rarely have to remind myself that I've been in the audio press for over twenty years. It feels like it has been that long -- twenty years of writing, editing, HTMLing and, of course, listening, to all manner of music and equipment in literally thousands of different rooms. No kidding -- thousands. Basements, second bedrooms, offices, hotel rooms and meeting rooms, each having a unique sonic signature, even when one room is right next door to another of the same size and configuration. It's true that the listening room has a profound effect on the sonic outcome of any audio system, no matter what the system costs. But, at the same time, it's easy to overlook this and forget that the room contributes even a little to what's heard. It's just the space in which the equipment resides, a set variable, so to speak, readily dismissed because of its ubiquity. Even so, there are some listening rooms that have made strong impressions on me over the course of my twenty years. Dave and Sheryl Lee Wilson's gargantuan listening room is one of these, as is distributor Philip O'Hanlon's -- and my own room, which has been the site of so many speakers, amplifiers and source components that I've reviewed. But a recent trip to the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley made for an unforgettable sonic experience, because I visited the best listening room -- by far -- that I've ever been in, and I don't expect I'll come across its equal. The unrivaled character of this room is literally by design. The owner, who prefers to remain anonymous, left the construction to a project manager, Chris Stephens of Xtreme Projectors, with experience in audio electronics and system design, and a team of skilled designers and craftspeople, including Jerry Steckling of JSX Audio. The finished product is as much a testament to their expertise as it is to the good judgment of the person who brought them together.
A year in design and construction, the room was added on to the house, not a space recycled for the purpose. Given the neighborhood, the layout of the house and the surrounding landscape, just planning for construction was a challenge. The homeowner had to buy adjacent land, not for the expansion of the house, but rather to give access to his lot. He also had to get permission from a neighbor so construction machinery could prepare the lot.
The terrain is lovely -- low desert with ample contours and changes in grade -- but it is almost entirely sand and rock. This meant that the project's beginnings would be nearly as much an exercise in mining as excavation, because the room would sit below existing grade in order to accommodate a ceiling higher than that in other parts of the house.
In all, the room is more than ten feet into the surrounding rocky terrain, a horizontal window providing the only outward indication that all of this concrete is not merely the house's foundation.
The internal volume is a room within a room, with a defining twist. Normally, this sort of construction is easily understood. An air gap exists between the inner wall and outer foundation specifically for the purpose of isolation. That is the case here, but the inner wall provides much of the room's particular sonic fingerprint, or lack thereof. It's more akin to what you'd find in a performance space than a typical house. The walls are actually large acoustic panels comprised of gorgeous black walnut and air gaps covered with what looks like grille cloth. Horizontal slats are strategically placed as part of the room's acoustic design and are removable for retuning, if necessary. The room is 30'L x 20'W and has a 13 1/2' ceiling. It measures flat down to 6Hz, and the owner has attempted to make use of every bit of that low-frequency extension.
The bottom of the room -- the very bottom of the foundation, that is -- is concrete, but the actual floor is suspended and comprises multiple isolated zones, most notably for the YG Acoustics speakers and subwoofers, which rest on separate concrete platforms. To accommodate the LFE channel for home theater, five JBL subwoofers -- just the drivers, each removed from its MDF cabinet -- are set into the floor, with a precise volume of space below comprising the replacement "cabinet." This is a particularly novel solution for reducing the clutter of equipment in and around the speakers.
Also part of the project was a custom-designed, state-of-the-art power-delivery and grounding system the likes of which I've never seen. It goes far, far beyond the idea of dedicated lines that we audiophiles covet. It begins outside, where a completely separate circuit delivers power to only the A/V room, as though it were a separate residence. Inside, the most massive toroidal transformer I've ever seen -- it's nearly the size of a car tire -- is mounted and further isolates the room's circuits. Grounding uses the natural amount of copper in the rocky terrain along with more than a dozen grounding rods driven into the rock, creating not so much a ground plane as a ground field. It is no exaggeration to say that this AC system would be worthy of the most critical application in just about any field.
