True Confessions (Trio15 Horn1)

Dear Ze’ev

Suddenly I realized, audition time must be over by now, and I wasn’t sharp on its start either. So I guess I owe you some confessions and observations. First of all, you will not get these great speakers back. (bluntly breaking the ice….;-)

I had the impression that I was used to quite a wide and deep soundspace. That appeared to be a false impression. These speakers really can take you into an envelope of sound. Depending on the sound-engineer’s mastering, some recordings let you perceive sound from an angle of about 70 degrees on either side of the center, the more conventional recordings give you tunnel-deep perception. I mean from the front to the back, very deep.

I thought that my room was acoustically difficult to tame. Having spent months studying on acoustics, theorizing, measuring and experimenting with damping material appeared to be a waste of time. These speakers just need distance from the walls and when placed relatively close (2½-3m or so) to the listening position ‘and’ are well broken in, you have nothing to wish for. No need for damping or bass traps anymore.

At first I thought open baffle bass production was an illusion compared to a well designed Transmission line speaker that I used to have. This impression appears to be false as well. During the four weeks these woofers became better and better. In fact the whole breaking in seems to be much longer than I thought, Over time I notice improvements even still after an estimated 350 hours or so. This yields for the horns as well.

This brings me to wonder how on earth you could develop a speaker like this, when it takes a month before you can hear the end result? Either you must have had highly valid predictive skill or lots of patience and perseverance. Maybe both.

These horns are rather addictive! As most of us work from our homes these days, so am I. I have to confess that an audio supported lunch break can easily result in forgetting to lunch. (with the consequence that you have to work until late in the night to get your targets done 🙂

Although I own Class D mono amps which distortion-wise perform hundreds of times better than my kt77 push pull VanderVeen UL40S-Power amp, the latter has not been disconnected from the set for the last two or three weeks. These speakers seem to be an excellent match for this amplifier.

I’ve always noticed some degree of improvement between the start and the end of the first side of vinyl. These speakers make it clear that the improvement starts between 5 and 10 minutes after which apparently the needle’s suspension, the cartridge or preamp have warmed up.

I thought the configuration of my set had settled after the years. Well, these speakers gradually made it clear that shortening inerconnects, even high quality,  have a big effect. So my house is in a mess now, rewiring, re configuring, thinking over a HiFi rack for instance, even the car battery, which feeds the DAC, has found temporary asylum in my living. And although female intervention in electronics associated decoration is history for years now, my aim is to resettle again as soon as possible. (even I have my limits 🙂

So cheers to you Ze’ev! I had my reservation, shooting savings into the stratosphere and expecting some rain after – guess what? I got torrential HiFi rain making me happy every day!

Stephan (NL)