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Incredible Listening Room with Vicoustics

Listening Room - Vicoustics

Yesterday Matthew and Adam did a beautiful job of installing Vicoustics acoustic treatment in one of our favorite customer’s listening room. This client is an accomplished musician and definitely has an ear for what his recordings should sound like. So over the past couple years he has allowed us to help him build his audio system to the level of performance that most people have never experienced.

Musician's Room

For vinyl playback he chose the Clearaudio Innovation turntable with the Goldfinger Statement moving coil phono cartridge. This feeds the music downstream to the wonderful Aesthetix Janus Signature Preamplifier. From there, using all Nordost Heimdall-2 balanced interconnects, the signal flows out to a matching pair of Aesthetix Atlas Mono Blocks and, because our customer is a bass player and doesn’t want to miss a beat, a wonderful JL Audio Gotham subwoofer. The speaker cabling is Nordost Vahalla and the main speakers are the beautiful Focal Scalla Utopia speakers. For digital playback he chose the Aesthetix Romulus CD player and Digital to Analog Converter and our very popular Sooloos Music Library server.

Listening Room - Gotham

One would think this state of the art combination would knock your socks  off. Normally a system like this does. It sounded great, however this room’s overly lively acoustics got in the way  of the focus and tonal balance of the presentation. So we invited the talented folks from Vicoustics to help us fix this this problem. Kiera from Vicoustics came out and measured all aspects of placement issues and sent theses specifications to their acoustics engineers located in Lisbon,Portugal. From there they ran several sophisticated computer based evaluations and gave us recommendations along with a menu of products for us to choose from.

Vicoustics Ceiling

The big smile on my customers face last night said it all. We sat with a nice bottle of wine and thoroughly enjoyed listening to this incredible system.  I know, I know…. it’s a tough job but someone has to do it.

Enjoying Listening

Here’s the message I received from our customer later after he’d had more time to experience his new system:

“Am I hallucinating or am I getting tons more bass out of the scalas? So I am going to say something really stupid and you can quote me… but I really feel that I am listening to my stereo system for the first time versus istening to the room.”

A Complete Aesthetix System

Aesthetix System

Today we fired up a complete Aesthetix System in our main listening  room. It included the Romulus CD / DAC, the Calypso Signature preamp and the Rhea Signature Phono Preamp, along with a pair of Atlas mono block amplifiers. We have been going between the Focal Diablo Utopia and one of our favorites the Stella Utopia. The Calypso is a new addition and we’re just breaking it in. However already I think this is one of the most 3 dimensional sounds we have experienced in our showroom.  I recently installed the same system for a client in Canada and felt the same sense of dimension while listening in his room.  I just wanted to invite whoever wants a wonderful  listening experience to come on in to hear it with your own ears. You won’t believe how good it sounds.

A big heartfelt thanks to our friend and colleague, Mr. Jim White of Aesthetix, for paying very close attention to what can be sometimes overlooked in our industry: musicality and detail but also a wonderfully rich presentation of the physical space sometimes seemingly hidden and often lost inside the recordings.

A Music Bath

I ran across this quote this morning and wanted to share the wisdom.

“Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.”

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Now Playing At Our Theater Near You

Sony VPL-VW1000ESk Projector

This morning we installed the long awaited SONY VPL-VW1000ESk projector in our theater room. This is considered by most video aficionados as the absolute State Of The Art in home theater picture reproduction. You know how good Blu-Ray looks right? Imagine 4 times the pixel count with eye popping  contrast and color. We watched a bit of “Planet Earth” and it actually feels as if you are looking through a window. 3D also looks better than anything any of us have ever seen. We are displaying it on our 133-inch Screen Innovations Fixed Screen and you can actually walk up to this screen, put your nose an inch away and not see a single pixel. The price is not for the faint of heart but when you see this, be careful… you are going to want it!