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.            

   

Watching TV

I think I finally have the home theater system to about where I want it.  I have an Oppo BDP-93 for discs and streaming upon which I cannot heap enough praise.  Next to my old 1989 vintage Sony CDP 605ESD it is my favorite disc player.  We use a somewhat (for an AV receiver anyway) older Marantz SR6003 as the brains, and a very old (1982?) Hafler DH 200 (again updated and modified by Wayne at In House Stereo Repair) running the mains.  This is an amplifier to keep forever.  The speakers are all new Dynaudio DM series- DM2/7 fronts and DM center.  They sound great, even though they are not broken in.   The center is 1/3 the size of my Dynaudio Audience C122 center (which is in storage now) but has a wonderfully natural timbre on voices, which is obviously important.  It's also on a neat stand it comes with to give it clearance over the top of the cabinet, which is perfect given the cabinet's depth.   No sub (yet, I think- the DM 2/6s have great bass) and no serious thoughts for surrounds, but just fine as is for most stuff.  I will admit that the Emerson Lake and Palmer Brain Salad Surgery DVD-A could use surrounds though, as could some of my Porcupine Tree stuff, but the ELP- there's a TON of weirdness in that mix.

A/D/S/ as promised

Well, it took me a while but I managed to dig up an older picture of a system I ran with a pair of a/d/s/ 1290 speakers.  They belong to my Uncle, but lived in the basement of the condo we used to have and a dorm room (!).  Sorry this is a terrible picture, I took it to show someone how we had installed speaker wiring in the walls and had plates for hook up.  The system actually worked pretty well, but the picture does not flatter the room color or the equipment.  At the time, the amp I was using was a Hafler, and that still lives with me now.  It has been recently upgraded with new binding posts, caps and high quality RCA inputs by In House Stereo Repair in Setauket, NY.  Check out their link- they do terrific work.  The Hafler now runs a pair of Dynaudio DM 2/7 mains for a home theater, with a Marantz SR6003 AVR providing the processing brains.  I can't really comment on the sound in detail as the speakers, amp modifications and blu ray player are all very new to me (blu ray is an Oppo BDP-93).  I'm not yet accustomed to listening to multi-channel without a sub woofer, although I will say the DM 2/7s create a ton of bass for their size.  Apparently they need a lot of break in time, so we shall see. . .

Chicanery, legerdemain and snake oil

I don't own an iPhone.  I sent my first text message over a cell phone in the fairly recent past, and I didn't have a voice mail box until this past spring.  I have no idea what I would do with an iPad.  In the past year however, I have purchased no fewer than four pairs of speaker cables.  I suppose I should change the name of the blog to: "Hello, my name is William, and I have a problem. . ." but I am not even considering the first of the twelve steps for my stereo habit.  Now, if the people in the back will sit down and stop shouting: "NERRRRRRRRRD!" I will get on with the purpose of this post: new speaker cables.  My wife (the Saint- as you may recall her) has never really had any issue with any of the various peices of stereo gear I tote in and out of the house.  In fact, right now she is (happily, I presume) listening to our Marantz home theater receiver (wait, now she's yelling: "What?!  Gort doesn't reconstitute?!  What a terrible ending!"  It's best not to know, sometimes).  The only thing she generally can't stand is messy wiring- you know, the rat's nest behind equipment racks that makes the overloaded outlet in "A Christmas Story" look neat and orderly by comparison, and speaker cable splayed all over the floor like visiting day at the Reptile House.  I sometimes have to turn Pentecostals away at the door- no snake handling here!  Who can blame her? 

So, since we are in the midst of painting and re-doing the listening room, I figured that I would hunt for something a little less industrial-looking than the Tara Labs stuff I had been using.  Susan especially hates the fact that the Tara cables are white.  They really are meant for in-wall use.  Furthermore, almost all of my vintage Sony stuff accepts bare wire connections, but not standard banama plugs (can anyone tell me why on Earth they are called that?).  At first I checked Audio Advisor for the Kimber cable I have long wanted to try, but I couldn't bring myself to spend $440 on an 8' pair, plus the jacket is partially you guessed it- white.  The local shop, Audio Den carries Nordost and Tara, but truth be told, they gave me some of the entry level Nordost as a loaner and: a.) the flat ribbon's potential for creasing and b.) the sound I heard did not thrill me for the money. I am sure they thought I was nuts when I returned it.  Kudos to Bob for letting me try it, however- that's the thing that will keep the brick and mortar shops in business- well that, and whomever is still making money on Wall Street buying lots and lots of expensive flat screen TVs and remote starts for their hot tubs.

Then I remembered a catalog from a company called Mapleshade that I had received a while ago, so off to the closet (much of the contents of which are strewn about the house as it awaits new paint and carpet) to find it.  I ordered an entry- level 10' pair of Golden Helix for a little over $100, and it was here in two days.  I had never read any reviews, nor had I seen their cable anywhere but on their web-site.  It was vaguely Kimber-esque in looks and much nicer than the white-jacket Tara stuff Susan detests.  But when I opened the shipping box, I was a little taken aback to find an invoice and a box only slightly larger than a paperback novel.  "Darnit, they only sent one 10' length" I thought.  Wrong.  As you can see in the picture above, that tiny box contained 20' of neatly coiled double strand wire.  In fact, the cable is one lead for positive, one for negative, with something like a thousandth of an inch of dielectric coating.  Check out the link to get the full story from Mapleshade. The ends are nicely tinned and marked for speaker/amp connection.  They immediately met with Susan's approval: "MUCH better" she said. "We'll see" I thought to myself.  No warranty, but a thirty day return policy.   Off I went to hook them up.  She's right though- these cables definitely look cool.

Everything about the set-up is in such a state of flux (much like my career), that I didn't worry about elevating the cables off the floor as recommended, nor did I sweat routing them around other cables as the whole shebang is getting disassembled in a day or so.  Didn't even warm anything up, just uncoiled the little suckers, carefully inserted them into binding posts (lest I put out an eye, I worry about these things, you know) and turned on the power.  One SACD loading cycle later (I will name this unit of time in the future, I assure you), and I was listening to Norah Jones.  Standing back from the setup, I could barely see the cables.  Just what Susan is looking for.  It's too soon to get a handle and the sound but. . .

First impressions?  The presentation is bright.  Not harsh, mind you, and remember that there is absolutely NO furniture in this room right now other than the system and a chair (and a step ladder to spackle holes in the walls that are mysterioulsy close to the ceiling).  The room has a definite echo it did not have before when it housed two book cases.  It merely sounds as if the treble had been adjusted slightly upward.  With that brightness there is a clear sence of greater immediacy, or "space" around the vocals, I think that real reviewers (HA!) call this phenomenon "air" or "presence."  It was a definite contrast to the dark sound that the Dynaudio Focus 220 speakers are known for.  And. . . I like it. 

Right now, FM stereo is running low in the background until things settle in.  Of course this may be futile as the system soon comes down, but I am very much looking forward to some serious listening in the near future.  I have concerns that some of my older progressive rock my be a very poor match for these cables, but I really want to hear some of my classical SACD stuff.  Time will tell.  As for the title of this post, I am as yet unwilling to come down on one side or the other as to the differences cables make in a system's sound, other than to say that should they exist they are surely subtle.  And I know just enough about the science to know that about 99% of what the packaging says is absolutely meaningless.  So why 4 pairs in a year, you ask?  Well, it beats having to answer voicemail on my iPhone.