Brigadiers Audio Debut at the Newport Show!

"All right Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

If you've been following this blog you'll know I went to Sydney last summer and worked with my mates Brad Serhan and David Allen to perfect an already freakishly good two-way monitor called, at the time, the Compact. I had them playing at my house for the first six months of 2015, and then I packed them up and spent 20 hours at 35,000 feet in order to return them and offer my opinions. I spent the next three weeks with Brad, David and their partner Morris Swift and sat in a big comfy chair while they played around with resistor values, speaker positioning and other strange design rituals. By the time I returned to the US, the newly-christened Brigadiers BA2 monitors were performing at an incredibly high level of fidelity.

I started off this Down Under Audio project of mine right here in this blog with the somewhat lofty and delusional title "In Search of the Perfect Two-Way." I'm not going to be all sappy and say this speaker is it--as Judy Spotheim of SpJ Turntables told me, there is no such animal as a perfect two-way--but I did give the brigadiers my blessing with the declaration that I could buy the BA2s and be happy for the rest of my life with them.

Since I left Australia last September, Brad and David and Morris have continued to work hard to make the BA2 and its bigger brother, the BA1 floorstanding loudspeaker, a commercial product. They've tweaked it even further to get as close to sonic perfection as they could, and then started demonstrating these two models to dealers all over Australia. Within weeks they nabbed several dealers, who in turn found homes for all the existing stock. I didn't hear from Brad and David for many weeks--they were too busy building speakers and filling orders.

Now that the Newport Show is quickly approaching, the BA2 is ready for its debut in the US. Colleen and I will be pairing the BA2 with our favorite amplifiers from PureAudio of New Zealand. We'll be using a high-quality analog rig (TBA) as well as cables and power management from Furutech, as part of our Down Under Audio presentation. You'll be able to hear the Brigadiers Audio/PureAudio/Furutech combo in Room 1012 at the show, right next door to the Axis VoiceBox S and REDGUM Audio room we'll also be hosting.

Again, the whole idea of Down Under Audio is this: Australia and New Zealand have always had a lively and active audio industry that has offered some great brands over the years. We're talking Plinius, Duntech, Whatmough, Orpheus, Perraux, Continuum, Halcro and more. But aside from one or two of those brands, Down Under Audio has kept a very low profile over the last decade or so. While in Sydney I heard great system after great system in dealers such as Len Wallis Audio and Knox Audio. In the last couple of years, I've heard plenty of stellar products from Australia and New Zealand such as the Axis VoiceBox S loudspeaker, the REDGUM Audio RGi35ENR integrated amplifier, the Audio Union Helix turntable, The Wand tonearm, the Antipodes music server and, of course, the amazing amplifier line from Gary Morrison and Ross Stevens of PureAudio.

If I accomplish anything in the audio industry, I want it to be this. All of this gear is phenomenal. I know I represent much of it and it's my job to promote it and market it and sell it. But here's the thing. I've got a birthday coming up, number 54, and as David Allen said to me back in Sydney, "Let's face it, we're not getting any younger." The context of this comment was that most of us have been in the audio industry for a very long time, and it's time to do something special. We're not talking about making a bunch of money and retiring to our own tropical paradises, because we should have picked a different market segment to do that in. No, we just want to do something of value, something truly good and worthwhile. Quite frankly, I'm all in.

So come to room 1012 at the Newport Show and listen to these wonderful speakers. A lot of good people are putting their hearts and souls into these products. Sure, that can be said for most of the rooms at any hi-fi show. We all believe in the magic of putting beautiful music into people's lives. But I've been into audio since 1975, when I used money from a paper route to buy a Kenwood receiver, AR loudspeakers, a Dual turntable and a Shure V-15 Type III cartridge and I was deliriously happy. And turning people on to sound production of this caliber also makes me deliriously happy as well.

See you at the show!

Down Under Audio

I know what you're thinking. All this talk about Australia has to lead to something. Well, it does.

