Hey Mark, We enjoyed having you visit the room. Thanks for the comments above and please let the forum know how the NOS1 is settling in.
Here we are almost a week after the show and I think overall the event was very good for Phasure. First, Peter was able to introduce his personal brand to the West Coast and meet/chat in depth with a number of Bay Area based engineers in the field. Second, although the room sound wasn't perfect by any means, the SQL was extremely smooth and extended out into the room nicely. After fighting with the very bright Heil tweeter for half a day, we decided to cover them with a sock (literally) and stick with songs that emphasized the speaker's strong points: dynamics, low-level detail, ambience.
The speakers were Surreal Audio Fifth Row speakers, an interesting design that consisted of the ESS Heil AMT tweeter on top, a 7" mid range driver hand made by David Chaffey of DC Gold Audio, and six 10" bass drivers in a separate bass enclosure. We used a Crown Xti 4002 amp to power the bass and a beautiful Wells Audio Innamurata SS amp to power mid and tweeters. The speakers can be seen here:
http://www.surreal-sound.netI first heard the Surreal speakers at Newport and thought they sounded great. What happened unfortunately was the speakers were altered after the Newport show, for what reason we know not. The mid range driver was pulled and swapped for the DC Gold Audio 7" cone, and the Heil tweeter was installed with no resistors in the line to attenuate it's brightness. I am told the crossover point for the new mid range cone was never adjusted properly and there was a resulting mid-bass hole in a crucial area, along with extremely bright sound from the Heil. The room sound really emphasized the upper mid and treble of music. Peter was the first to notice on day one that things weren't right.
The crucial mistake for me was in keying up a track by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson for Jason, Lorraine is one of his favorite sopranos. At low volumes, Lorraine's voice was sweet and smooth. But as the song climaxed, her voice began to break up at top and Jason's well-tuned ears saw it coming.
In retrospect, anyone of the relatively unknown components we brought together could have gone wrong and I think Peter's point from above is that we may use his equipment/speakers for any further shows. Overall, the room sound had strengths and weaknesses, but the smooth and harmonically rich sound we encountered, and deep extended soundstage, were noted by all who listened.
Per Peter's comments above about the Zalman, he is correct. We used two computers connected via x-over cable, my Zalman fabless (Zuma) design used as storage and his XXHighend/Silverstone pc as the player pc running a RAMdrive.
/LM
