past few days. What a difference. Fed through the Bryston, via the 518, the Arcam delivers clarity at the top (hihats sound like cymbals, rather than a mash of noise), and warmth at the bottom. Bass is relaxed and tight, and the whole soundstage is wider and deeper. I’m sure it sounds even better fed from a better decoder than the Yamaha, but for now, I love it. I’ve even (finally) bothered to tweak the Yamaha’s ridiculously complex DSP settings to tune things a bit better. Shame about the 9B’s price, but I’ve ordered one anyway. Sigh.

The whole setup is a long way from my first ‘surround system’, which I built back in the 70s for about five Australian dollars —an ‘ambience recovery’ system based on David Hafler’s OOPS (Out Of Phase Stereo) hack. Nice to see that there are still cheap commerical implementations of this kicking around.