For the better part of the last year I've been planning to do an audio show in the US where I feature a lot of the high-end audio products I've been discussing here and in other places. While I worked with Brad Serhan, David Allen and Morris Swift on the final design of the Brigadiers Audio speakers, I spent the entire time bugging everyone to finalize production by June 2016. That, of course, is when the Newport Show takes place in Southern California.

As soon as we returned from the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas in early January, Colleen and I have been working overtime to bring together a consortium of manufacturers from both Australia and New Zealand to feature their gear at the show. And that was the beginning of "Down Under Audio," the theme of the two rooms we will promote at the show, which will be held on June 3-5.

The first choices were obviously PureAudio, Axis and REDGUM Audio--the three "Down Under" brands that we already represent at Colleen Cardas Imports. John Reilly (Axis) and Ian Robinson (REDGUM) quickly came on board--they manufacture from the same factory and their products obviously mate well together. From the swiftness of their actions, it became quite obvious to me that they've done this all before. So Room 1011 at the Newport Show will be an all Axis/REDGUM room. Of course we will be featuring the Axis VoiceBox S loudspeakers, but everything else will be REDGUM since this Australian company known for its high-current amplifiers also makes digital sources, cables and even equipment racks. John and Ian are all ready to go.

Of course Colleen and I wanted to spotlight PureAudio from New Zealand in the other room. We've represented the line since 2012; this brand has always been close to my heart and I really want people to know about it. The most exciting thing for me about including PureAudio is that I finally get to meet Gary Morrison in person. We've been Skyping for years, but I've never been able to shake his hand. I've met everyone else in person--John Reilly, Ian Robinson, Brad Serhan, David Allen, Morris Swift--but not Gary.

That, of course, brings up all the other brands we're featuring. But here's the deal--I'm going to have to hold up my promotion of those products for different reasons. One manufacturer is busy getting his legal doo-dads in order for trademarking and patenting and whatever else he needs to do, so mum's the word for a few more weeks. We're still working with another manufacturer on all the fine details, so I don't want to jeopardize this involvement because it will be awesome if it happens as planned.

One more manufacturer is involved, and I want to wait just a little bit to announce it because this is a really cool product that's been in production for a while. I've just recently been introduced to it, and it's the kind of product I love--great performance, solid engineering, amazingly low price. I want to give this company its own separate place in the sun.

But I'm not worried about announcing the US debut of the Brigadiers Audio BA2 bookshelf speakers. These are obviously the two-way monitor speakers that prompted me to go to Sydney and work with Brad, David and Morris. You know how I kept talking about the perfect 2-way speaker? In its final production form, I believe it's as close to perfect as it gets. This two-way stand-mounted monitor has evolved into something unusually impressive and satisfying for its size, and I left Sydney last September thinking it was absolutely amazing in every way.

We talked about bringing the BA1 floorstanders instead, but I think the excellence of the BA2s will act as sort of a lead-in for those speakers. I'll bring a pair of those into the US sometime this year, and I'll probably drag them around the country for a while and have people listen to them. Or maybe I'll keep them to myself. Mine! Mine! Mine!

So that's the scoop for now. Room 1011 will feature Axis and REDGUM Audio, and next door in Room 1012 we'll have PureAudio, Brigadiers Audio, Furutech and a few surprises to be announced. I'll keep everyone updated, and I hope to see everyone at the show!

The Chronicles of Sydnia, Finale: The Brigadiers Audio BA1 Loudspeaker

I'm currently fulfilling my own prediction that I'll be talking about my trip to Australia for the rest of my life. Here it is, nearly two months to the day after I returned to the US, and I'm still acting like one of those '50s dads who invites everyone over for twenty minutes of drinks and three hours of vacation slides. I'm ready to wrap it up now, although my trip will influence the direction of CCI over the next year.

