New Year Fiesta

2014 Lunar New Year is the craziest audio fiesta ever with gatherings lined up from a week prior to new year, followed by a customary family reunion break, party all the way to Chap Goh Mei. We meet for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Same old story, never end. Old wine in a new bottle, but the story never failed to amused. Time reveals true character, got to clean up the list.

After the heavy long feasting, I fear walking near to the weighting scale even though resisted mouth watering gastronomy. Shedding weight is a long and painful process. It calls for starving.

Usher in 2014, this year greets three Goldmund owners, one upgrade and two possible new owner. Now, I understand there is hardly Goldmund in pre-owned market. At astronomical prices, who says high end is dying? Surely, the little audio guys would scratch their head figuring the justification for the high price. Well, stop ridicule how people spend, instead, ask yourself why aren't you make as much money as them.
 

Two hour listening to Goldmund power amp suffice to tell its worth. For its hefty price, it must have done something right. Conventional wisdom tells that power always comes in the expense of refinement. The Swiss defied that wisdom with power and refinement co-existence.

It is hard to not notice the pace of Goldmund. Wow! This amp is really fast, rendering a real world music realism. No buffering! The drum is exemplary. Pro drummer knows the beat all too well while amateurs still undecided to strike the drumhead. You know some systems can literally make you wait and yawn, slow train. Goldmund excites, it raises hairs, music speaks.
 

The second distinctive thing about Goldmund is its grip on driver excursion, in total control. No lazy drivers. No difficult load excuses, an authoritative conductor. What a treat listening to heavy percussion! Goldmund will make your blood in adrenalin rush.

It may also seems there is no difficult passage can trouble Goldmund. Be it Masakela's Coal train or Chinese operas, Goldmund makes them look easy. The tonal balance is largely neutral, just as what you would expect from the Swiss. You can crank to the max and keep harmonic distortion at bay. And lastly, refinement. A rare commodity in a power house. A wonder woman, who can fix water leakages, bulb changing, defend herself, cook, and with a perfect body contour dressing to kill. Where to look out for amphibian like women? Hard, isn't it?

I got good news to share to you guys, Hifi Creations, a promising new local speaker company run by a car audio enthusiast Victor Phah. His Line Array 100 speakers made its maiden appearance in last year KLIAVS. He is coming back stronger with his new floorstanding speaker in 2014 KLIAVS. He believes in premium drivers, premium components, good engineering, good finishing and good value.

He offered me to review his standmount speakers in my room to see if I like it. He thought that they will sound great in my room, promises a room filling sound pressure. I can too with my Pioneer S1EXs. I politely turned down his offer due to the hassle of moving the heavy speakers and regaining the sound that I used to. I am not going to tell you how his standmount speakers sound, but I could tell you that he is by far the best speaker maker the local ever have. Everything comes in at a price. If your sound criteria is getting close to the real thing, I can heartily recommend you his standmount speakers. Knowing audiophile purchasing habit, they are very much unsure of their own hearing but relies on  the reviews for purchasing decision. A sad thing if you ask me.  

Operation "Listen to bass"

Building a foundation

It is absolutely no sin to dream of world class bass, but you got to hear one first to know where you are heading. May I say good bass reproduction is a rare commodity these days, even in high end system. I had heard of a bass from a Wilson based system that set apart from the rest of the pack. The bass has low bass ripples of overtones, coming in descending order at you, unhurriedly. 寬鬆. Bass definition, bass weight and bass tenacity in a single package, even extra-terrestrial would concur to that! Bass provides a foundation for the music, bag it. Inadequate bass, little substance below the neck of imaginary images is as if a regular photo on your passport. Well, I am not suggesting that only Wilson speakers can do that. Absolutely not, sir! I do not advertise for Wilson Audio. Many can achieve that too and it is a big mistake to disregard the room reaction.

I called it operation "listening to the bass". This comes as the most exciting tweak ever for me. No details to be revealed as yet because I do not have the permission from the guru to share this with you all. Shared only among selected friends with sharp ears, I am delighted all were at least concurring with me. It is totally up to the individual how they tune the bass with them. Naturally, if they were not effective, this post would not exist.

It would take hours and hours to get the bass specificity right if you are fanatical. Only one week into experimenting this tweak, I had managed to tighten and clean up the bass. Week two, I could feel the energies creeping up through my listening chair. Week three, I had found a new land - singing walls. You too will be proud of yourself if you get the bass you want. A house wife was complaining that despite many calls, his husband still not back home for the Lunar Year eve. The husband was madly indulging in his new found bass. He couldn't thank me enough, says that it is the most enjoyable year as far.

