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B&O Play Announces Release of BeoPlay A9 Active Speaker System
During their presentation to the press, B&O suggested that this product was not necessarily made for the audiophile but instead those interested in design and feeling enriched by one’s surroundings. Apparently, this message did not sink through to the other geeky writers. During the Q&A, reporters continued to prod whether the BeoPlay A9 could be used in stereo mode with two BeoPlays, to which B&O representatives affirmed that it could, but it was not designed for that intent. While the BeoPlay A9 was designed to sound good, more importantly it was designed to look good.
We asked Øivind Slaatto, a young designer who also has a strong interest in music, to create a design that is as free of visual noise as possible, and then had our engineers empower it with truly amazing sound.
The BeoPlay A9 houses two ¾" tweeters and two 3" midrange units each driven by a separate 80-watt class D amplifier. When playing back Stevie Ray Vaughan, the guitar-master’s licks sounded relaxed, refined yet realistically Stratty in the treble, and filled the loft with sound. For the low-end, the BeoPlay A9 uses an 8" bass unit powered by its own 160 watt class D amplifier. The bass performance on the speaker was noteworthy offering deep and supple extension. Tech-reporters prodded again whether it could be used in stereo mode. Again, it can, but only when connected via speaker wire. Airplay cannot send separate left and right speaker feeds so stereo playback was not a priority when developing the product.
I felt embarrassed on the behalf of the reporters. This is just supposed to look awesome. Can’t that be awesome too? As long as it is not marketed as the best sounding stereo experience on the market, which it was not but instead as the best looking, which it could contend for, then B&O is doing the customer a service by telling them exactly what they are getting. Presentations continued to focus on the visual aspect. With its gentle curves, aluminum siding, and Danish simplicity, the BeoPlay A9 is a subtle and enchanting approach to the loudspeaker.
The BeoPlay A9 offers three different “sound modes” depending on the type of placement: corner, wall, or freestanding. The speaker can be hung on the wall by hooking under its bass reflex port (gasp!), and despite the A9’s powerful bass, B&O representatives promised it would not fall off the wall when the you listen to double-kick drum patterns.
The A9 will allow for upgrades to their built-in DSP. One can turn the volume up or down by sliding your hand across a dimpled ridge on the back of the speaker and pause the music by resting your hand on top, a seductive party trick. Solid wood legs are available in oak, beech, or teak and B&O offer five color options for the fabric cover: silver, white, black, red, green, or brown. When the fabric cover is removed, a Fibonacci-sequence ridged grill covers the drivers.
The A9 will be available for prices starting at $2,699 at B&O stores, the B&O PLAY online store, Apple online, and select design stores.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
Touch.30 Live in NYC
Like ML, I was captivated by the total experience: the dim lighting, the attentive crowd, the lulling sounds, the rich scents, the soft feel of old floorboards and torn carpeting—it all worked to transfix and transport.
Still, I was reminded that I tend to enjoy this sort of art more in my own home, where I can create my own images and stories, or even allow myself to fall asleep, while the hi-fi handles the reproduction. I still haven’t managed to avoid wondering why I enjoy this sort of sound art. My thoughts interfere with my enjoyment. What is it that I’m listening for? It’s always the recognizable bits that turn on me, that turn me on: the shards of rhythm in the chaos, the accidental melodies in the noise. Then again, I was similarly delighted just to see Philip Jeck smile. Too often, we forget to have fun.
And, as ML says, the simple act of listening strengthens our humanity, reminds us of our connection to greater things—things outside ourselves, things outside our listening rooms.
