Welcome to the Labor Day Weekend 2003 newsletter from Sonic Spirits!

============================================================================

We’ve moved! Not very far; the new location is on East 72nd Street between 1st and York. The new listening room is a little smaller than the previous room, but not nearly as acoustically challenged.

Along with the move, I’ve added a few new products/components to the demonstration system. The most significant additions are two Blue Circle Music Ring balanced power conditioner and distribution centers, the MR800 and MR1200. Other pieces include an Acoustic Zen Tsunami II power cord and Satori mono speaker cables, a pair of Blue Circle BC86mkIII Noise Hounds (described below) as well as a number of cones and other accessories from Eighth Nerve. The entire setup now sits on a Billy Bags Pro-33 audio rack (it’s massive!).

We are scheduled to receive a demo unit of the BC3mkII Galatea tubed preamp from Blue Circle in early September. The mkI version has been recognized as a Stereophile Class A component for many years, and the initial reviews by those who have been lucky enough to demo the newly-released mkII version have been extremely positive. Sonic Spirits will only have it here for a week or two before it is to be shipped off to California for a reviewer. If you’d like to visit and hear a demonstration, please get in touch! (info@sonicspirits.com).

Also being planned for September is a gathering at Sonic Spirits of local audiophiles and enthusiasts participating on the Audiocircle.com online community, tentatively scheduled for Saturday afternoon on September 13th. Audiocircle.com appears to be one of those rare online communities that has avoided degrading into a series of pointless arguments and flame-wars…check it out! And of course, please let me know if you’d be interested in attending the gathering.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend!

============================================================================

Blue Circle has recently received the following reviews available online:

BC24 hybrid power amplifier: http://www.ultraaudio.com/equipment/bluecircle_bc24.htm

BC21.1: http://www.soundstage.com/revequip/bluecircle_bc211.htm

The Resolution Audio Opus 21 CD player received positive reviews in the August 2003 issues of Hifi+ and Hifi Choice (both from the UK). They are not yet available online. I do have hard-copies of the reviews; get in touch with me at info@sonicspirits.com if you would like to receive one.

An excerpt from the Hifi+ review: “The Opus really is very sweet sounding. Devoid of any grain, it enabled aspects of texture, tonal colour and thus the character of musical instruments to be clearly portrayed. Smooth but not bland – string music had a sumptuous quality about it, but not at the expense of detail, which has sometimes been a trade off with other players. Spacious and very open, acoustics and the associated boundaries were beautifully preserved, each note decaying perfectly into virtual silence.”

You may not be aware, but in addition to high end audio cables, Audience offers musical instrument and microphone cables in its product line. The Audience Conductor Musical Instrument Cable was recently reviewed in OnSoundandMusic.com; something for you musicians to consider!:

An except: "With less volume booming out over everything, the room and the stage had more delicate sound, tonally better sound, and a more engagingly relaxed sound than ever before. Better yet, the other musicians found themselves able to play at lower levels since the guitarist HEARD HIMSELF more truly and, therefore, played more quietly! His restraint influenced his band mates. The sum total of the change from substituting one cable for a much better one was immense".

============================================================================

In mid-July, I received an email from a distributor regarding a speaker company called Vince Christian Loudspeakers. As a relatively new dealer, I still get a bit of a charge when manufacturers/distributors contact me about their products, so I was very quick to reply and see what they were all about. To make a long story short, after about two weeks of some back and forth with the distributor, Vince himself contacted me from his operations in Northern California to say that he would be visiting New York at the end of July. He would have demos of his speakers with him and wanted to know if he could stop by and show them off to me. My response? “Absolutely!”

Physically, Vince Christian Loudspeakers are no ordinary speakers. From the pictures on the website, these speakers looked more like works of contemporary art rather than high end audio equipment. The flagship E9 consists of 3 horizontal PVC cylinders (“high pressure water pipe”, I was told later), each with a driver at the front end. To see a picture, see http://www.vincechristian.com/E9.html. Also, the technical specifications were somewhat suspect; on the E9 loudspeaker, frequency response was listed as “65hz to 18.5khz”. 65hz? 18.5khz?? For a $8800 set of speakers??? He was also going to bring his c12p subwoofer, so that would help the bass, but for guys who are into tech specs (I’m not really one of them), issues were already beginning to build. If they weren’t so funky-looking, I would have called Vince back to tell him never mind. As his visit to New York approached, Vince would send me emails with teasers like “be prepared” and “get ready for some great sound”. And when he arrived, he even went as far as to “diss” my Audio Physic Virgo II speakers, exclaiming “Arrgh! Turn those paper drivers off!” One thing my wife has learned over the years is to never diss a man’s audio system! Vince had certainly set expectations high. Would his speakers stand up to the test??