Then, of course, there's the equipment itself. For electronics, the owner chose a complete CH Precision system that includes amplifiers, preamp, DAC and phono stage. In addition to the M1 mono amplifiers ($54,000 each) shown with the speakers, there are A1 amps ($37,000 each), an L1 Mono preamp ($58,000), a P1 Mono phono stage ($55,000) and a C1 Mono DAC ($73,000), along with a T1 master clock ($24,700). Except for the clock, each component has its own X1 add-on power supply ($17,000 each). The only thing missing is a unit with which to spin digital discs, although it would be superfluous, because the system is connected to a state-of-the-art network that feeds the CH Precision DAC. There is no equipment rack; due to the integral mechanical-grounding scheme of the CH Precision electronics, everything is meant to be stacked. While digital is the primary source, there is also a turntable -- a Kronos Pro with Kronos Black Beauty tonearm ($53,375) and optional SCPS1 power supply ($15,000). The cartridge is a Transfiguration Proteus Diamond ($10,000).
In addition to the four-piece YG Acoustics Sonja XV speaker system ($265,900 total) used for the stereo right and left channels, there is a custom Sonja XV 1W center-channel speaker ($79,800). For the rear channels there are more YG Acoustics speakers -- four Hailey 1.2s ($42,800/pair), to be exact. Finally, four YG Acoustics Hailey 1.1s ($23,000/pair) hang from the ceiling for height channels. A full system of Kubala-Sosna Realization interconnects ($11,000 per meter pair, $200 for additional meters), speaker cables ($11,000 per meter pair, $200 for additional meters) and power cords ($3000/meter length, $600 for additional meters) connects everything, the rear of the equipment area looking surprisingly clean, despite all of the cables and connections.
Okay, so the room itself was wildly expensive, and so is all of the equipment that inhabits it. Why wouldn't it sound amazing? Well, putting aside the flawed notion that great amounts of money will buy great sound, the complexity of this joint music/home-theater system makes the vast technological terrain covered all the more tenuous. In fact, on its face, all of that equipment would signal, to me at least, that a field of icebergs is on the horizon. Simplicity almost always leads to greater sonic purity; this is the notion that underlies stereo reproduction itself: two channels for our two ears are all we need. But it was immediately apparent that this room and system were another matter. First, the room brings new meaning to both the idea and significance of quiet. Yes, the outside world is surely banished from it; all of the concrete goes a long way to ensuring that. But the electronics, aided by a power-delivery system that is compromised in no conceivable way, presented the music with startling immediacy and clarity, each note emerging from a background that was deep-space black. Added to this was a sense of precise focus, the music, and each instrument or singer making it, set in place without smear or blur of any kind. Black backgrounds are commonplace in high-end audio; we all work to achieve them. But what I heard here was something else, something I couldn't understand or appreciate until I heard it -- a new standard, in my experience. This room and power system would comprise an unparalleled reviewer's tool for what they're able to reveal about any product under consideration. After my demo cuts were loaded on the music server, I played a variety in order to discover what this room and system had in store. The music's natural ease, its unforced resolution, aided by the lack of spurious noise, was pleasing to the extreme. There was no sense of strain at any volume level, the music just emerging, not as the end product of a complex electromagnetic chain but as music -- as high human art. This may be waxing a bit too rhapsodic, but I'm not sure how better to describe it. The music simply flowed -- at its own pace, without a hint of electronic signature or added artifice. Given the attention paid to environmental and electrical noise, the CH Precision electronics seemed like an especially canny choice for this system. At home, I spent a couple of glorious afternoons playing records with a P1 phono stage ($31,500, plus $1850 for EQ card) and X1 power supply, and it extracted more music from the grooves than seemed to exist. I had the same sensation in Paradise Valley, albeit without the grooves, because I listened exclusively to streamed digital. These are truly stellar electronics, designed with the goal of extracting the most sonic splendor possible from whatever is fed to them -- AC or musical signal. Paired with the YG Acoustics speakers, they produced music in a way that was convincingly real. Near the end of my visit, I was able to hear the system
playing some spectacular movie soundtracks, but the real star here was the Sony 4K UHD
projector, which had the best video image I've seen outside a high-end movie theater.
"The best" became a theme of my visit. |