The event was just one in a series celebrating Touch’s 30th anniversary. Home to outstanding artists such as Hildur Gudnadottir, Oren Ambarchi, Christian Fennesz, Phil Niblock, and Philip Jeck, Touch shares our interests in sound, listening, and beauty. For more info or to purchase tickets to one of this weekend’s events, visit Touch or Issue Project Room. Also see my review of Thomas Koner’s wonderful Novaya Zemlya, available now from Touch (CD, Touch TO:85), in our October issue.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
Phil Muzio, Madrigal's CEO
Photo: Mercury Pictures: Chris Fitzgerald
Madrigal's chief executive officer is known for working well into the night, but that's been a goal of his since boyhood. For many years he dreamed of becoming a professional guitarist, and even dropped out of Yale to satisfy a ravenous musical appetite. "Enough of trying to be a Renaissance man," Phil Muzio recalls thinking at the time. His aim was to be out there on the bandstand making music.
Muzio was born in 1954 and grew up on his family's 47-acre vegetable farm in North Haven, Connecticut. (The land, which his Sicilian-born grandfather bought in 1902, is just a 35-minute drive from Madrigal's Middletown headquarters, where Mark Levinson and Proceed components are manufactured and where the marketing of Revel speakers is handled.) At age 16, while still in high school, he took a part-time job at a New Haven audio shop called David Dean Smith. The eponymous Mr. Smith was one of America's first hi-fi specialty dealers.
Phil subsequently entered Yale, but left after his freshman year to study music at the University of Hartford's Hartt School and at the University of Bridgeport, where his teachers included the jazz guitarists Neil Slater and Sal Salvador. He continued to work at David Dean Smith and, one Thursday evening in 1974, he recognized a young musician who strolled onto the sales floor—a bass player, whose picture had appeared on a Paul Bley album cover.
That chance meeting with Mark Levinson was the real start of Phil Muzio's career, which now occupies more hours—day and evening—than he ever envisioned it would.
David Lander: You began working at Mark Levinson Audio Systems in 1974, two years after the company was established. What were your duties in the early years?
Phil Muzio: I was first doing odd assignments for Mark Levinson—delivering things, picking things up. When I started working inside the company, Mark had launched Mark Levinson Acoustic Recordings, and I was inspecting records, doing listening tests and final quality assurance, particularly on the LNP-2 preamplifier. Then I became associated with his engineer at the time, Tom Colangelo. He was overloaded, and he gave me a circuit schematic he needed breadboarded. I had done a lot of that work. I was a hi-fi hobbyist, and I had built several of my own preamplifiers by going into the basement at David Dean Smith and pulling the schematics out of the backs of service manuals and asking a lot of questions of the people in the service department. I built the board and returned it to him in a couple of hours, and he fired it up, and it worked. So he went to Mark and said, "I need this guy in the engineering department." It just kind of snowballed at that point.
Lander: By 1980, you were managing the engineering department. What did it consist of?
Muzio: There were five people, primarily Tom, but zero degreed engineers. It was a design department.
Lander: Was Mark still using John Curl or Richard Burwen designs, as he had done at first?
Muzio: No. We weren't getting any designs from John Curl or Richard at that point.
Lander: Many years ago, you began doing listening tests on equipment under development. That voicing, as you call it, helped create the large, spacious, enveloping sound that characterizes Levinson. What, specifically, are you listening for?
Muzio: I'm not one who gets off on saying that our sound is accurate. Anybody can say "We strive for accuracy." In point of fact, today, products from different manufacturers sound as widely different as they did 20 years ago. The sonic signature is really a personal choice. Bottom line: We're in the entertainment business. Our goal—and we've said this consistently for 30 years—is to re-create the original musical event. That goes beyond saying a violin sounds like a violin and a trumpet sounds like a trumpet. I'm talking about being able to convey the emotional message that the artist can convey in a live performance. Our job is to re-create that within a home.
Lander: What specific sonic characteristics do you focus on in order to get the job done?
Muzio: One is resolution, the detail available in a live musical performance that gives you the cues that trick you into thinking you're there. If it's a live recording, there are cues from the audience. In a piano recital, it's being able to hear pedals being pressed. There's a level of resolution that's key to creating that illusion.
Another one is dynamics. Without that, you'll never believe that it's really music. Acoustic instruments are wonderfully dynamic—-they get loud real fast, they get very quiet. You have to be able to optimize the electronics so they don't limit the capacity to put the dynamics of a performance in the room. That's something we call harmonic richness.
