Refurbished NAD C326BEE from Spearit Sound

The weather in the NY metroish area hardly cooperated with rain and high winds today, but the good folks at Spearit Sound got my new amplifier to me in record time.  If you'll recall, I ordered it last Thursday, no shipping charge.  Total cost: $379 (!) And when I got home from work (late of course) it was on the doorstep, box just slightly damp.  And what a box (actually there were 2) it was:

This is the inside box.  There was one nearly twice this size on the outside.  Interestingly, the box is stamped factory refurbished.  Imagine my surprise when i opened it and found that the foam packing was literally encasing the amp and its accessories:

It must be something they do at the factory.  I hope to get some info from the folks at Spearit about the refurb process.  The packing certainly makes the delivery rather bullet proof.  Not too useful for re-using though.  We'll have to see about that.  The amp is spartan in that NAD way:

 . . . and overall I like the look.  Not thrilled with the plastic knobs and front plate but what do I want for the money?  It is much prettier on the inside, and that is what counts.  Remember, no phono preamp and only one set of speaker binding posts.  It does have an MP3 input on the front (although I would probably want to run that through a decent DAC first) and a nice tape loop.  It also has preamp outs which is very useful.  So, I pulled the Sony STR-GX90ES out of its spot, and here is a terrible picture (I promise better over the weekend):

I had an extra Pangea power cord out so i used that, although I think I have an Audio Quest around to try as well.  very little listening was done tonight, just a couple of soundtracks through the Dynaudio Excite 14s.  I will also try the NAD with the Focus 220s, but I believe that will be pushing things a bit.  My initial impressions are good, more to come.  Bottom line, take a look at Spearit, they have some very interesting stuff and some seriously good prices.

  

  

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone: Dynaudio Focus 140

In the Spring of 2008, I had a whole house of B&W speakers, all 600S3 series, in black ash.  They had been acquired new in 2006, and I was very pleased with them.  603S3 mains, 600 surrounds, a center, and even a B&W sub.    I was coming along to home theater very late, and had even picked up a few DVD-A discs (ELP and Yes, which I still have), and we were setting up a basement theater.  The first pair of new speakers that I ever bought myself that fit in what I would call the "high end" category was a pair of B&W DM 602S2 bookshelves (I had Klipsch KG2s in college but I was drunk most of the times I heard them, so it's tough to know about those- they were great to rock out to).  These had gone when a pair of used a/d/s/ L1290s came along, but I had always held a soft spot for the 602s.  As a result, B&W was an obvious choice when we did the new set up.  The set up sounded great, but amazingly, I have very few pictures of it.  These are from after we sold the house and the system came out of the basement theater.

We had an grossly over-priced Arcam AVR running them until that crapped out (which was in a very short period of time), followed by a less exciting but considerably more reliable Denon.  A mistake was made however, the day I bought the B&W 603S3 mains.  On a lark, I listened to a pair of Dynaudio bookshelves that were in the same room, I think while they were retrieving the B&W speakers on which I had just pulled the trigger.  For the life of me, I cannot remember what model they were, although I would not be shocked to discover they were small Contours, or maybe Focus 110s.  If they were Contours, they were an older model as they had none of the science fiction front plates later and current  models of the Contour series are sporting.  I recall asking neither what they were nor the cost.  I just remember thinking: "Wow, that's a small speaker to sound that big."  But then they wheeled the boxes for our B&Ws to the counter, and my wife was looking at her watch and away we went. 

You see where I went wrong, don't you?

I thought about those little Dynaudios quite often, even when listening to our fancy (and very good) B&W set up.  So, fast forward again to the Spring of '08, and I found myself in the listening room again, this time to hear Dynaudio speakers.  Not knowing what I had listened to before, I spent a bit of time listening to the Focus 110, which was a very impressive speaker for its size.  But when we switched to the 140, which is the next model up, I was really just blown away.  I had never heard a two-way bookshelf speaker carry a room like that.  The Focus 140 has a 1 inch Esotec + tweeter, and a 6.5 inch woofer, ported in the back and weighs about 19 lbs.  On the shelf in the store's listening room, this little speaker was KILLING my B&W 603S3.  I distinctly remember listening to a number of Peter Gabriel tracks, and the 140s handled all of his high-intensity use of percussion and bass with no trouble PLUS they had no hint of treble harshness whatsoever.  There was a visceral quality to the low end that many towers do not reproduce except at awful levels, much less bookshelves.  (or monitors, I recognize that there is a difference between the two).  They threw a wide sound stage that I really believed could be even better with proper set up.  So, without giving thought to the craziness that would ensue, I ponied up an (even for me) insane amount of $1600 and bought them in Rosewood.  

