Audio Note Event Report.

audio Note Event Report.

We would like to thank all of you who made it to our Audio Note event here at the shop last week. It is safe to say, we were all blown away by what we heard! Here are a few notes on what we heard over the course of 3 workshops.

We have the Field Coil loudspeakers and the all-new Konzertmeister amp here at Audiocounsel for a while yet, so if you’d like a demo of them in the New Year, just get in touch and we can arrange something to suit you.

What we heard….

The Idler-Drive CD Transport….

Micky Seaton from Audio Note was kind enough to bring along their prototype Idler-drive CD transport, which we played alongside the same level standard CD transport. Both transports ran through an Audio Note DAC5 Special Edition.

We gave the workshop attendees the chance to listen to some music, firstly on the standard CD-T Two/ii, which is already a top-loading CD Transport equipped with a magnetic puck – and it sounded pretty damn good! However when we changed over to the new Idler drive equipped transport, everything immediately went up several gears!! The music just opened out effortlessly, and as good as the previous set up had sounded, someone commented “it sounds like I’ve just taken a woolly hat off my ears”…..elements of the music were more present than ever before, and whist it was undoubtedly translating more detail, it was more than just that…..there was more SOUL to the music. More of the real essence of each instrument, yet also more space for each musician to play in! The true feel of the way in which the instruments were being played was immediately obvious.

What an incredible product Audio Note have come up with here, and I know we are not alone in being very excited for the Idler drive CD Transport to receive it’s full release in due course! We will, of course, keep you posted! Watch this space……

AN/E SPX Field Coils

Again, we were honoured to get the chance to preview Audio Note’s eagerly awaited “Field Coil” AN/E’s.
Before we jump straight into the technical aspects of the new Field Coils (which we will feature in a later full report dedicated to just the Field Coils), let us just say this (and we have carefully considered what we are about to say)……We think these speakers may very well be the best loudspeaker we have EVER heard. And we have listened to a lot of speakers in the last half a century!
There is a true life-like quality to the Field Coil’s that is almost slightly unnerving to begin with. The human voice is as present as if you were at the actual concert yourself sat a few feet away from the performance! And that applies to any genre, style, era of music we could throw at them!
We are fortunate to be keeping hold of this pair of the Field Coils for a little while yet, so if you are interested in hearing them in the New Year, you’d be very welcome indeed to book a demo.

A/N Konzertmeister.

This was the first time we’d heard the Audio Note Konzertmeister integrated 300B amplifier. We began the workshops by playing the now legendary Audio Note Meishu Tonmeister integrated 300B amp, which is no slouch at all. Equipped with the field coil loudspeakers, the standard Meishu sounded better than we ever dreamt possible. However, as with the Idler Drive CD transport, as soon as we swapped over to the Konzertmeister it just blew us all away. Elements of the music that had previously been there, were now jumping out at you. When we went back to the standard Meishu, it was slightly underwhelming in comparison and believe us…..that takes some doing as it already astonishing!! As with everything at Audio Note, we feel they are only in competition with themselves. And each time they bring a new product along, often employing older technology, seemingly forgotten about by the rest of the world, they revamp it in their own inimitable way, and the world is all the richer for it! Audio Note don’t rush these things out, and nor should they. When they are good and ready, and truly complete, only then do Audio Note release them into the wild to utterly astonish us fortunate music fans who simply want to get closer to the music than we have ever been before. These items we were lucky to showcase do the same thing…..they get on with playing music as it is being performed LIVE in front of you. We are all lucky that such a company exists and is so utterly committed to improving on what we’d previous considered to be perfection!