Steel Fist in a Velvet Glove

Maggielurva and I made another home visit last Friday night. The host, Wong, is Willy’s friend, he came along with Willy when he visited my place. You sure make a lot of friends in the audiophile circle this way.

Wong preferred a little privacy about his system, so this time round I have no photos to share. We all need to rely on written words alone.

Wong’s system frontends consisted of a Naim CD5x cdp, a Linn LP12 turnatable and a diy tubed phono stage.

The pre-amp was also a diy tubed unit, it passed the signal on to a Conrad-Johnson Premier One with 200w of tube power.

Doing the honour of converting the electrical signal into music was a pair of Wilson Sophia.

The system was strung together with an assortment of audioquest and JPS interconnects and JPS loudspeaker cables. Power conditioning was done by an AudioPrism Power Foundation, I spotted one or two PS Audio powercords and some diy ones supplying the juice to the equipment.

Impressed by the equipment list already? Wait till you read about the heroic length Wong has gone through to implement acoustic treatments in his approx. 11ft X 17ft room. Now, this one has to be seen to be believed. It was the first time I saw treatment on full 6 sides of the room.

On the front and back walls, Wong has put up open bookshelves from floor to ceiling. The shelves were stuffed with stacks of documents and books, interestingly, there seemed to be a scheme as to how the stuffing was done – the shelves and their contents on the left half and the right half of the front wall looked exactly symmetrical.

The 2 side walls were fully covered with diy diffusers, similar in concept to the Auralex diffuser in the picture below. At the first reflection points, the diffuser’s empty spaces were stuffed with absorptive foam.

Under our feet, the room floor was fully carpeted. Above, there was a ‘false ceiling’ hanging a few feet below the real one. The ‘false ceiling’ has some of the ceiling cardboard tiles removed, again the pattern on the left and right halves were symmetrical.

We started with CD and switched to vinyl later. Vinyl proved its superiority once again, the music was more alive and the details were better resolved. The clicks and pops was easy to ignore in the face of these sonic improvements.

For me, the most impressive aspect of the sound was that it was always filled with energy. The music was always being propelled along by the system purposefully, but surprisingly there was no aggression (or probably it was not surprising given that a high-powered tube amp was at the heart of the system). At the quieter part of the music, you could sense that this power and energy was being held in reserve, and it would just get unleashed on any dynamic up-shift in the music. The system conveyed a total sense of ease on any kind of music played. The sound was smooth, lively and full bodied, it was not the delicate or anaemic kind. The music simply flowed. The system portrayed good details as it was, and maggielurva thought that the system has the potential to go even further in this area, I can’t say I disagree with his assessment there.

But the description of this system would not be complete without mentioning its bass performance. It had a distinctive approach in handling bass (to me at least), and the host mentioned that it was the contribution of the Wilson Sophia. This system loved bass, you could hear that the system relished the arrival of every bass note, soft or loud, it would pounce on it and belt it out with gusto. On dynamic and bass heavy track, such as track 15 on Manger’s compilation CD - “Jazz variant” by the O-zone Percussion Group, the bass hit real hard and literally shook the room. If you were a bass lover, you would think that you have died and gone to bass heaven! I salute Wong for his skill in working with and managing bass performance like this. In a smaller room and lesser hands (like yours truly), the bass would have wrecked absolute havoc to the sound.

The most apt description of this system’s overall sound would be the oft used, but in this case fully deserving, phrase - ‘Steel Fist in a Velvet Glove’.