Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 1 - 2020 i Audio Esoterica

Sennheiser’s Orpheus HE-1s are not only the first electrostatic headphones in the world with a Cool Class-A MOS-FET high voltage amplifier integrated into the ear cups, they’re also the world’s most expensive headphones. A second amplifier, which has all the inputs you’ll need to plug in your music sources, and whose sole purpose is to support the super-high-voltage amps inside each ear cup, sits on a housing crafted from glass and Carrara marble… the same type used by Michelangelo. The complete set can be yours for just $87,294. More info: https://en-au.sennheiser.com…

‘Our goal when designing the Contrane Supreme was simple,’ said Leif Marten Olofsson, the founder of Swedish loudspeaker manufacturer Marten. ‘It was to design the best speaker in the world and with the Coltrane Supreme 2, we’ve arrived at where we want to be… our ultimate design. To create the ultimate speaker, we needed an absolute reference point, so we recorded our own album, ‘Supreme Sessions.’ The result? With our eyes closed, we find the playback of the recording is identical to the sound of the live performance.’ The array of drivers in the Marten Audio Coltrane Supreme 2 is impressive, comprising six 280mm diameter passive radiators, seven 203mm-diameter aluminium sandwich bass drivers, a 127mm ceramic midrange driver, a 20mm diamond tweeter and a 19mm diamond super-tweeter. These are linked…

AUDIO ESOTERICA: It’s an achievement for any company to celebrate its 30th anniversary, as you did last year. Can you take us back to the beginning? What you were both doing prior to Wilson Benesch, and how the company formed? CHRISTINA: Thank you! Reaching such a milestone and looking back upon it and reflecting, we realise it is quite some achievement in any industry. We are very proud of the company we have created and all the people within the organisation that have made it possible to reach this milestone. CRAIG: Looking back to the time before the foundation of the company, from my personal perspective I wouldn’t say there was one thing that fuelled the idea to create Wilson Benesch, but some of the more inspirational and formative experiences in my…

LEON SUTER: Lee definitely takes care of the mechanical side, with my input mostly confined to anything that may affect the acoustic performance of the design. I have always had a passion for sound. I often used to call in to the only hi-fi shop in town on my way home from school, checking out every-thing in the store. I remember feeling betrayed beyond belief as a teenager when my father went shopping with my uncle for a new hi-fi system without my knowledge! I went on to study classical clarinet at university and chose to also study advanced mathematics and numerical computing. I continued this dual passion when I joined the Air Force as a clarinettist and was the studio and live sound engineer. LEE GRAY: Yes, I’m the…

I didn’t like it when I heard that Boulder had moved from its home in Boulder, Colorado. OK, so the company still does all its design and manufacturing in good ‘ol Colorado, but now all Boulder products are being built in Louisville, Colorado… and Louisville just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. I guess it’s just lucky the company didn’t start out there, otherwise this might have been a review of the Louisville 866 Integrated Amplifier. Boulder builds everything it sells in-house, indeed the company claims to be last manufacturer in the USA to be doing so. Its website states, ‘Every part of our products, every piece of metal, every circuit is created and assembled in-house by our own craftsmen and technicians. Boulder is the last audio manufacturer…

Nirvana Sound, Wilson Benesch’s Australian distributor, is a new audio distribution and consulting business based in Melbourne. It combines a selected network of dealers along with its own demonstration rooms, ‘dedicated to representing the finest audio equipment to discerning music lovers’. And the enthusiasm of the main protagonists is palpable. Managing Director George Moraitis has spent a lifetime surrounded by music, with a professional guitarist father, a folk-singer mother, and a working life spent taking side trips to visit audio designers, personalities and audiophiles in his search to discover audio equipment which gets out of the way, putting the emphasis back on the joy of listening to music. ‘One of the benefits of this hobby is that you meet very interesting people and the friendships formed over listening to music…

Paul Wilbur Klipsch was an American speaker designer who pioneered the concept of horn-loading a speaker and was one of the first speaker designers to be inducted into the USA’s ‘Audio Hall of Fame’. One of his very first (of 22) patents was granted in 1945 for the ‘Klipschorn’ design, which was unique for many reasons, one of which was that it was designed specifically for use in a corner. Rather amazingly, 73 years later, Klipsch is still building the Klipschorn, largely according to the original design, but updated with modern components and drivers, making it easily the only loudspeaker in the world that has been in continuous production for more than 75 years. It is also now the only fully horn-loaded loudspeaker available to consumers. Paul Klipsch (also known familiarly…