For me, the single biggest reason to travel to Australia--outside of getting that first official passport stamp--was to hear Brad Serhan and David Allen's masterpiece, the Brigadiers Audio BA1 loudspeaker. I didn't even get a chance to hear it until about two weeks into my trip. I'd heard plenty about them beforehand, however. One of the many things I learned about Aussies was that they consider bragging to be poor form. (An American friend of mine has sarcastically noted, however, that Aussies like to brag about their modesty.) Brad wasn't telling me that he had made his masterpiece, a speaker so good that I should travel 8,167 miles just to hear it.

Instead, he said things like "we're anxious to have you over for a listen" and "we think it's really good but we want your feedback" and "we've had some reviewers and dealers here give it a listen and they really love it, but let's not get ahead of ourselves."

Here it is in all its glory. The Brigadiers Audio BA1 is much like its creators, understated and modest on the outside and utterly engaging while going about its daily business. Featuring two of those famous SEAS magnesium mid/bass drivers per side as well as a Raal ribbon tweeter, the BA1 seems very much like a traditional 2.5-way design--albeit one using the finest parts and materials. With this speaker, God is in the details with its birch-ply cabinet construction, constrained layer damping cabinet design using a new adhesive between the layers, and a remarkably refined crossover that is the culmination of Brad's thirty-plus years in speaker design.

In addition, Brigadiers can customize the BA1 and the BA2 in a number of different ways. An outboard crossover will be an option, for example, as well as driver gaskets made from additional constrained layer damping material from Les Davis. But one of the most unique aspects of these two speakers are their almost bespoke quality. When a customer decides to order a pair of BA1s or BA2s from a dealer, they will begin a relationship with that speaker. They can decide between exotic hand-oiled Australian veneers such as brushbox (seen in the completed BA1 we evaluated) and Australian rosewood and much more. Toby Hogpin, the master carpenter who is making the complex and beautifully-made cabinets for these speakers, can also encase them in dozens of different Corian finishes.

Then, once an order is placed, the entire team will send the customer video updates of the speaker being made. The customer will literally know his speaker inside and out before it even arrives. And while many manufacturers would use this custom approach to stretch out the delivery time of the finished product, Brad figures he can build a pair of these in just a few weeks.

Brad and David and I visited Toby at his shop in Sydney about a week into my visit, and to tell you the truth I had been looking forward to it for days. I have kind of a fetish about wooden loudspeaker veneers, and I'll be the first to admit that a gorgeous wooden finish is very, very important to me when I'm making a loudspeaker buying decision. I want something breathtakingly beautiful, something that no one else has. So I love the idea that you can discuss options with your dealer based on hi-rez photos supplied on the Brigadiers Audio website and choose a unique pair of speakers that no one else will have.

In other words, if your buddy buys a pair of custom BA1s or BA2s and you listen to them and decide you also want a pair, your speakers will not look exactly the same even if you choose the same veneer. Toby is always on the hunt for exciting and beautiful veneers, and he knows that the variations from tree to tree are profound enough to create a distinctive look for each pair of speakers. Then again, if you want a pair of speakers exactly like your buddy's, then it can probably be done. But what fun is that?

For instance, Toby showed me these blocks, which are all Australian rosewood. You can see the differences in color and grain patterns. That's why Toby will supply Brigadiers Audio with hi-rez photos so that the potential customers can see close-ups of the wood grain. The photos have to be hi-rez, of course; I don't know about you, but I've received speakers that looked completely different than they did on the website, thanks to these differences in veneers. Hi-rez photos are the best way to give the customer an almost exact idea of the final product.

Once a veneer is chosen, Toby gets started on the construction of the cabinets. With all of the layers of birch play, these speakers are very heavy for their size. I've had the 2-way BA2s since January and they're heavier, in my opinion, than any other wooden speaker of its size--more than 40 lbs. each. The BA1, despite having a relatively compact footprint and height, is a monster. It took two of us to carry each one of the empty cabinets back to Brad's house. They're not one of those behemoth loudspeakers that require you to place hydraulic jacks under your suspended floor, but they are surprisingly hefty.

