I thought I would write down about what I experienced at RMAF 2007 here in the GR Research circle.
Although the show is barely over, I've already had a number of people ask me via PM and email what my thoughts were upon hearing the LS-6's and 9's for the first time.
There were some behind the scenes dramas that took place as well that had some bearing on what the final sound of the GR Research LS-6/ Dodd Audio room sounded like.
I took a lot of notes during my 3 days of listening, and have compiled them and will write about them here in order to give an honest, and succinct account of the LS series speakers.
I will do this in parts, as I try and condense my thoughts and notes in these posts.
It was an awful lot to soak in, in 3 days, but I managed to achieve my personal objectives, which was to listen to all the speakers that I was curious about, and always wanted to hear, but hadn't ever managed to hear.
The best part of RMAF? The people.
Particularly all the AudioCircle members in attendance, of which there were many. We all hung out on many occasions throughout the weekend, and it was a great pleasure to meet face to face many people with whom I have spoken with on the phone, or corresponded via PM, email, or just gotten to know via their posts on the AC forum.
Meeting and chatting, and just plain hangin' out with these guys was the highlight of the show for me.
I arrived in Denver early Thusday evening, and got settled in to my hotel room just around the corner from the Marriott. I chilled out for a bit, and decided to grab a bite to eat. Then decided to stroll over to the Marriott and see what was going on in the GR Research room.
I walked into the GR room and met Gary Dodd and Bill And Chris (IIRC). They had the room pretty much all setup and ready to fire up. The problem was, they had no transport to feed Danny's system.
Danny was to feature someone else's highly modified transport, and somehow this didn't materialize.
Danny managed to get a loaner transport from someone else. It promptly died.
After some running around, Danny managed to get another transport. After the relief of finally getting a second transport, and time running out on fine tuning of the system, things only got worse before they got better.
The second transport was deader sounding than any of us could believe. Upon firing it up and pressing play, we all just looked at each other with disbelief at what we were hearing.
This was a (stock) fresh out of the box unit, and although it was an inexpensive player to begin with, the sound was truly the most lifeless, low resolution sound I have ever heard from any 2 channel audio rig. I'm not even dramatizing in audiophile fashion here, it was
bad.
Finding another transport at this late hour was going to be a serious problem. A local Denver friend of Danny's who was at the show, generously offered Danny the use of 2 old transports he had at home. One was an old Sony Elite, and the other was an older pro CDR type machine that had a similar stable platter system to the Sony.
We hopped into Danny's car and drove to pick up the transports at got back to RMAF at nearly 11.00 pm.
We hooked up the pro transport ( the name of which escapes me now) as it had an removeable IEC power cord, while the Sony does not.
The system immediately came to life. To say it was a huge relief to Danny is an understatement. I have to admit, while being a pretty level headed person myself, and not prone to getting worked up easily, I couldn't believe the calm with which Danny proceeded after one obstacle after another.
Now that it was determined that the transport was going to be at least decent enough not to be detrimental, we proceeded to fine tune placement of the speakers in the room.
Speaker placement, good.
Check.
Now we started to tune on the bass management system built into the LS-6's. These are Danny's prototype LS-6's that are all internally damped with NoRez and the crossovers are all point to point wired with AlphaCore, Sonicap, Sonicap Platinum parts. Danny added some additional bass management over and above what the original design was, in the event there were room loading problems.
He had it configured where the bass was rolled off, and with the removal of components, the bass could be slowly brought up in level. A couple of snips with wire cutters, and that was all that was needed.
We went incrementally a number of times removing resistance, as we did not want to overshoot and over power the room, which would require Danny to have to solder back in the resistors in side the speaker in a dimly lit room with not a whole lot of room to work.
I personally felt that he could have taken out quite a bit more bass management, and allowed more bass to come through. The LS-6's measure flat to 20 Hz in Art's well treated listening room.
The GR OB 5's and OB 7's with the GR PR sub that I have hundreds of hours on will play flat to the mid 20's in room.
I would say the LS-6's in the GR room at RMAF were flat somewhere in the 30's. It was getting late and Danny decided that he would see if we had the time tweak the bass some more on Friday morning before the show commenced, if not, this would be acceptable. It turned out that it remained the way it was left on Thursday evening.
The speakers imaged well, dynamics were there, and the low end was really clean.
Now, for me, the really fun part.....
I brought along a copy of some studio drums edits that I recorded last year, that are full range, uncompressed, straight to digital ambient drum recordings. There is a tremendous amount of low end extension on these recordings, much more that any drum recordings I have ever heard from test CD's, save for some Chinese drum tracks that I've heard.
There is so much low end on them that they had the Dodd amps jumping from class A to class AB easily (the custom Dodd mono blocs are 280 watt amps that run over 100 watts in pure class A before going into class AB and can pass signals as low as 4 Hz).
On a number of occasions during RMAF I had this test disc played in other systems where the vendors upon hearing the first few hits would turn down the systems and would not run the disc at levels over roughly 85 to 90 db. One vendor of a big name speaker upon hearing the dynamics and very low frequencies, stopped the disc, and began asking a lot of questions as to what the origins of the recording were, and started to make excuses that if this disc wasn't mastered properly it could damage his speakers and was therefore reluctant to play the disc any further.
The impact of playing these tracks in the LS-6's was real indicative of how well they do dynamics, sharp transients, and low bass. The speed and resolution of playback was great. It lacked a bit of the lowest of extension, but the visceral impact was really, really clean, and good.
More to follow....
Cheers
