@Gerald - Yes, sadly it was a limited report. One of the big problems I faced while being out there is that my press credentials didn't figure in many of these rooms, which were strictly invite-only; something that frankly I've not encountered before. This meant I could not comment on any new products demonstrated by many of the big names from Italy, the UK and US and Japan.
There are many other products that I saw and photographed that I have absolutely no further information on. Products like the Pearl Evolution speaker:
Or the Sutra Preamplifier:
Or the Ulix Arianna:
Or even the German Physiks Borderland speaker system:
This last one is especially galling, as German Physiks has a UK distibutor...
I'd love to know more about these products and many others, but at least one distributor forceably ushered me out of the room for daring to enter without permission, before I even got my recorder or camera out. Others were more open, That said, I still think this was a better show than a more local one that happened around the same time...
Of course, the fact that my Italian is limited to 'My hovercraft is full of eels' and 'Are you a fried orange?' probably didn't help. But regardless, much of the product that was on offer at the show was effectively off limits to anyone who wasn't already good mates with the distributor.
@Scott -Glad you liked it! There was a lot of weird-fi, yacht-fi and install-fi on site. Which was both fascinating and frustrating, especially as a lot of it never leaves Italian shores. Arguably the best of the bunch was VBS, who built five specially designed rooms featuing top notch custom install kit. Not something that necessarily fits here, as it's a one-off that could be anything from 'new build' (remember them?) price to Premiership footballer levels. Here's the company's Linn room:
And here's the bedroom setting, packed with hidden tech:
>One of the big problems I faced while being out there is that my press credentials didn't figure in many of these rooms, which were strictly invite-only; something that frankly I've not encountered before.
That is a shame. You would think that they would want their products featured in the on-line and offline press?
Thanks for the extra images, and I am sure that Milan was a better option than Heathrow
Hi Alan, Thankls for the extras. I am disappointed that so few audiophiles appear to be interested in multi-channel SACD via HDMI I.3 . I find the sound quality to be far superior to old RB stereo CD. even with a very inexpensive DVD player like the Pioneerd Dv LX50. Does DSD have to be converted to PCM ? or is it possible to find components both DVD players & AV receivers that output pure DSD or have I misundertood the issue. Any info would be greatly appreciated. I am also looking forward to the Hi-Fi Choice review of the latest Sony SCD-XA5400ES CD/SACD player and can only hope that it is very much better than the previous Sony Xa9000ES which I bought after a rave review by Paul Miller in Hi-Fi News but found the player very poor and sold it off at a considerable loss. Hopefully the new 5400ES is not a regurgitated 9000ES albeit with HDMI.
I suspect the reason why few audiophiles have an interest in multichannel music is simple. Domestic arrangements. Few will have the space, the money or the will to do domestic battle with their non-audiophile other to put five or more speakers in the room. Remember that to do multichannel music to spec, you need to be sitting virtually in the centre of a room with five or seven full-range speakers placed clear of walls, making it almost completely inappropriate for most listeners. This has had a knock-on effect on music companies, once again withdrawing from multichannel music recordings due to lack of interest from the buying public.
DSD can be delivered digitally from player to amplifier, using HDMI 1.2 or later. However, very few amplifiers support DSD decoding (even some of those that notionally support DSD don't actually handle the format correctly). So, although there are players that output pure DSD, there aren't that many amplifiers that do the same, and dropping the signal to PCM - or even converting to analogue in the player - is often the best method.
You're basically right. Making small tweaks is diffucult. It's 2.5 times as expensive to make a change vs. stereo and you have to recalibrate in many cases. Using valves in a 5.1 system isn't ideal and when you want to change speaker cable, it involves taking up trunking etc. As you said, getting five speakers in free space with some distance behind the couch was a problem. When you actually do it, it seems difficult and it stops being enjoyable - at least that's what I found when I tried it. This is why we're getting the retreat back to stereo which deals better with compromised room placement.
I am sorry you could not find information on German Physiks speakers at the show. I was not at the show so I don't know what happened. Our web site is www.german-physiks.com and if you would care to contact me via the page at http://www.german-physiks.com/contact.html I will be more than happy to provide any information you require.
I find your first para to be rather strange, are you saying that Home Cinema 5.1 is in the same category as the problems you pose with liistening to multi-channel sound ? Anyway with multi-channel sound one can get away with using only 4 speakers provided the front main speakers go low enough in the bass. Opus 3 the well regarded & possibly top audiophile label does not record for using a centre channel speaker and their multi-channel SACD discs sound exceptionally good.