And imaging, the localization of the performers. You get that with the first notes played in a live performance. You know where people are across the performance area, but you also know who's close, who's far away, who's in the back and off to the right. And then you also get a sense of the space. You have to be able to convey that because, on most recordings, all that information is there.
Lander: You've said that you got out of the live music business because you ultimately decided you weren't good enough to succeed as a top-level performer. Before that, though, you did play professionally. Does that experience inform your in-house listening sessions?
Muzio: I had a lot of experience playing in big bands. That was good training. I know that people don't have long aural memories, but I do believe that something develops.
Lander: "The ear educates itself," is how Rudy Bozak—that grand old man of loudspeakers—once put it.
Muzio: Correct. I've spent my life listening, and I think I have a sense of when something sounds right. "Right," to me, means it sounds like it really does occur in the room. And I think I have a sense of when things sound wrong. I was in the rhythm section, so to my left the saxophones were in front, the trumpets were in back. I always got a kick out of people saying, particularly with tube equipment, "It's so musical. It's so warm." If you've ever listened to a trumpet live, you'd never describe it as warm. It's brash. When I read reviewers who say the trumpets were harsh, I never know if they're commenting that they don't like the way trumpets sound or they don't like the way the system is re-creating the sound.
Lander: You've said it varies from project to project, but how many hours might you spend in the listening room evaluating a product during development?
Muzio: Hundreds. We start very early in the design of a product, in engineering, because there are decisions that need to be made at a topological level. That isn't every circuit block in every product; it's up for grabs. There's a lot of science here. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a product that's designed with good engineering practices, good basic physics, good electronics principles, etc., will outperform a product that isn't.
We place a high value on proper design practices and good bench measurements, but there's a flip side to the product-development process. We don't sell the measurements—we sell the experience, and the experience happens in the listening room. It's evaluated by people with their ears. Those two things go hand in hand. You advance the electrical design, and you confirm it in the sound room. From our experience, we know that certain circuit blocks within a product are more influential than others.
We have a whole library of topologies—and we advance them, they evolve. There are a lot of areas in digital design where the library continues to grow, because we're doing more products that have more digital parts to them than ever before. So our guys may come to me and say, "These three circuits all measure well, we think they're all valid to use in this block, but we need you to listen to them to see which one sounds better."
Lander: These days, you listen along with Tom Calatayud, a senior design engineer. Is that so there's someone present who can pinpoint the technological reasons why you're hearing—or not hearing—something?
Muzio: That's part of the reason. We have a pretty stable crew here, and a number of the key players in engineering have gone through this process with me many, many times. They understand what I mean when I say certain things. They know what I expect.
Lander: And, I would think, specific electronics problems create certain sonic aberrations.
Muzio: There are certain sonic characteristics to a system that has ground-loop problems. If it does X, Y, and Z, you have ground-loop problems. There's a whole library of those kinds of things. There's a history that builds up year after year after year.
Lander: Do you know which version of a circuit each prototype under evaluation is using?
Muzio: I never know what choices I'm making. I may know that tonight we need to decide on a feedback loop for a particular amplifier.
Lander: So, in effect, the tests are blind.
Muzio: Yes.
Lander: What are your feelings about the future of SACD and DVD-Audio?
Muzio: I stopped playing the horses, so to speak, some time ago, because I found it not to be productive. With SACD and DVD-Audio, we're talking about formats that, performancewise, have a lot of potential. What I think is important to the marketplace today is compatibility.
Source : stereophile[dot]com
High-End Tunes to Go
I was pulled over by a beefy young Trooper, lights blinking furiously. Oops. [heh heh]. He saw Kathleen and I weren't nuts, checked the papers and my license, then checked out the Lexus very carefully with his flashlight. There was much oohing and ahhing.
"Got a GPS (Global Positioning System) I see," he said.
