Phasure to X-fi 2013

[Scroobius]

Nick & I were considering coming over this year to represent the English "Nosser's" at X-Fi but unfortunately we are not able to this time. Next year though we hope to see you all there and hopefully we can drag Mani along as well.

Peter & Bert  -  all the best for a great show and all you Dutch (hey Eric!!) "Nosser's" be sure to post your impressions of the "Orelino".

Have a great time!!

Paul

[CoenP]

Hi all,

A little note from the x-fi show today!

First off it is good to know that I visit an audioshow about every year. Mostly to expose muself to different sounds, meet some people and to discover some new music. A couple of years ago I changed from the big VAD show to the smaller yet more interesting x-fi show. The latter was also a little more convenient because it was at much less travelling for me. Now the x- fi reoccupied the former VAD location near Eindhoven in the Netherlands, tough luck for travelling...
The Orelinos and "the sound of windows 8" made me curious enough undertake the trip to the Koningshof otherwise I would have skipped it.

Now I remember from previous visits that almost all rooms were plagued with poor bass quality or at least bass problems. Now there may be some prejudice and taste involved in my verdict about this bass quality, but the venture's rooms undoubtly play a role here. Furthermore these shows are a challenge to get right. Many use new speakers and amplifiers and have very little time to setup correctly. So it is unfair to have a verdict about products based on a bad show experience, but the a good ones I can remember years later. Nowadays I consider myself lucky if I have one demo I really like.

Am I heading to something? Read on!

All rooms were starting up and peeking in a few rooms I heard no sounds that raised my interest. 
Then I found the room of Peter and Bert and immediately there was a familiar sound in the room. Very musical, not having any of the dryness and boom of the others. Peter was playing some tunes that I am not very familiar with, but can be tough for a system to make them sound right...
And the thing is they didn't sound right to me. There was a nasty peakyness on loud passages in the horn, some highs were razorsharp and bass was plagued by a resonance. Also I expected more of the bass- horn integration, instruments and voiced lacked fundamentals. The kind of sound that I can recreate by connecting a mediocre cd player and solid state amp to my horns; not something to get excited about.
Knowing Peter and having heard his home system, this was not anything near the stratospheric standards he holds himself to. He wasn't looking very happy about the sound either. Peters wife Cisca confirmed to me in his absence that the sound at the was plagued by room related issues and not at all like it was at home.

Well that was in the moring.  I took a stroll and discovered another fine room and had a few chats. Then in the afternoon I decided to go back to the Phasure/BD room and Holy Cow there was a VERY realistic drum track playing VERY VERY loud.
No horn nastyness, no bad integration, no razor sharp highs, a very pure, natural and effortless dynamic sound all over the room. Easily imho the best sound of show by now. This was a diffent system!
By now I am familiar with these kind of drastic change in the XXHE world, yet I was still very impressed. I guess the system is still breaking in so imagine whet a fully tuned and broken in system would sound like!

Peter was kind enough to play some tracks that I brought along on an usb stick. These sounded absolutely better than I ever heard them, more natural and even more dynamic (not too much dynamic). I am shure both Peter and Bert (and Cisca) will tell you the sound in the room was so-so, and it probably was in their view and experince. To be frank I still noticed some (room related?) issues in the bass response but the big picture was so compelling that I took no offence to that.

If a system can sound this good at these soundlevels at a difficult show location, be prepared for what this does in your room. I can now assure you that the rants of Peter above are realistic!

I had a very good day and got all my goals fulfilled, it was very much worth the trip. Now I got enough inspiration and motivation to make win8 work and dream about a new speaker.

Regards, Coen

[PeterSt]

Hi there Coen (and all),

Allow me/us to thank you for your kind report. I think it was as honest and truthful as can be. Ok, allow me to highlight this one :

Also I expected more of the bass- horn integration,

Exactly. Now envision me a kind of hard-working on the XOver (with the horn and the bass department) I talked about, and which was not all that difficult. Net it took me quite some time, but once I found my "special means" to do it "100%", it was not so difficult - also not doing it again when needed.
But now what happened in this stupid room ...

When we setup the lot at Friday 5pm or so, our first impression was that we forgot to connect the mid-highs at all. Hmm ...
Measurements showed us that indeed "nothing" of that was there. What's up ?
Well, up till now we still don't understand, although many people told us that the sealing in there was special, and dedicated to "conference" what this room was actually for.
Still it was so that if someone was talking in there, you could hear "sibilantly" reverberate his voice in a fairly high frequency (20ms ?). Sounded really nasty. We never found what could have cause that, but maybe the special sealing was just against that (assuming that without this sealing this sibilance maybe was worse).