@Gerald - Yes, sadly it was a limited report. One of the big problems I faced while being out there is that my press credentials didn't figure in many of these rooms, which were strictly invite-only; something that frankly I've not encountered before. This meant I could not comment on any new products demonstrated by many of the big names from Italy, the UK and US and Japan.
There are many other products that I saw and photographed that I have absolutely no further information on. Products like the Pearl Evolution speaker:
Or the Sutra Preamplifier:
Or the Ulix Arianna:
Or even the German Physiks Borderland speaker system:
This last one is especially galling, as German Physiks has a UK distibutor...
I'd love to know more about these products and many others, but at least one distributor forceably ushered me out of the room for daring to enter without permission, before I even got my recorder or camera out. Others were more open, That said, I still think this was a better show than a more local one that happened around the same time...
Of course, the fact that my Italian is limited to 'My hovercraft is full of eels' and 'Are you a fried orange?' probably didn't help. But regardless, much of the product that was on offer at the show was effectively off limits to anyone who wasn't already good mates with the distributor.
Well, Alan, since you asked...
I'm Boris, one of the founder of Sutra (www.sutra.it), since probably it's not good etiquette to talk about our products on the forum, you can reach us at the contact page on our website, we'd be happy to answer any question about our creations.
Hi Alan Sony SCD-XA5400ES Hi-Fi Choice & Tech Radar
Why does any Hi-Fi Magazine bother to review Sony High-End products ? Sony is a Firm that from my experience has no interest in Consumer communication whatsoever and furthermore no Retailer that I know of is interested in demonstrating its high end products. If you can find me a retailer in London willing to demonstrate the new SCD-XA5400ES I am willing to donate £25 to a Charity of your choice. The previous 9000ES player received a rave rview in Hi-Fi News (not so good in What Hi-Fi ?) and despite contacting Eric Kingdon Sony's Senior European technical marketing manager, he was unable or unwilling to provide a demonstration of this very overpriced player. No Hi-Fi Retailer would demonstrate this player that because of Paul Miller's in my opinion over the top review aroused my interest so I went and purchased one at a very heavily discounted price from a Tottenham Court Rd Shop selling sealed boxes no demo's. Quite frankly I was very disappointed with the 9000Es , the CD performance was no where near as good as my long term reference a 20 year old Marantz CD94(modified) and the SACD was not up to much either. I eventually manged to dispose of the 9000ES at a considerable loss. I am suprised that the sacd sound pf the new SCD-XA5400ES only received 4 stars, despite the advanced HATS and the 1.3 HDMI etc. Is this because the Sony receiver used for the HFC review was the cheap STR-DA2400 which decimates DSD to LPCM as stated in the review. I find surround sound SACD discs mastered in DSD to be superior to RB CD and are their any amps or receivers that will decode DSD to analogue without DSD being converted internally to LPCM. It seems that the XA5400ES requires this type of amplification for best sound quality and then possibly it would get the full five stars.
Sony’s high-end strategy is to no small extent bidden by what high-end retailers choose to demonstrate. In many parts of the world, the best components from ‘mainstream’ brands such as Sony sit comfortably next to ‘audiophile’ names like Audio Research, conrad-johnson, Krell and Wadia in high-end stores. That is unfortunately not the case with the UK high-end market. In fact, you’ll be lucky to find a high-end store selling Audio Research and conrad-johnson in the UK, such is the polarisation of the high-end in the UK. So, to criticise Sony for the stocking policies of high-end retailers and the demands of the distributors that service them, is a mite unfair to Sony itself.
Despite your feelings toward the player, the Sony 9000ES player did receive extremely favourable reviews from many reviewers around the world, with several deciding to use the product as their own reference player. Admittedly those reviewers who selected the 9000ES as a reference point were - and still are - supporters of the SACD format, while those who play mostly CD would generally select another reference point. The XA5400ES strongly improves upon the CD performance of the 9000ES, but I would warrant the new player would still not be expected to better the Marantz CD94 - a CD player universally recognised as one of the best ever made, even by today’s standards. To find a CD/SACD player that delivered Marantz CD94-level performance on CD and concomitant SACD replay quality, you should be considering players like the Marantz SA-7S1 or the EMM Labs CDSA, which fall into the £5,000-£10,000 region.
