Visiting an audiophile friend: Avantgarde UNO 2.1, KEF LS50, Tannoy 501A, and Spendor SA1. Merry Christmas & Happy 2020's...

[2020-01 - Update... The active Tannoy speaker was originally listed as the "401A". In fact it's the "501A". Text and graphics changed...]

One of the joys of writing an audiophile blog is the opportunity to meet some interesting people in this hobby over the years! Here in Vancouver, there's no audiophile special interest group or club I'm aware of. As a result, connections are made through receiving E-mails or private messages once awhile by locals to hang out, check out gear, and listen to tunes together...

After meeting up in person a few months back, I paid one of these local audiophiles (who shall remain anonymous :-) a visit at home to check out his main system:

As you can see, he's got quite the pair of speakers and clearly his wife is highly accommodating to his audiophile "needs" ;-).

MEASUREMENTS: Emotiva XPA-1L (Gen 1) Class AB Balanced Monoblock

Let's continue measuring some amplifiers I have here at home. Today, we're going to get a bit more serious with fidelity into the "audiophile" level. Of course I'm using the term "audiophile" here for fun since audiophilia often does not equate with high-fidelity; but who else uses monoblock amps at home except for audiophiles!?

Here's a single 35lb Emotiva XPA-1L "Gen 1" monoblock which I bought back in 2013, a few months after it was released. Far from the most expensive monoblock amplifier out there, costing a "mere" MSRP US$699 each:

This is one of two I have in use as my reference amplifier for many years now. There's not much to see on the rear - speaker outputs, both RCA and XLR inputs (toggle switch to select), IEC power connector, 12V in/out trigger (can daisy chain a few devices) and main power switch. In the front, we have the large round Emotiva switch to turn on from sleep mode, a single LED that turns red when running diagnostics or if there's a fault, and blue as above when fully on. Notice that there is a switch just above the etched serial number to set it to either "standard" Class AB mode or the special Class A high bias mode which is a selling point for this amp that we'll of course talk about. When the switch is toggled to "A", it operates at Class A for up to the first 35W into 8Ω.

Over the years, I have seen a couple of (p)reviews from Audioholics and The Poor Audiophile, but have not seen any independent measurements of the output quality.

From late 2014 until they discontinued this model (not sure when), Emotiva also made the "Gen 2" model which cosmetically looked slightly different with black instead of silver side trims. I believe internally they also made some changes which were more about cost-cutting than affecting the sound quality.

Redscape and Creative Super X-Fi Amp: Headphone Virtualization

Thought I'd take a little break this week from all the amplifier discussions recently and post on something rather different!

I enjoy headphone listening... But not as much as actual speakers in an actual room :-). I see headphones more as a tool for detailed listening, and will reach for them out of necessity when I'm on the road or for private listening. Otherwise, I would much prefer to be enjoying the sound from my speakers.

Beyond typical reasons such as comfort (no matter how comfortable, I'm just not a fan of things touching the ears or around the head), a big part of the issue is that headphones have never sounded natural to me. Subjectively, the "inside the head" sound, while I can get used to, just isn't an experience that I find particularly pleasurable. A reason I bought the Sennheiser HD800 a number of years back was because it was said that these headphones were capable of projecting sound so that the experience was more outside the cranium. Alas, if one is expecting any headphone to do this well, there will be inevitable disappointment; unless you're applying some kind of playback processing like crossfeed, the physics will not permit such a thing. As a result, I am intrigued by ways of making that head-fi experience more life-like which is what the products today can potentially do.