Held at the DeVere Cranage Estate in Cheshire, The North West Audio Show was open to the public for the weekend and was free to attend, including a glass of bubbly on arrival. The show was incredibly well organised by Kris and his lovely team, who had to deal with loads of the Hi-Fi industry manufacturers, distributors and retailers alike. That was even before the doors opened, and the public was let loose! Superhuman effort, thank you.
I was at the show for the weekend to lend a hand to our partners, The Missing Link / Vinyl Passion.
Mark (The Missing Link) has exhibited in the same room for a few years now. The Hawking Room, which is almost square, makes for challenging acoustics, but we had a plan. With limited time and Acustica Applicata available, we set about tuning the system. A stack of DaaD 4 and DaaD 3 in each front corner immediately took the edge off the boominess otherwise present. It was also decided to use the smaller of Mark’s Elac Loudspeakers to reduce the energy in favour of better resolution. Additional Daad’s would have been required to tune for the larger speakers.
Once we had tuned the Acustica Applicata to the room, we looked at dealing with the electrical grounding of the system. First step, Entreq’s Tellus 3 was used to ground the Vincent Pre amplifier – It is as simple as connecting an Entreq Eartha RCA to a hook cable from an unused RCA socket on the Vincent Pre amp to one of the ground points on the Tellus 3. The effect was to reduce sibilance and help make the soundstage appear more 3D.
The second step was to ground the negative loudspeaker terminals of the Vincent Mono Amplifiers. A pair of Olympus 10T Ground Boxes was used with Eartha Apollo Ground Cables. This again incrementally made the music more 3D, more solid.
The third step was to deploy the awesome Max Mix Kit applied to the loudspeaker terminals. The kit has the effect of removing stray magnetic fields from the Crossover/Terminal area of the speaker, lowering the noise floor drastically. It has been said by multiple users that the effect is like turning up the brightness and contrast on a picture, the music is just clearer and more musical to the ear.
Each recording we played sounded great, with emphasis on sounding live, with weight, and great timing. Mark and I were happy with the sound the whole system was consistently producing, so we stopped tinkering.
Let the show begin!
On what felt like the hottest, most humid day of the year, we had a blast playing great music from pretty much every genre available. There was a constant flow of visitors all day, and the Vinyl Passion room was rocking. Mark’s Vinyl Passion Turntables are very special and represent superb value. He has refined his decks and achieved excellence. They gave the system a great foundation to perform. Mark makes no bones about it, he believes the Gold Note PH-1000 and PSU-1000 working together is the best Phono Stage.
The ability to integrate perfectly with pretty much any cartridge and then be flexible enough the match the requirements of most any Pre Amplifier, along with its wonderfully truthful, powerful, musically engaging delivery, we have no reason to argue. The combination of speakers and electronics worked effortlessly, and the final balance with LTNF employed gave us a very well-balanced, consistently excellent sounding system. In my humble opinion, our system, in a difficult room, sounded better than many, much more expensive setups over the weekend. One measure of our success was that visitors were staying with us to listen to multiple tracks at a time, then returning to have a second or third listen to our system!
So, after a weekend of good music and great company, I return home buzzing, planning ways to better my system, and working out where to store all the new vinyl I need to purchase!
Congratulations to the lucky Gentleman who scooped the Gold Note PH-5 in the Sunday Prize Draw – Enjoy!
Thank you to Mark, Shelley and all involved.