My pictures do not do the veneer finish any justice.

and here they are next to a pair of B&W DM602S2 that we acquired in the pouring rain in NYC one afternoon (which is another story altogether):

Everything was wonderful.  I didn't even really experience the tortuous break-in period I was warned about.  The 140s definitely got better with age but they never, never sounded bad.  I figured that somewhere in the collection of Sony ES gear I would find an amp that suited them ( TA-F444 ES, TA-F630 ESD, TA-F80 and 77ESD combo, STR-GX9 ES) or maybe an old NAD . . .  but what was the worst that could happen, I'd buy a new amp at some point, right?  But through no fault of their own, I wound up replacing them with a pair of Focus 220 series 1 2-way towers.  This was definitely a case of being lured in by price- $1995, new in box, shipped, thank you, Dan at Dedicated Audio.  I thought if the 140s are great, how much greater must the 220s be?  And the 220s are great. Really, really great.  They move an incredible amount of air on orchestral works and big progressive rock stuff, and they can be delicate.  They never really "disappear" though, which is something I miss in a stand mount.  Nonetheless I have had the 220s since 2010, which for me, says a lot.  And frankly, I have not really heard anything short of some Wilson Audio speakers recently that would make me give them up.  The Wilson's cost $13,000 or something ridiculous like that, mind you.

But there is something about small, stand mount speakers that I really, really dig, which is why no one should be surprised that the Excite 14s came to live here two weeks ago (see below, and more to come on this killer little guy).  As of today, I have not heard the Dynaudio Focus 160, the speaker that replaced the Focus 140.  I am telling myself that I don't like the way it looks.  

We shall see how long that lasts.  Any bets?  

    

    

Dynaudio Excite 14 and Marantz HomeTheater

The Excite 14 bookshelves are a new acquisition in our house, coming to join us after the big Audio Den clearance sale (please see below).

They are in a really beautiful walnut finish with a typically Dynaudio super high-quality cabinet.  They are beveled at the front edge in a fashion similar to the Focus series, but not tapered to the rear, like the Focus.

For new year's they were on short stands in our listening room, being run by the Yamaha A-S2000 and CD-S2000 combo. They threw a huge sound stage with clear highs and surprising bass for a speaker with a very small woofer (14 cm or about 5 1/2 inches). I typically listen to Dynaudio Focus 220 (series one) in the stereo set up, and whereas the Excites can't compete in the bass (they are not meant to) they easily equaled the treble clarity.  Plus they did that cool thing small monitors do- they "disappeared" into the sound stage while listening.  In my room, the 220s are just too big to avoid notice.  The speaker stands belong to the surrounds in our home theater though, so after the holiday, the Excites left that set up and went into the closet for a few days. Yesterday though i had an itching to hear them again, so i brought them out to our living room where they could occupy some space with our home theater, which incidentally is also made up of Dynaudio Focus series speakers.  (there is a story behind this set up, which I will share at a later date).

I do not intend to use the Excites as home theater speakers.  Frankly, I hate home theater for music.  Case in point it took me a few minutes to remember that I had to go into the Oppo BDP 93 menu and change the default SACD setting from multi to stereo before I could listen to the Excites without the rest of the set up.  Valuable listening time wasted.  At any rate, the Excites were set on small rubber feet from my old B&Ws, plopped down roughly equidistant on the cabinet and hooked up via Audioquest speaker cable to our Marantz AV 8801 pre/pro and Marantz M7055 multi channel amp.  

Interestingly, the speaker binding posts are mounted very deeply in the Excite 14 cabinet:

The upside is that the posts are very easy to access and the recess gives you something to grab when you are moving them around.  Not that that is a big problem, as these are very small speakers.  Our Focus center channel dwarfed them. I only had time to listen to tracks from four discs, which were the new Allman Brothers Idlewild South Blu-ray, the Rush Moving Pictures Blu-ray, something by Norah Jones the title of which i can't remember but can easily be found on the demo disc shelf at every Stereo store in the FREAKING UNIVERSE and the Yes Fragile DVD-A.  

Cutting to the chase, these speakers belong on ear-height stands, 12-24 inches away from the back wall, and in a room roughly 20 by 12.  Our living room afforded them none of these criteria and it showed.  they still sounded very, very good, but they were no better than our Dynaudio DM 2/7 in this arrangement.  I think that there were reflections from the cabinet that prevented the Excites from performing that magical disappearing act, especially on the Norah Jones disc and during Steve Howe's solo acoustic from Fragile.  The larger room also overwhelmed the small woofer, just not enough air could be moved on Moving Pictures.  That being said, the percussion on Midnight Rambler on Idlewild South still sounded very realistic if somewhat distant, and the treble effects in YYZ on Moving Pictures were phenomenal.  

I did not buy these speakers to use in a big home theater system, however.  I bought them (because I am clearly ill) to play great 2 channel music in our dedicated listening room, and there they sound the best. The night we bought them I played the first 3 or 4 tracks from another Yes album, the more recent "Fly From Here."  I like this disc a lot even though Jon Anderson does not provide the vocals.  It is very reminiscent of Drama, another album minus Jon Anderson (in fact I had heard that Fly From here was originally written to be a second disc on Drama.  Anyone know about this?).  Fly From Here is a very nicely recorded progressive rock album and the vocals are ideally suited to small monitors like the Excites.  The great thing is that in the smaller room you get the vocal magic plus the impact of Alan White and Chris Squire- the Excites can really rock in reasonable surroundings.  More to come.