"Yeah, officer, the SC 430 is only one of two in the New York area, the other's at the Javits for the car show! Hard top goes down into the trunk, and it's got an amazing Mark Levinson audio system in it! Hey, I don't own it, I'm a journalist, I just play a rich man on TV! I get to play with it for a couple of weeks, then bye-bye."
He was smiling. "How's your license, Jonathan?" he asked. We were on a first-name basis by then. (K-10 had the good sense not to blow cigarette smoke in his face.)
"Clean as a whistle!" I chirped. "Okay, lemme see what I can do for you," he said as he headed back to his cruiser.
At the Consumer Electronics Show last January, John Atkinson and I were asked by Madrigal Audio Laboratories if Stereophile would like the use of Lexus' hot new SC 430 coupe for a month or so. We could then write up the Mark Levinson Premium Sound System contained within, of course.
We looked at each other. Nah...
[in best Chris Rock voice] JUST KIDDING!
It all seemed like a dream. But in early April, there it was—a gleaming SC 430 with pearlescent white-over-tan interior, being off-loaded in front of emapUSA's offices on Fifth Avenue. Such a spectacle.
It attracted attention like...well, like Marilyn Monroe the night she sang "Happy Birthday" to JFK? Like Julia Roberts on the phone begging you for a date? Hot, hot, HOT! (Where's Buster Poindexter when you need him?) A guy in Range Rover told me Toyota makes the best cars, bar none...and would I mind if he gave the Lexus the 20/20? I got innumerable thumbs-ups from strangers, and huge, approving grins met K-10 and me no matter where we drove.
The question thrown at me all too often by less couth Noo Yawkahs was: "Hey! How much you pay?" Everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame. Slowed down in traffic and trying to vary what had become an almost inevitable dialogue, I told one guy, "Too much!" Which elicited the following outraged response in prototypical Noo Yawkese: "Hey! You tellin' me I can't afford that thing?"
Thankfully, the traffic opened in front of us and the SC 430's quad-cam V8 whooshed us into the sunset before further mayhem ensued. Even the toll-taker on the Jersey Turnpike, stirred from her stupor, chirped, "That the new Lexus? Cuuuuute!"
The SC 430 lists for around $60,000, if you want to know. Its top-up profile is reminiscent of the Audi TT's, but more sculpted and less the bathtub shape of an upside-down jelly-mold Porsche 356. The front is blunt but scythes its way quite cleanly through the air—modern computer-aided design, no doubt—so little noise or wind buffeting disturbs top-down motoring, even at high speeds. And I'm a high-speed kinda guy.
Riding with the hard top up gives you an unbelievably quiet interior space in which to lollygag and enjoy the car's rich fitments. Speeding along effortlessly at high zip is a doddle, thanks to a huge-hearted, big-torqued engine with tons of grunt on demand. The SC 430 is a hero—it was a gas, as it were, to press its pedal to da metal.
The Lexus's closing speeds were so much higher, with so much more mass involved than our little low-mileage 1984 BMW 318i, that it occasionally made even the ever-fearless Kathleen jump. And let's just say that the sophisticated traction control, which allows smooth, feather-touch braking, takes a bit of getting used to when changing direction suddenly. Ahem.
The steering wheel, on its motorized adjustment shaft, is a pleasure of ergonomic style and function. The seats can be set to two memory positions. The whole thing simply reeks of luxury. Outside, the SC 430 strikes a nice, contemporary stance with big wheel rims and slim-sidewall tires, which is very popular these days.
The Levinson component
When I tried to get the lowdown on the SC 430's sound from Madrigal CEO Phil Muzio—see David Lander's interview elsewhere in this issue—I collided with someone who is very passionate about the Lexus/Mark Levinson project. I'm not being fatuous (for a change)—Muzio's got religion, and its name is Mark Levinson; everyone at the ML division of Madrigal has done his or her job so well that Lexus came to them: "Do you think Mark Levinson would consider doing an audio system for us?" Well, duh, as it were. According to Muzio, ML had only been considering it for...the last nine years!