As an additional choice, Toby can make the BA1 and BA2 with a Corian finish instead of the wood veneer for customers who want a more modern, streamlined look. Corian is a really interesting material for loudspeaker cabinets because, unlike wooden cabinets, Corian cabinets are repairable. If you scratch the cabinets of your BA1 or BA2, anyone who is a certified Corian installer can buff out the scratch and make your speakers look like new again. If you knock a chunk out of your loudspeaker cabinet, a Corian technician can merely shape a new chunk, fit it to size, and work it into the cabinet. You'll be able to see where these bigger repairs were made from up close, but not from your listening position. Minor scratches and dings, however, will not be detectable after repair.

Toby also has the ability to produce different combinations of veneers, so you can have brushbox on the outer sides and Corian on the front baffle, or anything else that might strike your fancy. Toby has more than 30 different colors available in Corian.

Once we carefully packed up the empty cabinets in the back of Brad's wagon, we returned to Brigadiers to assemble the speakers. For my initial listening impressions, we left the crossovers on the floor behind the speakers so that we could change resistor values if needed. (This is what we did with the BA2s, by the way.) Within a couple of hours, our BA1 was ready for my approval.

My input, as it turned out, wasn't really needed. Unlike the smaller BA2, which was still an unfinished prototype when I arrived in Sydney, the BA1 was a finished design and was already making the rounds. Indeed, this pair wasn't even serial number #001. With that Einstein integrated, the BA1 was an incredibly complete speaker, one that did everything I wanted it to do. After spending more than a week fine-tuning the BA2, I was beginning to think that my quest for the perfect two-way speaker was over. The BA2s were, in its final reiteration, so solid in the lower bass that I could not imagine needing more. When I heard the BA1, however, I heard that more and knew I had to have this speaker. Natural, detailed, extended and the frequency extremes--I knew that Brad had made his masterpiece. The perfect speaker for me, in other words, is a 2.5-way.

I'm going to stop right now with the hyperbole and the marketing talk because I don't want this to be about sales. It's just that this has been one of the highlights of my audiophile life, actually working with designers and consulting with them and getting results that are far better than I ever expected.

The challenge, of course, is bringing these two wonderful speakers to the US market and beyond. In just a short time, Brad and David have found a couple of dealers in Australia, and they're already talking about New Zealand distribution. But the US has become a very tricky market for high-end audio. It's not enough to say here, listen to this, you'll like it and want to buy it. As an importer and distributor, my main obstacle is usually bringing in brands to the US that represent good value, something that can be tough to do when you have to work in the cost of global shipping and still pay the bills. That has become one of the main requirements for CCI carrying a brand--when someone asks me how much a product is, I want them to say "Oh, is that all?" and not "Why is it so expensive?"

With this level of design, however, every little thing makes a difference in the final product, and everything costs money. These two speakers will not be cheap. That means Brad and Davis and Morris Swift (a third partner I haven't mentioned yet...sorry, Morris!) will have to ensure that they are running their operation as lean as possible without affecting the results. Plus, there are hundreds and hundreds of new speaker companies trying to get a foothold in the US market. They all want to be the next KEF or Harbeth or Quad or whatever.

All I can say is that this is the speaker I want when I retire, when I get off the audio merry-go-round. Is that enough to make people notice? Well, I aim to find out. Right now I'm trying to get all of these Down Under brands together at a US high-end audio show, possibly next year's show at Newport, so people can listen for themselves and decide whether or not I know what I'm talking about when it comes to good sound. I'm talking PureAudio, Axis, Redgum Audio, Brigadiers Audio--and let's not forget Les Davis' intriguing new CLD material--all in one room, or maybe two.

Australia and New Zealand are hot spots for high-end audio. They know good sound, and they are serious about achieving it. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. And I can't wait to go back.