Dynaudio claims to have the largest and best-equipped anechoic speaker measurement chamber in the world, but it also has another huge chamber fitted with an in-house designed loudspeaker measurement system known as Jupiter. Jupiter is housed in a room that is a 13-metre cube: 13 metres by 13 metres by 13 metres. When you’re standing in one corner of it, the surprising thing is that the ceiling seems much further away than the opposite wall. You will notice this because you spend most of your time here looking up. There’s a massive half-circle assembly up there that is home to 31 microphones positioned right around it, and they surround a separate gantry that positions a speaker right in the middle of them, such that every microphone is an equal distance…

If Daniel (Dan) D’Agostino designs a new amplifier, you can be sure that not only will it look like no other amplifier available, but also that it will use inventive circuit topologies and innovative materials to deliver state-of-the-art sound quality and that, further down the track, it will win awards right around the world. So all that lies ahead for the just-released first integrated amplifier in D’Agostino’s Progression Series. ‘The new Progression Integrated combines the elegance and detail retrieval of the Progression Preamplifier with the power and dynamic capability of the Progression amplifier topology,’ says D’Agostino. Rated with an output of 200-watts per channel into 8Ω and 400-watts per channel into 4Ω, the Progression is analogue-only at its heart, but you can option in a digital module that adds every…

When Yamaha announced its 5000 Series of two-channel audio, one choice was fascinating — it would be all-analogue. There is no digital source for the system, although of course Yamaha has other products in its ranges which could do the job. But in pride of place at the front of the 5000 Series is the GT-5000 turntable, the final component to be released in this combination of turntable, separate pre-amplifier and power amplifiers, plus the iconic NS-5000 loudspeakers. Together they manage to deliver something which is both fresh and modern, but which clearly leverages both Yamaha’s past classics and its engineering technologies developed over the company’s century and a quarter. BALANCING ACT Not only is the system fully analogue, it is also balanced from beginning to end, from cartridge to…

Brabham Automotive’s BT62 has been called the world’s most track-focused hypercar. Tubular spaceframe steel chassis; naturally aspirated 5.4-litre V8. Only 70 BT62 cars will be produced, built here in Australia by a team led by British-born Australian racing driver David Brabham, son of Sir Jack, the only man to win a Formula 1 world championship driving a car of his own construction, three-time F1 world champion, and founder of the Brabham racing team that went on to win 35 F1 races. And in a newly-announced partnership, Kyron audio systems are now available for Brabham Automotive customers to order in liveries matching their BT62. It’s part of a Kyron bespoke production program that will also see Kyron developing audio systems for future Brabham road-based vehicles. ‘Brabham is pushing the envelope in…

When you read Vivid Audio’s brochures and delve more deeply into the technologies it uses in its loudspeakers, you might start to experience a certain sense of déjà vu… the feeling that you’ve already heard about Vivid Audio’s technologies. If so, you should trust your sixth sense, because Vivid Audio was founded in 2004 by two men who spent a very long time at B&W and were instrumental in that company’s success: Robert Trunz and Laurence Dickie. Trunz was for many years not only B&W’s managing director, but also its majority shareholder. Laurence Dickie was a research and development engineer at B&W for thirteen years during which time he developed for B&W not only the ‘Matrix’ cabinet bracing technology the company still uses to this day, but also its most…

Dan D’Agostino and Mark Levinson are the two amplifier designers who, many years ago, put the world of audio on the path to ‘high-resolution’ by building amplifiers the like of which no-one had ever seen before. Both men proved to be better audio engineers than they were businessmen, because Mark Levinson is no longer the owner of the company he founded (even though it still carries his name) and Dan D’Agostino is no longer with the company he founded, which, as you’ve probably guessed, was Krell. Krell’s fortunes have fluctuated over the years, but a change of ownership has seen a renewed focus on the company’s core values, and the release of a renewed product range, of which this new K-300i digital integrated is a leading light. The design brief…