CCI at the AXPONA Chicago Show in Two Weeks!

Colleen and I are gearing for our biggest trade show yet...two complete rooms at the upcoming AXPONA show in Chicago. Chicago hasn't had a high-end audio trade show since the Winter CES was cancelled fifteen years ago, so everyone is expecting a huge and enthusiastic turnout.

Here's a rundown of our two rooms and the systems we will be featuring:

In room 817 we will be featuring the Unison Research Simply Italy integrated amplifier coupled with the new Unison Research Unico Upower booster amp–48 wpc channel of beautiful single-ended EL34 sound. We will also have the Unison Research CDE CD player, the Opera Quinta loudspeakers, all on a Trellis rack from Splintr Designs and cabling and power management courtesy of MIT.



The second CCI room at the Chicago AXPONA show, room 813, will feature an extraordinary system that includes the US debut of the PureAudio Control preamplifier and the PureAudio Reference monoblock amplifiers, along with the outstanding PureAudio Vinyl phono preamplifier we debuted at RMAF last October. We will also be using a SOTA Millenium turntable with a Soundsmith cartridge, and all cables and power management will be provided by WyWires. The loudspeakers are the incredible My Audio Design Duke Royal Limited which appeared at CES.



Special thanks goes to Arnold Martinez of Tweak Studio, our Chicago dealer for Unison Research and My Audio Design. Arnold has been instrumental in helping us organize and run both rooms, while at the same time he's planning a grand opening for his new store at the Hyatt Regency--which will be held right before the show. Colleen and I will be attending that event as well, and I'll have more information soon.

2L Recordings: Fartein Valen String Quartets on Blu-ray Audio and SACD/CD Hybrid

I was very pleased to receive the two latest Blu-ray audio/SACD/CD disc sets, Fartein Valen String Quartets and The Schubert Connection, from Morten Lindberg of 2L Recordings in Norway because they're both recordings of string quartets. My love for intimate classical ensembles harkens back to my formative years as an audiophile living in a small apartment, when I discovered that British mini-monitors and small-scale jazz and classical recordings were the key to enjoying great sound quality without pissing off the neighbors. As a sheer listening exercise, string quartets are also a great and informative tool for evaluating micro-dynamics; it's exciting to follow individual musicians through a particular piece, and decent hi-fi equipment allows you to do that with uncommon ease. (Truly great audio equipment allows you to do the same exercise with large symphonies, but in my early years I had to settle for "better than average.")

The liner notes of Fartein Valen String Quartets open with a fascinating quote from conductor Issay Dobrowen: "If Valen had not been such a shy, self-effacing person, he would have won fame throughout Europe." That's one of the keys to enjoying this recording--by listening to these primarily atonal pieces and putting them into a temporal context (String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2, along with the three brief Goethe poems that close the programme, were composed between 1925 to 1931), one wonders why Valen isn't as celebrated as Bartok, Berg, Schoenborn and Webern, among other modernists. While Valen was well-known in Norway, his output was not widely embraced in his home country due to the conservative musical tastes of the time. That excluded him from the admiration bestowed on Grieg, among other Norwegian composers, at least until the end of his life when performers such as Glenn Gould started to champion his work.

While Valen is famous for his atonal polyphonics, his earlier work built heavily upon the counterpoints of J.S. Bach. That's why it's particularly intriguing that this recording also includes String Quartet Op. 0, which was written back in 1908. This piece, with its sweet melodic themes and lingering allegiance to the Romantic Era, and to my ears only fleetingly to Bach, stands in stark contrast to the rest of this disc; it's positioned toward the middle and acts as a wonderful, lyrical interlude to the signature pieces.

Where this disc excels is in its ability to provide the listener with a true definition of musical dissonance. It's easy to pound clumsily on a piano and call the result atonal. It's quite another to demonstrate how the individual musical lines of each performer--in this case, the Hansa Quartet, and soprano Hilde Haraldsen Sveen, who sings on the final three Goethe poems--can express such beauty and only provide dissonance with the other members of the ensemble. This typically amazing 2L recording illustrates this comparison with more clarity than I've heard before; this is the classical recording for fully realizing each member of a string quartet within the context of the whole ensemble.



