Tír Na HiFi

Gorgeous speakers and room!

Have the amps sorted for you already you just need to make sure the visa card is still working

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Jadis-Ja50-mo ... Sw9mFWMM-O

Thanks Tony. Although I'd be tempted to go one further:
http://audio-markt.de/_markt/item.php?id=7000027195&

Or even

http://audio-markt.de/_markt/item.php?id=2499568559&

However, VISA card now made of lava, sadly.

Was only joking Simon but the two amps you linked seem relatively great value.
The JA200's are massive. This looks like it is going to be a big Hifi year for you.

Lugging them over to Steves for him to try out on his speakers will be fun!

Congratulations on a great success, the speakers and the room look really beautiful. The best of Italian manufacturing, enjoy!!

Oh those JA-200's would be glorious!!! With KT120's, that's certainly a sound I'd love to hear...

So how are things after few days?

Yes indeed, you all deserve an update at this stage! But where to start...? Well, I'll start with the conclusion: I love these speakers, they're working out better than I could have ever imagined, and I don't remember the last time I was so happy about a hifi purchase.

Maybe I'm just still in the honeymoon period, but given the risk of buying a pair of speakers I'd never heard anywhere, I wasn't exactly 100% confident that they would work out, and I wouldn't have been hugely surprised to discover that they were miles too big for the room (sonically rather than physically) or that I didn't really warm to the sound, or that for whatever reason I just didn't like them. As it turns out, they work really really well in the room, have exactly the kind of sound I was looking for, and they have brought back a lot of enjoyment that has been missing for me for a while. If I may use the cliche, I'm putting on specific tracks and then discovering after 20 minutes that I'm still listening to the album. I can't wait to listen to music on them, and I keep listening long after I should stop. They're not perfect of course, but I'm listening to music rather than hifi, and that's what I needed.

So, to be a bit more specific, whenever you read about Sonus Faber you inevitably get the idea that they sound great but that they're ultimately coloured in that they give everything a kind of rosy tint. I was concerned about this, because while I wanted more "gorgeousness", I didn't really want to give up the openness and precision of the Kharmas. I was concerned that I'd get the sonic equivalent of soft focus, a smeared kind of sound that's superficially easy to listen to but ultimately disappointing. In actual fact they sound fast and open, and if there's colouration there, I don't hear it as being any more obvious than any other speaker. They certainly have a more full-bodied sound than the Kharmas, but they sound natural and precise and detailed and all the other things you'd want.

Now, all that said, they're definitely easy to listen to. The tweeter is the real star, I think, as it manages to sound open and extended but without the attacking onslaught that I hear from some other high-end designs. Not fatiguing at all, basically. The bass is roughly the same as the Kharmas in terms of extension, but the upper bass in my room (always a problem here) has a bit more meat on the bones. The mid is also very natural, and again more open than I was expecting. So, given all this, are we back to the "everything sounds great because it's coloured" question? Well, it's not like every recording sounds the same or that bad recordings aren't still obvious as such. It's just that while before the bad recordings were bordering on unlistenable, now the music seems to shine through and that carries everything. As expected, string tone is gorgeous, just gorgeous, and voices do very well too. I haven't played anything with thunderous bass, but it's probably fair to say that they don't have the last word in slam and punch. If that's your thing you're probably not looking at these anyway, but I think there's plenty of bass there and they have performed well with all kinds of music so far. I'll let you know how I get on when I play the really heavy stuff.

In terms of soundstage, the wide baffle allows for placement close to side walls giving decent width (for a 9' room) and the free space from the back wall leads to a really good sense of depth. They have the kind of sound where the stage starts at the front of the speakers and goes back from there, rather than projecting into the room per se, but I much prefer this. It invites you in, and makes for a believable sense of space and size. They probably don't have the image specificity (fancy word, eh?) of the Kharmas, things are a *little* more diffuse perhaps, but it's not in any way disappointing or anything of the sort. Again, natural and inviting.

DaveF asked me earlier if they're as coherent as the Kharmas, and I don't really know how to answer that. I've moved from a 2-way that was widely considered to have SOTA levels of coherence to a 3-way with no such reputation, but I don't find it appreciably different in terms of driver integration or anything like that. Maybe that will rear its head later (it's not a facet of speakers that I'm hugely sensitive to, I don't think) but I'm very happy with that aspect of things so far. For me, it's all about the tonal balance, and that seems right on the money to me.

As for the amps, well God bless 'em, they're standing up much better than I would ever have anticipated. The thing about the GRAAFs is that as an OTL design, they just don't work into low impedances. And when I say don't work, I mean not even meant to work, nobody would ever claim they should work, even the designer is very clear on the "stay away from low impedances" mantra. Now because I've the monoblock version they're meant to just about cope with 4 ohms but no lower. The Elipsas are a nominal 4 ohm but dip to 2 ohms or thereabouts at 70Hz with a difficult phase angle too, so on the face of it they need something completely different in terms of amplification. But the Italians are sticking together on this one and have obviously come to some arrangement between themselves because I'm getting some great sounds. Yes, smaller scale works are faring better at the moment. Yes, things can get congested and harden up when the music gets complex and you can hear the amps running out of steam. Yes, the bass isn't exactly hitting as hard as a 600w Krell. But they're making some great sounds all the same and I don't feel in the least bit cheated. Of course, that's not to say that alternatives won't be investigated over time...

One interesting thing for me is that I can now clearly hear the amps improving over the first hour or so of playing. Before, they seemed to settle down after a few minutes and I didn't hear massive differences from then on, but now it's much more apparent. The main amp problem at the moment is the heat. Because I'm more inclined to listen for longer, the amps are on for longer and are heating up the mancave by an extra few degrees. Oh well, at least it will be proper winter soon.

As an aside, I've been enjoying some great correspondence with the guy who sold them to me. Once they arrived and I'd reported I was happy with them, he told me loads of his own findings and thoughts. He was apparently afraid to say too much earlier and case it seemed like he was being too pushy, but he's been full of interesting snippets. One point he made was that the Elipsa Red (or Elipsa SE) speakers (which we're talking about here) are actually MUCH better in his opinion than the original Elipsa. What little info I could find in my own research seemed to suggest this, but he was very emphatic on the point. So if you're tempted down this road yourself, make sure of what you're getting. The SE is the one with the Strad tweeter and the Strad-inspired crossover. Accept no substitutes!

So I'm not sure what else to tell you really. I love them, I'm delighted with them, they're the right speaker for me at this stage, in truth I think they're great speakers full stop, and they probably deserve to be better-known. They don't sound like other speakers I've heard, it's hard to compare them to anything else really, but the Sonus Faber magic is definitely real.

A really nice evaluation Si, I'm glad you are more than getting to grips with them and all to the good.
As an after-thought, do you know what Amp the guy you got them from use?

Nice to hear you're enjoying them Si, it is always a risk buying blind but sometimes you just go with your instinct. I know that feeling where you just keep throwing music at a system and go from disc to disc, it's hog heaven!