This highlights one of the great mistakes made by audiophiles when comparing old products with new. A new Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow cost around £10,000 in the early 1970s, but few would expect a new £10,000 car to be ‘better’ than a new Rolls-Royce. However, people do expect a £1,000 player of 20 years ago to be bettered by a £1,000 player of today. This scenario is unlikely, even factoring in improvements in technology in the intervening years.
Both the Marantz and EMM players I mentioned above are principally two-channel models, as are the majority of high-end SACD players on the market. You may feel that multichannel SACD offers marked benefits over stereo (a sentiment shared by many in the industry including, I believe, Eric Kingdon), the larger audiophile market (in the UK at least) vehemently rejects anything with more than two channels. Despite some extremely successful demonstrations of multichannel high-resolution audio by Sony and a number of other manufacturers, the concept of placing several full-range loudspeakers in a room was too much for most buyers to bear. This is perhaps particularly understandable in most UK homes, where living space is at a premium.
The four-star rating in Hi-Fi Choice reflects the fact that as a two-channel SACD player, it delivered a performance that our reviewer considered to be not quite as good as the Yamaha CD-S2000 (although the Sony’s CD performance was superior to the Yamaha player). Speaking as Operations Editor of that magazine, our scoring is stereo-led; we no longer place weighting on the multichannel performance in our scoring of hi-fi products, reflecting its significance to most audiophiles these days. We are largely forced to downplay multichannel performance (mentioning it only in passing, and then only to highlight exceptionally good or bad performance), because of the rejection of multichannel music by stereo-led audiophiles. Even if we had the full multi-channel DSD replay chain in the test, it would have been exceptionally unlikely to improve the sound quality rating of the player in this context.
Thanks for your reply which unfortunately I dsagree with. The American brands you mention are all being sold in the UK albeit in small quantities both Audio Research & Krell are available in London. Obviously there is something radically wrong with Sony's marketing. The Sony 9000ES did not reach my expectations after its inaccurate reviews its seems others are more easily satisfied. You say the XA5400ES strongly improves on the 9000ES CD performance and I say it definately needs to. You mention the £5K Marantz SA-7S1 , far too heavy, can not read the the display from seating position. I purchased it after the HFC review and sold it on after 750 hours burn in. The CD performance was insufficiently musical compared to my old CD94 and the SACD stereo performance was poor. For multi-channel SACD surround sound one can use a cheap Marantz DVD player DV6001 or the excellent Pioneer LX50 (£279) and obtain a great result, so to pay up to £10K for a Stereo only SACD player like the EMM Labs CDSA one would have to have a lot more money than commonsense. With the growth of 5.1 Home Cinema which many people seem able to accomodate, I am unable to understand the lack of interest in multi-channel SACD and I put the blame entirely on the Hi-Fi Media. It is only necessary to have an extra pair of small rear speakers, I use the B & W MI's. With regard to the review rating of the XA5400ES you are making a big mistake in downplaying its multi-channel SACD performance surely the main reason for purchasing this player with its HDMI I .3 connection enabling only I lead required instead of many. I note that American High End brands are now starting to use HDMI even for Stereo only items. So Hi-Fi Press please wake up.
I’m afraid you missed my point. The dealers who sell brands from one distributor do not sell those from another – and this is not necessarily because of snobbery on the part of the retailer. As a high-end retailer, would you stock one product line if you knew it might cost you half a dozen of your key electronics lines and several brands of loudspeaker? Sony might be one of the big boys as a corporate entity, but it doesn’t stop it from getting pushed around in the UK high-end playground.
You seem to have pinned down a good multichannel SACD replay performance, but are unable to find a SACD/CD player to out-perform one of the best CD players ever made. I am not altogether surprised by this. My recommendations of the Marantz and EMM Labs are based on products that approach the performance of a good CD player from SACD. The key word there is ‘approach’. There is still a strong contingent of audiophiles who hold that the only a CD player can play CD well – any other format added to the mix has a negative effect on the CD replay performance. There’s a parallel here with those who unwrap their shiny new Blu-ray player, bask in the HD quality of Blu-ray discs, but wonder why the DVD quality took a tumble.