"We did it because we always had an appetite to bring what we consider the ML signature sound and refinement to automobiles. But you need a low enough ambient noise level to allow it." Turns out their earlier LS 400 had a noise factor 3dB better than those of several other luxury brands, and Lexus was looking for a replacement for Nakamichi.
The pieces fell into place. As Muzio explained, Harman owns Madrigal, JBL works with Toyota, JBL is another Harman company, and Harman has a "terrific" OEM car stereo division, And in Japan, Lexus employs a lot of audiophiles! So when Lexus' engineering department did the market research, Mark Levinson came out in the top three. "So they came to us..." mused Muzio, amazement still in his voice.
Queried closely about skeptical audiophiles who will no doubt accuse Lexus and ML of badge engineering, Muzio said, "The motivating factor for the mission was to replicate in their car, as closely as possible, that emotional experience people who love music get in their home. People spend a lot of time in their cars—for some, even more listening time than at home. To that end..."
The Mark Levinson Premium Sound System comes standard in the Lexus SC 430 and is an option for the LS 430, GS 430, GS 300, and LX 470. Each Lexus vehicle installed with a PSS is voiced with separate digital EQs, and the SC 430's fairly small cabin mandates a very nearfield experience, as Muzio described it. "Almost like the sound at your computer," he rued. But Mark Levinson uses a proprietary digital signal processing algorithm on the PSS CD player, and with the car's top up, "spatialization" is added by two rear side channels. All of the system's discrete EQ is automatic and separate for CD and FM, top up or top down. There's also Automatic Sound Leveling, which compensates for volume changes depending on ambient noise thresholds. The DSP is realized using Analog Devices SHARC (Super HARvard Computer architecture) chips.
The system is powered by eight discrete amplifier channels based on Mark Levinson amp topology. "Not just an LSI (Large Scale Integrated circuit) like you find on amp chips in other OEM car systems," Muzio enthused. All channels driven, the Mark Levinson Premium Sound System cranks out 240W, 20Hz–20kHz, with 0.01% distortion, according to Muzio. He points out that those "amps on a chip" from other OEM companies never get below 0.1% distortion—a full order of magnitude higher.
Muzio spoke on the phone with me of the literally hundreds of hours he spent in each Lexus model doing their setups. I asked him how he knew he'd hit the mark in each Lexus the ML system went in.
"I used to be a musician. I know when I know. It's a purely emotional thing. After we've got the right electrical parameters and gone all through the double-blind testing, picked which caps go where...It was like that with the No.32 Reference. We knew it was done when we forgot what we were doing and just played music."
We are driven!
There are nine custom-engineered speakers in each SC 430. When I settled my bustle into the luxurious seats and took it all in, I spotted a pair of circular tweeters mounted close in on the "sail" (where the air vent window used to be on older cars) next to the A pillar. These turned out to be ¾" titanium-dome numbers with ferrofluid cooling and neodymium magnets to give very low distortion, about which Muzio is pretty adamant. "In a car, in the nearfield, you sense distortion as harshness and brightness." Below each tweeter, just under each door's upper sill sits a 2½" midrange driver, placed there because it has the same directivity characteristics as the tweeter—important, as there's no center speaker. (A center-channel front driver is used in the GS 430 and GS 300 to create a better image across the dash, while the LS 430 and SC 430 use horn-loaded compression drivers to achieve a high level of directivity in the audible frequency range to aid imaging.) Each door bottom carries a rigid 6" by 9" neodymium-magnet/Kevlar-composite cone midrange driver.
Moving to the back seat...uh, forget it. It's not much more than a nicely upholstered package shelf, or a space for your Louis Vuitton duffel—wow, it's cramped. The rear double-bucket seat might be okay for midgets with no legs, but no way, man. If you managed to wedge yourself in back there, as did our long-suffering photographer, you'd notice the rear side-panel grilles, behind which are 4" mid-high ceramic-magnet (not neodymium) drivers, and feel the 8" subwoofer behind the back seat cushion. The sub's driver once again uses a neodymium magnet, with a copper-clad aluminum voice-coil and a special surround for long excursions.
