West Coast Audio Excursion

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R.I.P.
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Jul 15, 2005
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Location
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We had the privilege to visit Blues(Paul) in St Helena Bay this past weekend and besides exploring the incredible surroundings and tasting Petra exquisite food(I could probably do a good review on that as well LOL!), we also had some audio fun.

Paul has a dedicated music room and it seems as if the entire room is filled with acoustic diffusers and bass traps and whatever else is needed to take care of reflections and standing waves.

As we planned on trying different combinations, I took my Nuforce Pre-amp and Flying Mole monoblocs along.

Just as a matter of interest, his sound equipment consists of the following:

Source:
Custom Memory Player

DAC:
Gerdac(with some attractive foil-like finish)

Pre-Amp:
Decware valve kit

Power Amp:
Mc Allister push/pull valve(75 watts per channel)

Speakers:
Northcreek Rhythm kit based on customised Scan-speak drivers and custom Northcreek crossover.

Let me get this out of the way before I mention anything about the combination we tried, these speakers are the best I have ever heard and that includes things like B&W 803s!

The sound quality from Paul?s setup blew me away! He has obviously gone to a lot of trouble to get his setup as close to perfect as possible. You could almost touch the singers and instruments and I already dreaded throwing me modest equipment into the mix! This was after all an all valve setup and based on so many articles there is no comparison between valve kit and anything else!

We also tried out some DNM interconnects and speaker cable that Ramsey Raad from Audiotweak graciously lent us. We did this in a piecemeal way by first introducing one interconnect, then the other interconnect and lastly the speaker cable. Although there was an improvement in the sound with each addition, it was not a huge improvement.

Following this, it was time to change from an all tube to (as Paul calls it) an all ?digital? configuration and I was a bit nervous that it may sound horrible compared to the valve equipment. However we were both pleasantly surprised! The mids and highs were not as totally fluid as with the valve setup, but the difference was really minor and actually an eye opener. However the bass took on a totally different character! With the valve setup the bass sounded good, but using my equipment bass reproduction went up quite a few notches and off course I said ?good dog? to the Nuforce and Flying Moles LOL! We attributed the better bass to the Flying Moles as reviews always pointed out how good and controlled the bass was with these little boxes.

So then we went to the next test. We connected Paul?s valve pre-amp to the Flying Moles and went through the same tracks we used during previous tests. Hmm, now we were confused as the bass was the same as with the all valve setup, still very good, but with less bass.

Next step was to use the Nuforce Pre-amp with the McAllister valve power amp. The bass was back!!!! The rest of the frequency spectrum was as with the all valve setup and both of us were totally knocked out! The Nuforce is reported to be very natural, only passing the signal through as you would expect from a good pre-amp, but we also expected the same from the Decware valve pre-amp as it did sound very good during our first listening sessions! In the end the Nuforce stayed in use until we sadly had to leave on Sunday.

In the end, the weekend was a huge success as far as audio was concerned as it confirmed that I need not look at upgrading the amplification sections, but rather look at some room treatment(lots of rear wall reflection) and at the source(transport) It did leave some questions for Paul though, but I am sure he will figure out a workaround for the ?lack? of bass using the Decware Pre-amp. Concerning the surroundings and the company, we could not have asked for more and we thank Paul and Petra for their hospitality.

Abe and Christa


 
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