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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: The remarkable moments in Audio.
Post Subject: Never before or after.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 12/23/2017
It was somewhere in 1998-99 I believe. A local dealer, Dan
Chadwick called me and told that if I swing by he will show me something that I
never imagine. The dealer has a spectacular
listening room, I mean beyond believe spectacular, with no money or efforts spent
to calibrate decays across the spectra and take care many other aspects. Usually
these rooms build by today’s “acoustical geniuses” are not so great, that room was
truly good, it was just a pleasure to be in that room.
So, they had some kind of pre-production version of Avalon Acoustics’
Eidolon. Might be it was not pre-production but Neil Patel’s own prototype. I
do not remember now. They told me some intricate story how they got it and what
it was, it is not so important. The important is that when I saw Eidolon lately
the speakers looked and sound exactly as the speakers I heard during that demo.
The electronics was top of the line Spectral, with MIT top of the line cables
all over. The shop was big Spectral/MIT pushers, so it was not a surprise. They
play explicitly RR recordings and advised me do not use my CDs, I did not
argued as I had no need to.
As I entered the room the setup made me to laugh. Not that I
had too much experience those days but it was ridicules beyond believe. The speakers
were good 10 feet apart, almost parallel to each other and almost parallel to
the long walls. The speakers were facing to the left side of the room. The
listening chair was practically between the speakers, perhaps a foot from the
live between the tweeters, facing to the right side of the room. As I sat it
the listening chair and juts looked at the location of the speaker I thought
that Dan is out of his mind. I hardly even saw the damn speaker as they were at
the line of my shoulders pointing behind me. They has perhaps 5 degree tow-in
and were shooting to the wall behind me, good 15 feet away.
As we begun to play music, I got the message: it was beyond believe.
There was a lot in that sound that I would accept even then, not to mention now,
but the imaging aspect that the installation was throwing was completely out of
that world. The layout of the instruments and section, the deeps, the width,
the stability of the images across dynamic ranges, anything that I even seen in
imaging was just exquisite. In fact I never seen any playback even remotely go
to this level of imaging, with exception of the playbacks that operate in DPoLS
mode.
Dan told me that it is a bit ridicules setup but the uniqueness
of the room and geometry of the Eidolon allow them t have that inimitable
setting that does some exceptional trick
with imaging. It was so good that sometime I got disoriented and felt that I am
standing at the very edge of a huge cliff. I honestly told him that he need to
keep that setup and to charge audio people for the rights to hear it. I am glad
I did.
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