In between the lines : the highs were so much sucked out of everything, that our 30 or so chairs in there were minimized to 9 Saturday morning; it could help.
Also, those 9 chairs were positioned such that on their locations the sound could be somewhat acceptable, but of course those chairs won't hold their positions long. Oh well.
Moving 5 cm left or right or back or forth drastically changed sound in all imaginable directions. If anything there were very precise sweetspots and if anything again I don't like that. In my own room the phenomenon doesn't exist. Here ? crazy.

Outside the above, on Friday night we had been working on squeezing out the highs per means of lowering the woofer section. It was the only solution we could see. Totally illegal because the first it would do is destroying the XOver, and since both "lines" of mid and bass would not be in balance, no well working XOver could exist. And worse, my method of aligning the both (the proof of it) could not work anymore; we'd have a two dimensional situation where the exact XOver point (Hz) was unknown, and the time alignment also was unknown; normally it's only the latter but now the both had to be varied, and this is undoable. But merely, my very same method of proof now proved that it could not happen (which is logic within itself).
So at 2:10am we were dead and just had to give up.

That's hotel rooms;
The sad thing is that personal me was fairly sure such a thing would not happen. Here it did though, but impeded by high frequency problems - not bass.

In the mean time we already noticed that with a certain amount of people in the room, the problems would not show much. It varied all the time;
It was even so that - sitting in the back - you could clearly hear people walking through the room; all kind of phase changes came to you. Logical to some extend, but there this was a kind of outrageous.

Sunday morning - at some stage - I didn't know what to do or play anymore. All seemed to have stopped working out; what didn't show so much on Saturday now all ceased working. Why ? again no clue.

Well, at least from many people we received a similar message like Coen so nicely described : It doesn't sound well anywhere anyway, "but your room is a total relief". This is at least what kept me going, with the idea that people didn't know how it can sound anyway.

One last thing we discovered at the very end :
It was GerardA who came along with a request to play something from Van Morrison; sounded terrible (oh, really !). Then I thought of my back-home measurements and how I accidentally had seen that Back to the USSR from the Beatles did not show content above 12KHz or so. And so I tried that. And suddenly there were No-Problems (at all IMHO).
How ?
Something went just totally odd in that room for the higher frequencies. And I can tell you, all with the highest transients worked out totally grey. And I mean grey. Unplayable.

Luckily were are out of there ...
Peter

[CoenP]

Peter,

Thanks for sharing your struggle!

I still think it sounded way better in the afternoon. Besides that the room was busier you also opened the curtains somewhat, probably for some fresh air. Maybe that helped the acoustics too.

No more Veldhoven?!

Regards, Coen

[PeterSt]

No more Veldhoven?!

Haha, with these unpredictable results ? better not.
But using the same room as last year should just be OK; there everything worked right out of the box and we did not need to search for the slidest anomaly somewhere.

Oh, I now recall that last year I measured the mains to be on the safe side, and from there we "saw" our halogen lights popping up nasty peaks. That is how we needed another house ring;

One of those rings "burned" right after plugging in one of the amps. Then we needed the maintenance man to repair that, who also could tell nicely how all was connected concerning the mains stuff.

But this year's room ? It had one wall outlet only (really). There was one other at the opposite longitudinal side of the room, and that one came with some cord from the room next door. These things should be forbidden.

Peter

[BertD]

Mani,

Your Swings contain 2x15" drivers. Per side that is.
Just in case you don't know ...

Peter

Nope, just one driver is used in the later Swings and which is the situation at Mani's.

Bert

[BertD]

A little note from the x-fi show today!

Thanks for that Paul! For comments I leave things to Peter as I can't follow him as quickly and therefore very little monitored or corrected if needed...

I am not a man of so many words so to speak. ;-)

Bert

[PeterSt]

I just found the show report from hifi.nl :
http://www.hifi.nl/artikel_pagina3/21065/Verslag-X-fi-High-End-Audioshow-2013-Contrasten.html

Funny ... I read the whole text, and nowhere (that I found) a remark has been made about good performance/sound, but one ... (remarks about poor sound or way too loud playing, yes) ...

een kamer verder stond BD-Design met hun unieke set hoornluidsprekers en luxe apparatuur van Phasure. Hoewel de ruimte voor wat akoestische  problemen zorgde was het aanwezige publiek over het algemeen tevreden met de klanken van deze toch wel fraaie luidsprekers met hun eigenzinnige ontwerp.