The issue is that many feel the same is true for two-channel SACD. The logic of this argument goes as follows; once you put a multichannel output stage inside a SACD player, you effectively short-change the two-channel performance. As such, those who seek a good two-channel SACD performance seek out better quality two-channel only SACD players. Reading your comments, you may only end up satisfied with a separate multichannel SACD player, stereo SACD player and CD player; this is, ultimately, the only way to guarantee optimum performance from all three audio pathways (and that is not being in any way sarcastic – I have heard of someone in the US who has done just that, with stereo CD and SACD players in the two-channel room, and multichannel music in the other. However, I don’t know of anyone in the UK that has followed this uncompromising lead). Alternatively, could it be that your criteria are not met by stereo SACD itself?
In the majority of cases, the audiophile is a very different animal to the home cinema enthusiast – some audiophiles do not even own a television and many more refuse to have one in the listening room (those who have the luxury to do this in a dedicated listening room we call ‘rich’; those who don’t, we call ‘single’). These are extreme cases, but those who even tacitly support a multichannel musical experience are few and far between. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, it seems audiophiles are openly hostile to anything beyond two-channel audio... And that dislike has nothing whatsoever to do with the hi-fi magazines. From experience, if a dedicated hi-fi magazine publishes more than two multichannel products in a single edition, it will receive a significant number of complaints from readers; if the magazine does the same thing in more than two issues in three, it will likely receive subscription cancellations and complaints sent to the publisher and beyond. These are not small numbers, either – a hi-fi magazine can lose as much as 20% of its readership by being too supportive of multichannel products. By way of contrast, your two recent missives effectively doubles the number of letters and email I have received in support of multichannel music.
So, given the facts (manufacturers are concentrating on two-channel music, majority of audio enthusiasts take an active dislike to the very concept of multichannel music, magazines aren’t going to talk up multichannel for fear of losing readers forever... plus that the vast majority of today’s music buying public has effectively forgotten that SACD and multichannel music even existed) it seems unlikely that we are making a big mistake by downplaying multichannel SACD replay performance. Sadly, for most people that ship has sailed.
I do agree with you that HDMI will feature strongly in forthcoming audio-side products. It’s a GHz solution for a kHz problem. And products that support HDMI in an audiophile context are beginning to appear. As and when such products arrive in the UK, they will be reviewed by the hi-fi magazines. However, the same inertia problem arises; audiophiles are comfortable with their players doing digital duty and their amps doing the amp thing. Stereo amplifiers with built-in DACs already exist, but sell in very small numbers... even when a product with a built-in DAC is demonstrably superior to an identical design without the digital component, the product without the digital stages inside the amp will always sell more. Eventually, as audio-side becomes audioserver-side, so HDMI will become increasingly significant in two-channel audio. Nevertheless, there will forever be someone somewhere wondering where HDMI goes on a three-watt triode amp.
I was once a hi-fi retailer & a manufacturer. At present only a life long audiophile who knew the hifi greats, like the Golden Age of Hollywood they unfortunately no longer exist. Name dropping I knew the best reviewers Percy Wilson, Gordon J.King, Ralph West, Bert Webb, John Borwick Geoffrey Horn, Roger Driscoll whose reviews one could trust unlike todays mob. Then the original manufacturers, the amusing Gilbert Briggs, Peter Walker, Harold Leak & many others. Quite frankly I find the attitude of the retail trade with its diminishing sales hard to comprehend and as to what I think of the Press I will leave to your imagination. I also do not understand the politics of the retail who sell brands from one distributor but not from another makes no sense at all. However it iis a very long time ago that I was in the trade. I do agree up to now only a CD player can play CD well and requires a stereo only analogue amplifier but this may change. I also understand misguided audiophiles who would not have a TV set in the same room as their audio equipment. I obviously grew up with valves but would not have them now as a gift. I am not trying to find a SACD/CD player that will outperform my CD94 . Furthermore I have absolutely no interest in Stereo SACD when multi-channel SACD is so very much better. My interest in the new Sony SCD-XA5400ES is only to discover if the multi-channel SACD performance is better than my existing setup but I shall not be buying one unless I can hear it demonstrated. I also want to find a amplifier or receiver that will decode DSD to analogue without having to pay £5500 for the too large Pioneer SC-LX90.
You still seem fixated on the idea that this is something uniquely to do with the retailers. The problems endemic within the hi-fi industry are rooted throughout the industry. Within an ever-decreading market, all companies (magazines, manufacturers, distributors and retailers) are over-protective of their market share, to the point of damaging the industry entire. That means:
Manufacturers closing their UK factory to build in China to keep competitive, only to find the company ends up being Chinese-owned a year or two later. And then seeing that brand name be used for air-conditioning units, refridgerators and anything apart from hi-fi two years after that.
