where TAMA meets SSTA (part 1)

little kc, maggielurva, jeff lin, jo ki

[sorry for the bad photography... i am still learning to use my new panasonic lumix!]

i had spent the last two days witnessing how jeff lin, the telos guru, tweaked my system and jo's system, and i must say, the lessons learned are far more worthy than tweaking alone in closed doors all by myself for the next 5 years.

the reason why i didn't blog immediately is, the whole experience actually set me thinking about my hifi philosophy and belief in all my 20+ years of dabbling in his hobby. i won't say jeff lin totally threw my belief out of the window or make me doubt my own self but i must say, meeting him and sharing together with jo ki give me another dimension and deeper insight into resonance control and balancing. i am more like a thinking hifi man now than before. let me share with you what i mean.

you see, all along, i view hifi from a holistic viewpoint - as a whole, it must convey music and that means the system must have the correct tonality, fluidity, freedom, balanced spectrum of sound, emotional contents etc. etc. and most of these elements cannot be measured. to me, it is more art than science. i am never a technical man who goes and measure how deep/wide my soundstage is, how much is the separation between the vocalist and the guitar...those things don't matter that much to me. as long as i could perceive a well-defined soundstage, i am happy. so i create a term for those audiophiles like me, i call them TAMA, short for Tone and Musicality Advocators.

then i slowly get to know and understand jo ki, master ken and now jeff lin and his followers like little kc. this camp of audiophiles is what i would now call SSTA, short for Soundstage Sculpting and Technical Advocators. these audiophiles puts top priority on soundstage definition, layering, imaging and they are always technical about their pursuit. they always use various forms of tweaks to achieve these desired results.

mind you, i am not saying that SSTA doesn't have TAMA characteristics or vice versa, so don't get me wrong.

my enlightenment comes from gradually appreciating SSTA's mentality and their requirements in hifi, and learning SSTA's way of playing hifi, as i believe TAMA combined with SSTA would make the perfect hifi. TAMA + SSTA is the perfect amalgamation of "softness" married with "hardness", emotions married with technicalities, which is what good hifi should be.

now, onto jeff's visit and what he did to my system.....

after listening to my system or less than 2 minutes, jeff commented that my sound was skewed more to the highs. what he wanted to do was to shift the spectrum downwards to enhance the mids and lows while maintaining the highs. he also wanted to correct the pitch of the singer, which he thinks was not right.


jeff basically did 6 things to my system, in this order:

1. torque the 4 bolts on the bottom of my mana table
2. torque the 4 bolts on the bottom of my mana soundframe which my hydra 8 sits on
3. torque the 4 screws on top of my meridian g08.2
4. torque all the screws on my maggie 3.6 (this was done by little kc)
5. tried out the telos banana pins on the hydra 8 - this is like the RCA male cap but with the pin shaped like banana plug
6. tried out the new reference telos power cord on my meridian g08.2
7. tried out the telos titanium cones (set of 3) on the meridian g08.2

step 1) & 2) were done using a special spanar torque, which, accordingly to jeff, cost much more than the tohnichi torque driver that ck gnoh and hifikaki bought.

step 1) brought about tremendous improvements in terms of focus, imaging and coherence. suddenly images snapped into focus and the noise floor also went down a notch. even separation and layering improved in such a way the the musicians are no longer sitting on the same vertical plane. they are "pulled" further apart! this is simply marvelous.

step 2) went further to enhance what is already good. now, we could hear the throaty voice of the vocalists. the vocalist's diction is clearer and the whole pitch is more correctly defined. we can follow the vocalist better. can you imagine this - it is only by tightening the screws on the platform for my hydra 8!

step 3) was great too. now the images are very compact and real, without the "hairy" outlines before. guitar plucking is more rhythmic and dynamic contrast is more discernible. there is a tendency to crank up the volume to fully appreciate the dynamic contrast of the music. at this stage, i thought it was already great, anything more would probably upset the balance.

step 4) brought about negative results. the sound suddenly lost the delicacy and became more forward and blown up. i didn't make any comment on this but jo seemed to know my feelings when we exchanged glances.

step 5) & 6) proved to be too much of the good thing, resulting in a sound which is less natural, eventho' the soundstage was even better defined with better separation and layering.

i must say i am greatly shocked by the extent of improvement from step 1) to 3). you can dump another RM10K on your hardware (cables, amps) and still can't achieve this level of improvement. i am so grateful to jeff for "putting money in my pocket"! i suppose i would never leave my mana rack un-torqued for the rest of my hifi life!

the whole exercize got me thinking for the last two nights about balancing. i fully endorse the SSTA's school of thoughts but i maintain the belief that one cannot go too far. i told jo that i am a changed man forever because i am now willing to incorporate SSTA's techniques into my journey.

remember how i reported about ceraball's pros and cons in my previous posts? today i got the cerapucs (2 sets) and i put them under my monoblock. they seem to work better than ceraballs in that they won't roll off the highs. i observe an immediate improvement on the separation and layering of the soundstage but as reported by hifikaki, all FE ceraballs or cerapucs or cerabases need breaking-in to sound good. so i would leave them for a few days before i report on them again.

jeff's visit and sharing with jo ki have enligtened me. from now on, i would work to retain the strengths of my system, while learning the strengths of these SSTAs.

balancing is too easy a word to utter but to do it 100%, is almost an impossible act. that's the goal i have set for myself.