DOOD.CA: Guy Stuff

Pass Labs, one of the premier producers of Audiophile equipment in the world, had a collapse of their US dealer network as they have concentrated so much on overseas sales. They’re addressing the issure now, but since they have been doing all their sales overseas they have lost all their US dealers. The are re-establishing it from scratch, which is very cool. They will be focusing on dealers that start with customer service.

Nelson Pass of Pass Labs originally started with Threshold back in the day. He now makes some of the best gear I have ever heard. The X1 Preamp has to be the most amazing preamp I have ever heard, and I would love the chance to own one. Check out the X1 here: http://www.passlabs.com/preamps/x1.htm

I would suggest a taking a real hard look at the Pass Labs stuff if you get the chance.. It knocked my socks off!

Trends Audio just keeps releasing new things at very affordable prices. Lots of Canadian and American dealers everywhere for this affordable high performance line of audio components. This is what they say about their new Audio Converter:

“There are more and more good quality audio DACs newly released. But, a good audio source is still difficult to find. Trends Audio developed the Trends UD-10 USB Audio Converter, which works as an external sound card with various formats of digital output and decoded headphone output. It effectively isolated the serious interference from within the PC/Mac case. e.g. the high frequency data signals, the switching-mode power supply and the FAN motors, etc¡K.

On the other hand, Trends UD-10 upgrades your PC/Mac to be a hi-end audio source. Thanks to the excellent power supply handling, the high accuracy clock and the sophisticated digital output circuit, the Trends UD-10 makes your PC/Mac to behave as a high-end CD transport to work with an external DAC. Yet, the Trends UD-10 and PC/Mac combination provides better sound quality, larger storage capacity and a more user-friendly interface than most standard CD players. (Remarks: computer hard disk is far superior to a CD player, no matter the speed, stability, error correction, jitter reduction. They are actually the technology of different eras.)”

Usher is going to be releasing their new BE718s speaker, very nice. $2,500/pair. Using a1.5-inch beryllium tweeters, carbon-impregnated paper-cone midbass drivers, the tweeter heats the beryllium formers to greater than 700 degrees fahrenheit, turning it into high-strength beryllium oxide. It is said this ceramic’s enormous strength-to-weight ratio pushes the Be dome tweeter’s transient response to an extraordinary level while minimizing distortion as no fabric-dome can claim. Naturally Usher has employed their Symme-Motion technology to the drivers, which symmetrically locates the voice coil within each driver’s magnetic field ‘linearizing’ the motor’s movements.

With none other than loudspeaker guru Dr. Joseph D’Appolito serving Usher as their technical consultant, providing guidance in crossover design, the new Usher Audio Be-718 should be an extremely promising engineering feat. The cabinet is crafted with wood panels for a luxurious look not usually found in loudspeakers at this price range.

Drove the 100km down to visit the not-so-local Audio Note dealer yesterday, to see what they had brewing. In addition to the usual AN-E/Lexus selection was not much else. I noticed their Audio Note selection had gone down somewhat, and the majority of it had been relegated to the Audio Note room, as I like to call it. It is their listening room that is solely dedicated to Audio Note.

Oftentimes, they have Audio Note out in the main areas to listen, but not yesterday… instead they had a MASSIVE pair of the new Quad ESL-2905 Electrostats! Wow! At retail those things are $12,500US. The most expensive and arguably best-sounding Quad speakers I have ever seen.

Also checked out and listened to the SimAudio Moon Evolution gear. They had a complete system, Moon Andromeda, P-8 and W-8 Preamplifier and amplifiers. It was incredible to look at, let alone hear. They were powering a beautiful pair of B&W 800D speakers… the top of the 800 range. Wow! Not a bad way to spend $50,000… or whatever that stuff costs. I can’t afford it, but it doesn’t stop me from listening or drooling over it!

This just keeps getting better. Since we have our workspaces in a networked drive so we can run a test environment from there, we’ve been having problems running Eclipse 3.2 on Mac OS X. We’ve been asked to use SmartCVS, but I personally would rather switch back to a windows OS than continue using Mac on a different editor. We will see.

Eclipse does not run well off a SMB mounted drive on Mac OS X when you have a CVS tree as big as ours, simple as that. Don’t make the same mistake folks! Windows does a better job of handling this one… scary, isn’t it?