I'll too add my thanks to Mike and his family and canines for hosting the event.
It was also great to meet HiFi, F100, and see Mike and Mad Dog again.
Remarkably Mike's wife is "hip" enough to be well versed in terms such as "WAF".
And as always, we could have spent "hours" more playing with the toys. Seems there are always too many options, configurations, and settings to contend with.
One thing I keep seeing is that it seems that more and more we are finding that "power cords" DO make a significant (noticeable) difference in the sound.
In fact it seems like they have more of an effect, than interconnects and speaker cables in some cases.
When we added the Boulder Power cords, there was definitely an improvement to the sound. I have noticed the same thing in my system lately as I added some AudioQuest and BPT PCs.
While I said "even more so than the interconnects and speaker cables" we didn't try the reverse of adding the interconnects/speaker cables, listening and "then" the power cords to see correlating improvement values.
As far as the Speaker "shoot out", it was actually more of a "tryout", than a shoot out since we (during the time I was there) didn't A/B any speaker to speaker back and forth.
The format was five cuts on one speaker at 80-84 db peaks, then go to the next speaker and 5 cuts on it and so on.
The room was quite large and open I would "guess" at least 25 x 25 with well over 9 foot ceilings. The floor was carpeted but the rest of the surfaces were standard sheet rock and window glass.
I did a "slap echo" test before the room filled with bodies and it showed a rather lively response. Mike and I then "arranged" the listening area accordingly.
The listening area was set up in rows, yielding one "primary" sweet spot and one "secondary" right behind it.
The speakers were placed about 9 feet away, and 8-10 feet apart. They were probably at least at least 7-9 feet "into" the room from the front wall.
As far as listening impressions it is probably relevant that you know the gear set up. I think Mike can probably supply you with the specific electronics, I believe the amp was around 100wpc and the speaker wire was (what looked like) a CL-3 grade of Monster Biwire twisted into a single wire configuration. This was "bare wired" to each speaker (no spades or bananas)
As far as speakers, my impressions were the following:
1) First up Mike had his RM1s which have the spiral ribbon tweeter. These are the speaker he and I used to setup the seating position. As with most VMPS ribbons these sound very detailed and clean. Since Mike uses them in another room, with another amp they were not "optimized" tuning wise, for this set up, but performed admirably well. The bass was solid and certainly went down to the 30 hz region. Mike mentioned that he might have to do a little putty adjusting for the different room and electronics, but I only thought one cut seemed a little boomy the rest sounded very good. The cut I used from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, (thanks Tommy) was both Bass heavy and highly defined in the high end and the RM1s seem to handle it just fine.
They seemed to image well and had a very sweet high end. Primary Sweet spot listening was very good, as well as secondary. In the sweet spot they sounded open, airy and clean.
While I just noticed that Mike didn't think they imaged well, I was able to get good center fill, and placement as well as a full soundstage. What I did notice was that the center image had "shrunk" a bit and was slightly recessed compared to what I hear with my current reference system. I think this was room and set up dependant since the 626Rs and "all" the other speakers had this same trait, compared to my reference room at home.
2) 626Rs, I am rather used to this speaker and know it's capabilities. To me it sounded very similar to the RM1, but with reduced bass response, in fact "much" more reduced than I am used to. In fact, not really close to what it usually does.
I can only attribute this to a couple possible culprits. 1) New stands I brought along. They are the Skylan 4 posters, which I had just received the day before (FRI) and had assembled, but were "not" filled with sand, so they were extremely light and not that inert or stable. 2)The lower power or dampening of the AMP (100wpc) since they have gobs of Bass with my amp, and Mad Dogs Aragons.
Generally one of the more impressive aspects of the 626R is the surprisingly low bass response, but that was not present in this set up. In fact upon arriving home I immediately set up my speakers and ran the same track and found that it was more the room and power than the stands, since even without the sand (which I got today) they have deep bass here. Strange?????
So I would have to agree with Mike's assessment that the room was not as friendly to the 626Rs.
3) nOhr Mini-9s - While I don't have a lot of experience with this speaker, I do like it based on how it sounded in "my" room and system when Mike brought them by a few months ago. Today they didn't exhibit all of those qualities.
I did hear a rather "open" and solid bass that I felt was impressive. I have to agree that they sounded a bit compressed in the mids and upper mids. Again, this was not apparent in my system but I have 300wpc and Mike is running 100wpc.
4) Ref Ones - This is one of my favorite $1500 speakers and it did not disappoint today either, in fact it sounded superb. I'm not so sure that all of it was "room friendliness" as Mike suggested, but that we somehow had it playing slightly "louder" than the other three. I could hear that immediately and saw the SPL meter hitting 90-92db rather than the 80-84db on the other speakers. But they sounded so darn good no one cared.
But the Refs as I said, did not disappoint. Mark has put together one of the strongest contenders in the "under $3000" speaker category out there. And today it did sound very good from top to bottom. Solid tight bass, smooth mids and crystal highs. While I had thought that the somewhat reflective room might cause it problems, such did not seem to be the case.
While the imaging is not as precise as what I have in my highly tweaked reference system at home, it matched or surpassed all the speakers we listened to today, in Mike's room, on that system. (like I said we didn't do any direct A/Bs, and without that, it is impossible to get any more accurate in description)
I for one would have liked, to have had, more time to actually A/B a few of the speakers cut to cut, but the logistics of how many participants and number of component combos made that impossible.
And a couple words about the Boulder package. I had to leave a little early so didn't get to hear a lot of the toys in the package (DARN!!) but I did get to hear the improvement made by the Power Cords and a couple A/Bs of the Mensa/Dio.
During those A/Bs it was clear that with the Mensa in the circuit that the midrange had more color. I don't mean it was "colored" but it just had more color and texture (meat). Now initially I also felt the highs were "down" just a bit, but upon closer listening, it was just that the ratio of mids to highs had changed.
The reason that this was so hard to discern was that the A/B also had a level change. That is, the spls increased a bit (maybe 1-2 db) so that had to be corrected before evaluation.
All in all, it was great to meet the new faces, and see Mike, his family and set up, and Mad Dog and his beautiful REFs again.
What a hobby!!!