The Chronicles of Sydnia, Part 2: Getting to Work

In the interest of disclosure, I must state my biases about Brigadier Audio up front, especially in the context of my recent visit to Australia. I've been consulting with Brad Serhan and David Allen on these two speaker models all year long. I'm not even going to try to say that I had something to do with the final design--Brad and Dave have been completely obsessed with these two speakers for more than a year and a half. My role is little more than an audiophile who came in, listened and offered feedback. Despite all that, the Brigadiers Audio BA1 and BA2 are sort of my babies, in a godchild sort of way, and my main objective in going to Australia was to sit down with Dave and Brad and listen and tweak until we were absolutely sure they were great enough to bring to the US market. So of course I'm going to tell you that I love these two speakers--but just not because I want to sell them to you.

Let me illustrate. I love pizza, and the best pizza I've ever eaten was mine. Ask most of my family and close friends about their favorite pizza, and they'll probably tell you it was mine as well. While I was in college I worked at a local pizza parlor, then I managed it, then I started my own pizza parlor based on my own recipe, and then I sold it and partnered up on a second one. When I developed my own recipe, I basically started with solid recipes that I truly enjoyed, and then I tweaked it until it had evolved into the best tasting pizza I had tried up to that point. It wasn't culinary skill, and it wasn't luck. It was just about indulging my own preferences, and hoping that my tastes in pizza had a somewhat universal appeal.

It was the same with these two speakers, especially the BA2 2-way monitor that I've been evaluating since last CES. I was going to listen, offer my opinions, and then step back and let Brad and David decide whether or not my recommendations were valid. When I told Brad that after listening to the BA2s my only reservations were the extreme bottom end and a reticent midrange, he nodded and agreed as if to say, "I thought so." It turns out that Brad was able to voice the speaker in one of two ways, and he basically flipped a coin to decide which setting he was going to use on my sample pair. After hearing my comments on the BA2's performance, he basically told himself, "Ah, the other setting."

Once I arrived in Australia and my body clock adjusted somewhat, we dove into work. Brad's first recommendation was to experiment with a variety of resistor swaps that would set the impedance at different values between 4.5 and 5 Ohms. David, shown in the photo at left, suggested that we swap out the rear ports as well. In the workshop they had a variety of wooden O-rings of different shapes, as well as matching tubes of differing lengths. When I told Brad that I wanted deeper bass, he and David decided to try a longer port with a smaller diameter hole. Dave got to work on machining the O-ring so that I would fit perfectly into the rear of the BA2 cabinets.

Sure enough, the change in the port dimensions produced a much deeper and much more satisfying bottom octave. I told Brad and David from the beginning that every smallish two-way monitor sold in the US had to have one salient feature in order to be successful--it had to sound "much bigger than it looked." After the port tweak, I no longer had reservations about the bottom end of this speaker. The deep bass was huge, deep, full, round and musically persuasive. The port fix also seemed to cure the laid-back midrange, the proverbial two birds with one stone. If these different ports had been available to me while I had the BA2s in the US, I wouldn't have needed to go to Australia at all. They would have been perfect, in my honest opinion.

But I'm so glad I did get to go, so that point is sort of moot.

By the way, we did all of our final testing of the two Brigadiers Audio speakers with this Einstein integrated amplifier with internal phono stage. We had quite a few amps on hand to test out the speakers, but we decided unanimously that this German-made Einstein did the best job of stepping aside and letting us hear what the speakers were really doing. We compared the Einstein to another very highly-regarded amplifier from a very highly-regarded European manufacturer--and we were all surprised when the Einstein came out head-and-shoulders above in terms of detail and focus and imaging.

I know very little about the brand--I did have a chance to audition one of their phono stages years ago when I was reviewing equipment, and I remember liking it. But this amp right here, well, wow. What a nice, beautiful, state of the art amplifier that is, incidentally, light enough for one person to carry around comfortably. Someone told me they thought it retailed for around AU$16,000, but that's actually a bargain for this level of performance.

