Thanks to Mel & Susan for opening their home to us for what turned out to be another very successful meeting. June meeting have a history of light attendance because of graduations and people starting to get involved in summer activities, but for the 6th month in a row that we have had 30 or more attendees.
Mark K. of Miracle Audio (
http://www.miracleaudio.com) was on hand to demonstrate two of his flagship products. His top of the line Di-Ane speakers are unique in that they are a full fledged audiophile speaker that is designed to be directly wall mounted. (And by the way I think we should nominate Susan for Audiophile wife of the year. I thought my wife was tolerant of my hobby, but if I ever tried to tell her that I needed to punch holes in her living room wall to to a stereo demo for the guys I would be ducking pots for sure.
) These 42" x 14", 1/4 wave transmission line cabinets extend only 5" off the wall giving them a very high WAF.
OK, so they are easy to place, and can be kept out of the way to promote marital harmony, but how do they sound?
Better than they have any right to given conventional thinking. Mark has broken a lot of the traditional "rules of speaker building (and as a matter of fact has been told his ideas would never work by many of the "titans" of this industry
) but somehow it all hangs together and produces some very credible sound. It really is a credit to Mark's ability to think outside the box. I was very impressed with not only the off axis response from a spectral point of view, but also the extent to which you could hear both speakers and still get a good sense of the stereo image from way outside the traditional sweet spot area. If I was pressed to identify any one weakness of these speakers I would have to say that on some tracks you did miss some of the lower foundational bass response (the most noticeable was the Hotel California track on the Eagle's Hell Freezes Over.) But it was not something that I noticed all the time and considering that Mark said one of his biggest target markets for this speaker is people will be using the speakers for Home Theater as well as pure music, I think it is safe to assume that many of the installations of this speaker will have a subwoofer that will be able to fill in the bottom octaves. (As a matter of fact Mark is working on a matching on-the-wall sub that he said should be ready for prime time very soon.)
The second item that Mark brought along to demo was his Divinative preamp.
It was hard to come up with an assessment of how the preamp sounded given the fact that I was listening to it with a pair of speakers I had never heard before, but it id have a number of features and characteristics that got my attention. First of all it is built like a tank. The fit and finish is absolutely first class and the electrical construction is clean and neat. I almost hesitated to post photos of the unit because the really look kind of ordinary and do not do justice to how well this piece is actually built. (But I knew Rich would be sad if there were no pictures, so here they are.
)The unit has a separate power supply chassis to keep all of the noisy PS components away from the signal path. And speaking of the signal path, there are no capacitors anywhere in the audio path. We can argue all day over which capacitors sound the best, but I think we can also agree that the best sounding cap in the signal path is no cap at all. And Volume control is achieve through the use of a microprocessor controlled ladder of extremely high quality resistors such that no more than two or three resistors are ever in the signal path at any give time (keep it simple.) The preamp also has a very interesting operational feature. It contains a comparator function that allows you to lock in a volume difference between two of the inputs so that whenever you change the selected input the volume automatically changes as well to insure a constant spl between the two components. Sounds like it would make comparing the sound of two different components a breeze. Again, given that I really had no reference point I can't make any specific comments about the sound, but I can say that it certainly sounded good within the confines of the system that was demoed and it had some operational and design features that really piqued my interest.
Thanks again to Mel for hosting,
to Mark for presenting
and to Susan for feeding and putting up with all of us loonies.