Magazines responding to the entreaties of the vociferous 5% of the market that writes in and rants about expensive mains cables or phono cartridges, and failing to notice this direction wipes out a quarter of the readership, who just want to know whether today's CD players are better or worse than a docked iPod.
Distributors threatening to restrict access to their portfolio if caught stocking the products of a rival.
Retailers selling what suits them (and what suits their bank balance), not what suits their clients.
That being said, this has nothing whatsoever to do with retailers reluctance to demonstrate multichannel SACD. That is simply to do with the feelings toward multichannel music in the buying public. There isn't any interest in multichannel music anywhere on the planet at the moment, but even that is a buoyant state of affairs compared to the UK market.
I believe dealers should stock what people want to see and hear (not simply the products that have the best profit margin). But there are limits.
On re reading your last but one long missive of the 15th much appreciated, I realise that I have not fully replied to all your points. Firstly I find your subservient attitude to the backward 2 channel brigade quite absurd you are standing in the way of progress. There is so much absolute rubbish written about hi-fi started by certain manufacturers then taken up and extended by the itinerant scribblers of the hi-fi media. When I said that I understood the attitude of many who would not have a TV in the room with audio, of course I meant to say that I do not understand it especially in these days of flat screens. I can not agree that the majority of audiophiles take an active dislike to multi-channel music because most have never experienced it and they go by what they read in the media. For commercial reasons magazines lie about expensive cables, mains conditioners etc. It is not true as you say that it seems the vast majority of today's buying public has effectively forgotten that SACD and multi-channel music even existed for two reasons firstly most don't know about its virtues of more realistic sound because of neglect by the media and most SACD's are overpriced.. Cheaper classical SACD discs are available from LSO Live and more and more SACD discs appear every month, especially excellent ones from Linn, Telarc, Pentatone etc & occaisionally from the audiophile label Opus 3. You say sadly, for most people the SACD ship has sailed, this again is not true and it seems to me that magazines like yours are deliberately (as you say for Commercial reasons) are trying to sink the ship by downplaying multi-channel SACD replay as you have done in the review of the new Sony SCD-XA5400ES, you are short changing the readership. Again I can not see the point of magazines reviewing Sony products that retailers will not stock and from past experience no retailer would stock the previous Sony 9000ES despite the rave reviews it received. I note that you now say Distributors threaten to restrict access to their products if a retailer is caught stocking the products of a rival.. This absolutely illegal and should be reported to the OFT etc.
The ‘2 channel only backwood audiophiles’ you mention represent almost all of the music and audio buying market. At the risk of labouring the point, magazines that supported multichannel SACD and DVD-Audio in the past were forced to abandon the concept because they saw readers leave to rival, stereo-only titles at pace. Nothing would convince people to try either format when they were still going concerns in 2004/2005; what chance does a magazine stand of convincing people to try multichannel music today? So no, we are not attempting to ‘sink’ multichannel music – an ‘audiophile’ format that was only popular with a relatively small group of audiophiles was arguably holed below the waterline from the start – but would prefer not to get dragged along with it in the undertow.
Given that I have been a supporter of a variety of next-generation formats (including multichannel audio in its early, potentially commercially-viable days), I feel I am hardly ‘standing in the way of progress’. Progress – if it is impeded anywhere – is impeded by a public that unilaterally rejected the idea of multichannel music from the outset.
In suggesting that the buying public has effectively forgotten SACD ever existed, I point to current RIAA statistics (to year end 2007). These show a total of 200,000 SACDs sold in the US in 2007, compared with 511,100,000 CDs and 42,500,000 album downloads purchased in the same period (I cannot give the same statistical breakdown in the UK, because sales of SACD are not published here – but no-one from the SACD community highlights the UK as a hotbed of SACD activity, either). SACD has shown a steady and sharp decline in the last two years – 42.5% down in 2006, 30.5% down in 2007 – despite 2006 being suggested to be the year of classical music’s revival, with all classical sales up nearly 26% that year.
As to whether a magazine should review products that are not sold in bricks and mortar stores, we had to abandon that policy about two years ago, because there aren’t enough bricks and mortar hi-fi dealers anymore. There are many people to whom a review (or reviews) are the only method of determining the performance of a product, either because they live hundreds of miles from a dealer or there are no dealers who supply products in that sector any more. We still insist that a product must be available in a set number of dealers, but we do not differentiate between dealers online or on-street.