I found the sound room in the workshop to be a little on the live side. I could hear around the room acoustics to a certain extent, but I was concerned that some of the room reflections could mask minor problems with the sound. So we moved the BA2s and the Einstein to Dave's gorgeous condo right on Sydney Harbor. If you've seen the photographs of the Axis VoiceBox S on the Axis website, the ones with the Sydney Harbor Bridge in the background, well, then you've seen Dave's place. Despite lots of glass sliding doors and sleek, modern surfaces, Dave's living room actually turned out to be a great place to listen. Solid floors and soundproof rooms combined to make the BA2s sound focused, warm and full of inner detail.

We did proceed with a few transistor swaps and finally came up with an impedance value that balanced the midrange perfectly against the frequency extremes for a totally coherent and balanced sound. We listened for hours, and at the end of a long night we all decided that the BA2 design was finished.

So I've been talking about the search for a perfect two-way speaker in this blog, to which SpJ's Judy Spotheim-Koreneeff told me "No such thing, and no such creation." I know that in high-end audio, there is no perfect and there is no best. But I can say that the Brigadiers Audio BA2 is a lot like a slice of my pizza circa 1982--it's what I want in a two-way if given the choice. Because it's a two-way, it's small and easily managed when it comes to speaker placement. (Someone, I think it was Brad, mentioned that the strength of the two-way is that it's much easier to set up in a small room, and I believe we all agreed.) It images like crazy, with musicians and voices inhabiting very specific spaces between the speakers, their actual sizes perfectly reproduced in Dave's living room.

But because of the complex, solid birch-ply construction, constrained layer damping and high quality drivers, I just got the impression that this was a basic two-way design taken to the nth degree. Now I know there are some pretty ambitious and expensive two way speakers out there from the likes of Magico and Raidho and others, tiny speakers that sound magnificent--and cost about the same as a new Honda Accord. The BA2s will cost a fraction of that, but they will still seem fairly pricey to the uninitiated. But this is simply a matter of looking a little deeper--seeing the love that Brad and David put into every pair, and then hearing the results. I'm very proud of how this speaker turned out, and I can't wait to share it here in the US.

I'm jumping the gun a little--I'm saving the coverage of the cabinet-making aspect of Brigadiers Audio for later--but I did want to show you an unexpected development in the cabinet choices of these two speakers. Brad and Dave and I went to visit Toby Hogpin, the master carpenter who will be building the exquisite cabinets for the BA1 and BA2. In addition to plenty of exotic Australian hardwood veneers, the cabinets of the Brigadiers Audio loudspeakers can also be made from Corian. You probably know Corian from its applications in kitchen counter tops. My personal pair of Trenner & Friedl ART loudspeakers have Corian on the front baffles, which is very polished and shiny and attractive.

Well, Toby made a couple of BA2 enclosures using black and white Corian and they are simply beautiful. What's unusual about Corian is that it can be repaired and re-polished if there's an incident. So if you scratch the outside of these speakers, you can take them to anyone who is a certified Corian installer and have them re-polished and restored to their original pristine state. If a chunk gets knocked out of them--and I've seen this on many traditional wood veneer enclosures--you can get add a piece and re-contour the surface and get them almost back to perfect--supposedly you can see where the piece has been added if you look up close, but not from your listening position, where it counts.

These speakers can be finished in 35 or 40 different Corian finishes. Many of these finishes will remind you granite counter tops, however, so sticking to the solid colors is probably wise.

So for now the Brigadiers Audio BA2 2-way bookshelf monitor is finished. Brad and David are going to perform some measurements so we can get some specs on the Brigadiers Audio website. Then I'm getting another pair sent to me so I can show them to dealers, at trade shows, all the usual venues. I'm nervous and excited, as are Brad and David. But we're eager to see how audiophiles and music lovers respond to the BA2.