Still a bit vague, but since it's the only expression about "suind quality" from the reporter, let me translate it (to my next capabilities) :

In the room next door there was BD-Design with their unique set of horn speakers and luxury equipment from Phasure. Although the room caused acoustical problems, the audience generally was satisfied with the produced sound from these charming speakers in flamboyant design.

I think it is fairly much justified to put this in the context of "the better room" because I have been talking to the guy who wrote this, who also vistited our room a second time for explicit reasons ...

Peter

[Jud]

No more Veldhoven?!

Haha, with these unpredictable results ? better not.
But using the same room as last year should just be OK; there everything worked right out of the box and we did not need to search for the slidest anomaly somewhere.

Oh, I now recall that last year I measured the mains to be on the safe side, and from there we "saw" our halogen lights popping up nasty peaks. That is how we needed another house ring;

One of those rings "burned" right after plugging in one of the amps. Then we needed the maintenance man to repair that, who also could tell nicely how all was connected concerning the mains stuff.

But this year's room ? It had one wall outlet only (really). There was one other at the opposite longitudinal side of the room, and that one came with some cord from the room next door. These things should be forbidden.

Peter

First: I feel I should apologize, to Peter most of all, because it was my little throwaway comment about my Vandersteens that Peter closed quickly, before realizing it was the same page where he had been working on his magnum opus comment about the Orelino speakers.  I will try to make future comments more substantive, so at least if someone loses a comment while closing one of mine, it will have been a little more worthwhile!

Second: Peter, is there any way, without overmuch fuss or cost, to have the forum server(s) auto-save draft comments?

Third: This is I think at least the second time the particular room facilities at an audio show haven't allowed Phasure to perform near its best.  It might not be a bad idea to have a couple of "room treatment kits" (one each for Europe and the US), a few cylinders for corners, some first reflection treatments for walls and ceilings, at the show sites in case the room turns out to have such problems that you would really have to screw up the system response to try to deal with it otherwise.

I'm very much hoping either you have a show near where I live or I am traveling near where you are having a show in the not terribly distant future.   

[PeterSt]

Second: Peter, is there any way, without overmuch fuss or cost, to have the forum server(s) auto-save draft comments?

Jud, no worries man, your comments are never daft. So no need to save them in draft either. Just post.


Anyway I don't see where apologies are needed. Really.
But special thanks for your good advices !

Peter

[GerardA]

Since my name has ben mentioned I must give my reaction I guess.
After 30 years I visited a hifi-show again, this time with wife and children and we had a nice afternoon. I told them we had to check if new audiosystems sound better then our aged homesystem. Well luckily no system sounded better!
All the rooms had either to much bass, heavy colouration or no definition. At entering the BD-XX room there was a big difference, phenomenal definition like comparing 4k with VGA. But after sitting down some strange phenomena got in the way. Like people moving close to the speakers, changed the soundstage abruptly. Mind they were not straight in between speaker and listener.
It comes to my mind like the horns are like a radar that makes it possible to see all the obstacles in the room.
Then my favourite track of Van, Moondance, sounded awfull, no base, no warmth, no rhytm. When I came home I played my vinyl-version and was afraid this was a different song, but I'm sure I saw the title on the monitor after Peter found it after a long search.
So it was disapointing to don't hear the perfect bass I was expecting but it was nice to have a chat with the St-family, and my wife is getting warmed up for the NOS1.
Since our government doesn't know anything about economy we have to keep our money in our pockets here in the Netherlands, so I'll have to wait some more before I can join the happy NOS1 family.

[Robert]

What about some captions re the photo's. Presume its your wife showing good interest in loudspeaker cables for a HiFi wife. Mine would never go near anything like this preferring to go shopping for womenly things.

Would be good to see a photo of St Peter.

[ed linssen]

What about some captions re the photo's. Presume its your wife showing good interest in loudspeaker cables for a HiFi wife. Mine would never go near anything like this preferring to go shopping for womenly things.

Would be good to see a photo of St Peter.

The utmost right gentleman in the middle picture is Peter
doing his prayer!

[GerardA]

Peter has an XX-badge, my wife is indeed checking the cable behind the Orelino (it's her biggest complaint at home, I already posted them here some time ago!) and the children are having fun.
Maybe some of the other people can come forward here?

[CoenP]

Would be good to see a photo of St Peter.

Look here:http://www.stereophile.com/content/cas-2013-day-one-scaling-heights

It was posted before on this forum.

Regards, Coen