Fly me to the moon

Be it like impactful mid bass or natural gentle decay of low bass, hello brethren! You must first have a system capable of producing the bass first. How effective you may ask? I found that it is nevertheless hallucinative if one does not have a system that capable of producing decent bass talk about bass similarly, Africans talk about flying to the moon. That is baseless.

If not, you can start cash out your system while still fetch some monies and do something else. However, timing of this tweak is off, the New Year business closure did nothing to help but compound to further suspense, I can't get the ideal material for the tweak. Mind you, I mostly indulged in home made tweak, using household stuffs to align room reaction. They may not have WAF though.

Credits must be accorded to the guru whom I borrow his ideas from. His unique ideas rock, 堅! My audio philosophy had taken a different perspective under his influence. I had quietly verifying his tweaks and I must say that I was thoroughly humbled. What I did, I improvised it a bit for greater applications. Fortunately, the results shine and certainly not those pseudo psychological feel good. Forty years of field experience in his bag, he possesses many rabbits in his hat that I intended hop on a plane to pay a learning visit. Wrote to him, thank God, he had accepted my visit. Passion is the driving force.

Here's a teaser, is your room ambiance evenly distributed? Almost all dedicated audio share one common problem, stuffiness. Airiness that resembling live atmospheric event, as of to date, three had heard it in my place. Two give a consensus of opinion, presence of real air. Sorry, this is altogether another tweak.

Why a system sounded marvelous in a showroom but not in homes? Room reaction is the determinant. 聰明的玩法是借房發力，單靠器材發力非上策。Harvesting the good energy of the room is smart move, than relying on audio equipment alone. You must first sector your shoe box room into 3 x 5 or 5 x 7 in to cubic and learn the nodes and anti nodes, nodes are highly responsive to tweaking. You may want to energize or diffuse them depending on your preference. Whatever you do, maintaining the balance yin and yang is the utmost priority and you simply do not want to overblown certain departments. To illustrate, subwoofer works on the reinforced energies of the walls, then again, emphasizing the existence of subwoofer is the last thing you wanted to do.

Of 90 per cent of the systems I have heard showed bass deficiencies. Telling hurts relationship. Most bass start off with a pack of punch and descend with incomplete and choppy harmonic, premature rolled off. Bass wholeness is largely not preserved, diffused and confused. This is the listening room fault. Go listen a live band in a pub, the bass is always full and many times intruding the mids regardless how noisy is the environment. End of the day, you still hear and feel the wholeness of bass. Reproduced music, we are listening the music through the ears of mixing engineer where the music is cleverly edited.

My take on bass, double bass must possess tenacious properties and big drum with rumbling characteristics. The earlier must float and hop like "float like a butterfly and sting like a bee", the later must nosedive and roll. Excuse me, cinematic bass excluded because these are synthesized and exaggerated. "Pirate of Caribbean" soundtrack is not exactly the type of bass you would want your system to be judged on.

Are we there yet?

With twenty years audio experience but frankly, the last eighteen years was crap. OK, I admitted it. So, never never ever try to convince people with number of years you had, but the quality of audioing and the influence of the people around you. Meeting the right people, you never have to the very least, walk into a maze. They will be audio Samaritan, loaning equipment to assist make the wisest decisions, like your audio GPS. Friendship is to cherish but not to exploit. They who read this know.

Brush off eye pleasing tweaks, they are merely symbolic and nothing more than to impress your guests. There are always principles of physics behind every tweak, go figure.

Bass can be influenced by type of cable, cable management, seating distance which I had covered earlier. I get thrilled when I heard layers of papery skin onion bass, depicting space between layers. Goosebumps. Achieve this, everything else will be like cup cake. Beware, too much dampening is detrimental to the sound, as if high cholesterol content that narrow your system arteries.

Practically, everything in a room changes the sound, some are more distinctive than the other. Start with an empty room, you move in your carpet, shelves, seating, audio equipment etc, it will change the sound. No voodoo, but pure physics and it does not take a genius to figure this out. Having said that, the real audiophiles are the one that optimize the potential of their system. Optimizing these nodes generates butterfly effects and hence sonic improvement.

Tweaking sharpen your listening skills. I reiterate everybody can acquire good listening skills, it is a learned skill. And lastly, get a CD worthy of reference to tune the sound, not just any CD for God's sake.

OK, you can get back to work now.