Things did not start off auspiciously for Vince’s demo. He had just picked up his E9 speakers from an audio reviewer who had been testing them for the past few months, and when we opened the boxes, the speakers were damaged; on both units, one of the cylinders had broken off from the rest of the speaker. Unfazed and enthusiastic as ever, Vince told me “Let’s get some epoxy!”, so we trekked to the local hardware store to buy some. After some handy-work, the speakers were glued back together, and we went out for lunch as they dried. Lunch, by the way, was fun; if his career as a speaker designer was ever in jeopardy, Vince could certainly get a job as a motivational speaker…he is high energy, positively focused, and a lot of fun! Returning an hour later, we set up the newly-fixed E9s and the c12p subwoofer. We were ready to hear how they sounded.

It’s always hard to describe an audio presentation without using such clichéd words such as “dynamic”, “open”, “transparent”, “large soundstage”, “holographic imaging” etc. It’s also almost embarrassing to use descriptors like “awesome”, “amazing”, “incredible”, “engaging”, “musical”. However, these are all the words that come to mind. The E9/c12p combination was all of these things and more. And they did well on a wide variety of music; among the test CDs were my usual “Introducing Jian Wang – Jian Wang”, “Carmen Fantasy – Sophie Anne Mutter”, “Come Away With Me – Norah Jones”, “Live at Blues Alley – Eva Cassidy”, “Wired – Jeff Beck”, “Friday Night in San Francisco – John McLaughlin/Paco De Lucia/Al DiMeola”, and “Shaman – Santana”. It is hard for me to write about how each CD sounded, because I find myself repeating comments thinking about how lifelike the presentation was. As Vince would say, “there’s some great sound coming out!” As always, personal preferences always have a lot to do with how one critiques something, but I honestly found no weaknesses to note. And if you told me these things rolled off at 18.5khz, I’d say you were nuts. Perhaps if I was to A/B compare these speakers in my system with the likes of the Wilson WATT/Puppy 7, the Revel Salons, or other highly regarded speakers in the price range of a midsized sedan, I could point out differences and possibly even preferences. But on this particular sunny afternoon, I was simply amazed.

According to Vince, the primary theory behind his design was to remove the distortion that is caused by mounting drivers all onto the same front baffle/cabinet. Cabinet resonance is a very common phenomenon, and some manufacturers believe they can solve such resonance with cross-bars, spikes, even such designs as mounting drivers onto a single baffle unattached to any cabinet. Vince approaches this problem by basically eliminating the baffle and cabinet altogether. His PVC cylinders are tuned specifically for each driver, and each has no resonant effect on the other drivers in the speaker. He also believes that not enough speaker manufacturers pay enough attention to properly spacing drivers from each other in their designs, causing interference/distortion as the sound leaves the speaker, interacting with the sound produced by the other drivers poorly. So Vince Christian speakers are carefully designed to space each driver optimally to properly blend with each other.

One of the things that really surprised me was how seamlessly the E9s integrated with the c12p. Although Vince did not give me a technical explanation for why this might be, I do have my own theory. The c12p is designed similarly to the E9; it is a 12” woofer mounted at one end of a 12” PVC cylinder. So basically the E9/c12p consists of 4 drivers each mounted on the end of 4 PVC cylinders with no baffle or cabinet to resonate; in essence, it’s almost as if you could consider the subwoofer as just another driver in the E9 design, with the crossover being engineered with equal precision as the rest of the speaker.

Vince also brought along a pair of his E5 “Lifestyle” speakers. Instead of the three cylinder design, the E5 has a carbon fiber driver mounted into one cylinder, and a tweeter mounted on the end of a shaft. For a picture, check out this web page: http://www.vincechristian.com/E5.html. Based on time constraints, we weren’t able to demo these extensively, but they demonstrated much of what the E9s showed in terms of openness, soundstage, and musicality. They can be either stand-mounted or ceiling-mounted, and at less than half the price of the E9, they seemed like they would be a superb value at their price point.

There have been very few instances where I have been completely floored by the performance of audio equipment. I now count this demonstration of Vince Christian’s E9/c12p among those instances. The E9/c12p speakers provided one of the most dynamic, open, transparent and balanced sonic presentations I have ever heard in a home setting. Are they the best speakers out there? I would never crown any speaker with that award, because system synergy, personal preferences, etc make that impossible to single out just one product. But I will go out on a limb to say that they are now one of my very favorites, and if there are speakers that are significantly better, I don’t think I have the ears to be able to tell.

For a picture of Vince Christian in New York with the E9 and E5 speakers, check out the Gallery page on Sonicspirits.com: Gallery