And can that baby woof! The bass gets way down there, especially with the top up because of the improved acoustic environment mostly due to space being properly pressurized, as well as the trunk not having the hard top sitting in it. The sub driver even sports a patented spider of aramid fiber—a very strong, lightweight, and heat-resistant polyamide.
Muzio recounted how he worked with the vehicle designers to redo the rear "seat" profile and sculpt its (very upright) back for optimal acoustical output from the sub. They even named the system: IVE, for Integrated Vehicle Enclosure.
The trunk can be viewed as a custom enclosure with baffles molded in as part of the trunk to best tune the chamber. Of course, there are two conditions of operation, as they ML characterize it: Top up "and a-way we go!," as Jackie Gleason would say; or top down, more "Step thees way, chérie."
"The internal volume of the chamber changes when the top's down, and the compensation we designed for that is a big part of the story," Muzio explained. "Getting a good tonal balance both ways was one of the real obstacles to overcome in such a relatively small cabin." In short, it's a sophisticated systems approach, like everything Madrigal does, and Muzio feels he's succeeded with his baby.
"Sitting on top of the drivers as you do in the SC 430, you've got to start out with much less distortion. So all EQ is digital because you've got to watch out for phase shift in a car environment—the customers will pick that up in a New York minute."
On the Road
Hey man, what—you think it was, like, bad?
No way. It sounded fantastic. The only problem I had was with all the maniacal people yelling at me "How much?" There was no question that there was anyone who didn't lust after it. Even babes eyed it thoughtfully.
The bass could shiver your liver, matey. On Peter Kruder's Peace Orchestra (G-Tone G-CD 004), the low bass synth set the armrests a-vibratin'. (A few pre-production prototype nits turned up, nothing serious.) With the top up, the bass was always truly awesome.
There was a nice transition to the upper bass and midrange proper, which you'd never guess was coming from the door. You can use the controls to adjust the mids and highs just so, not to mention the bass, which has a subwoofer mode. All controls are easy to use and sensibly laid out.
I listened to the system for hours on end with a variety of discs. And with the mid and high controls no CD was too out of hand to deal with. I could make any CD I played sound enjoyable in the movable feast that is an ML PSS-equipped SC 430, top up or down (but with slightly better sound with the top up)—all while moving along cushily at a blistering pace while adjusting the heated seats just right for my tushy.
Sound fade front to back and left to right is also available, of course. Old man. And the head unit can swallow six CDs right—no need to head for the trunk. A glossy but slightly sticky door on this pre-production car hinges down to cover the radio/CD/tape controls. (But I couldn't find the Cannon or Eject buttons, apologies to Ian Fleming.) The Global Positioning System glides back into the center of the dash and a nicely finished cover slides over it on key-off, while the wheel motorizes back into the dash. Shaken, not stirred—right, old chap?
Sportsmen! Step across the line!
So who are the buyers of the Lexus SC 430 with Mark Levinson Premium Sound System?
"We wanted a system so that music can play an important part of the emotional experience of riding in the car," said Muzio. Even at 120mph with the top down, as Outlaw Phil confesses to have done.
It was a gas dropping the top to the many catcalls and motoring in the still-cocoon-like luxury of the SC 430. Getting nippy? Pull over, mash a button while staring into the eyes of the beauty sitting next to you, and pop that hard top back in place. Hold the button past its "I'm done!" ping and the windows slide up, too.
While I'm sure the larger LS 430 proves a more friendly environment for high-end car audio, the pleasure of the SC 430 lay in its choice of sensual realms: closed-top lux or open-top motoring, Corinthian leather up the pipick, and the finest-sounding car system I've ever heard. And that engine...oy, don't ask.
What can I say? You can afford it and it's your taste? Go for it!
Source : stereophile[dot]com