I have to admit that I've stacked the deck for this review. I listened to Fartein Valen String Quartets on an extraordinary audio system built around those incredible Duke Royal Limited speakers from My Audio Designs (disclaimer: I'm the US distributor of MAD). This is the first time I've listened to one of my 2L discs while the Dukes were set up, and it was a rare treat to hear a recording of this caliber reproduced on a world-class transducer. I'll bring this recording, along with plenty of other 2L recordings, to the upcoming AXPONA show in Chicago--so you can hear what I'm hearing.

My Audio Design Grand MS Maestro Supreme Loudspeakers

Speakers, speakers, speakers. I have no less than four pairs of speakers that I need to break in before CES next month. Fortunately those $48,000 MAD Duke Royal Limited speakers were just used at a trade show in Hong Kong, so they're pretty much broken in. I spent two days listening to them, loving them, caressing those beautiful cabinets into the wee hours. They do everything you'd expect a speaker at that price point to do--bottomless bass response, crystalline highs, extraordinary midrange. It's almost scary that they do it all while being surprisingly compact and lightweight. Most $50K speakers resemble coffins and weigh hundreds of pounds; I could pick the Dukes up by myself and move them around.

Now I'm playing with a more modest design from MAD--the $11,000 Grand MS Maestro Supreme--and they're larger and heavier than the Dukes. They lack the exquisite cabinetry of their big brothers as you can see, although they are still obviously made with great care and skill. The MS features the proprietary MAD SFC coaxial drivers which are designed to be coherent and offer exceedingly low levels of distortion. The crossovers use pure silver solder, 99.99997% pure copper cabling and "ESA silver diamond" capacitors.

Compared to the Royal Duke, these speakers don't quite plumb the same depths and are slightly less dynamic, but let's face it--the former speaker is quite a tough act to follow (and more than four times the price). Plus, the Supremes still needs some break-in before I can evaluate them fairly. As it stands, they image like crazy and possess a silky, extended treble that's addictive.

After this, I still have a pair of Opera Mezzas to break-in, as well as another pair of MAD 1920s that I haven't even removed from the box. Plus I have a Unison Research Simply Italy to warm up, and we have yet to receive the Unison Research Unico Upower booster amp from Italy. The Upower quadruples the power of low-powered tube amplifiers up to 100wpc, so the Simply Italy will go from 12wpc to 48wpc. This will be the first Upower in the US, and it's making its debut at CES (in Room 29-117). I'll have more info on the MAD room in a few days. Until then, I'm switching out components and listening to everything from Sam Cooke to Tool in an effort to get this equipment sounding its best.

My Audio Design Duke Royal Limited Edition Speakers

It's been a long time since I've had a pair of $48,000 speakers to play with...okay, I've never had a chance to play with speakers anywhere near this price point. I used a pair of $13,000 Harbeth 40.1s for a few weeks, and that's probably it. No, these are the My Audio Design (MAD) Duke Royal Limited Edition speakers, and I get to break them in for a few days on their way to CES.

I apologize for the troublesome pics--these babies are so glossy and dark that it's hard to capture the absolutely breathtaking finish on them. Turn on the lights and they become virtual mirrors, and I'm pretty much taking a pic of myself standing in awe of the MADs while holding my iPhone. Turn down the lights and they look pure black. But they're not gloss black. This is a very dark-stained wood that appears translucent up close. Yes, that is the Union Jack on the side panels (these are made in the UK), lovingly assembled with different shades of veneer. It takes a month to make these cabinets. I believe it.

They're also much more compact than they look in the photos. They're only about waist-high, and I can easily pick them up and move them around. Despite their modest dimensions, they produce a GIANT sound with deep, powerful bass that shakes the room. $48K is a lot of money--I could have purchased that BMW 1-series M I really wanted for around the same amount of money--but once you see, feel and hear the Dukes you'll have no doubt that they are serious world-class loudspeakers.

I've listened extensively to a MAD speaker once before--I reviewed the entry-level 1920 a few months ago and found them to be the perfect mini-monitor for those who want a modern, updated and improved version of the classic BBC LS3/5a. I spent a few weeks with them before sending them off to TONEAudio, where they received a very favorable review in Issue #49.

The Royal Dukes share that same sense of refinement, and that same smooooth midrange, but with almost unlimited dynamics. Can it get any better than this? It's possible, since MAD has an addition line called the Royal Salute that has models ranging from $96,000 to $150,000. Colleen and I are helping the designer and founder of MAD, Timothy Jung, get a foothold into the US. MAD is already huge in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and their home base in England, and after my review of the 1920s I received several emails from people who wanted to know where they could hear them in the US. After CES in a couple of weeks, I may have an answer.