It may be an odd thing to say, but Jonny Wilson knows how to decorate a demo room.
No, seriously. There are a lot of folks that can set up a great-sounding room. But the photos of those rooms only show an unending sea of ochre and beige that completely undermines whatever it is that’s going on in the room.
Jonny, by contrast, brings drapery. In bold colors. Result? Saturation, baby! Oh, myyy. Golds, blues, reds, greens — my cameras just eat this stuff up with a big, fat, splatty spoon.
Oh, and Jonny is showing some audio stuff too.
I’d never heard John Grant, or his album, Pale Green Ghosts before Jonny cued it up for us on the Pear Audio Kid Howard turntable ($4,200), mounted with an Ortofon Cadenza Bronze and using a Verto SUT. Played back here through Sonist Audio Concerto 4 loudspeakers ($6,495/pair), Grant was airy, weird, menacing and playful. I’m getting this record. The Concerto 4 are 97db efficient, with 8Ω nominal response, and a low-end that pushes into the high 20Hz region. They’re also:
solid wood, 2-way, first order crossover, and utilizing the Sonist Audio ‘el Maestro’ speaker cables. It’s all about the synergy. The Sonist Audio “Maestro” cables are bi-wire speaker cables designed and built with the EXACT same precious metal configuration used within the Sonist Audio speakers themselves. The el Maestro cables, a mix of 24k pure gold, .999 pure silver, and pure oxygen-free copper will carry the synergy of the system all the way from the amplifier directly to the speaker’s drivers. Just like the speakers, the upper and lower conductors within the bi-wire cables have a slightly different recipe, each engineered perfectly for the needs of the speaker’s treble and bass circuits.
The speakers are pretty much perfect for low-power tube amps — which is where the Triode Corp of Japan comes in.
Triode Corp makes some of the prettiest, and most affordable, thermionic gloriousness in today’s high-end. Shown here — and doing the work — was the TRV-300XR ($3500), a 300b-based SET integrated amplifier pushing all of 8 watts. A TRX-1 preamp ($3200) was also in the rack, but unused. This pairing, Sonist + Triode, made a very convincing case for not spending megabucks on a high-end system.
One of my favorite rooms at AXPONA.
