July 2011- CALIFORNIA AUDIO SHOW

The 2011 California Audio Show ran on the weekend of July 15th through 17th, at the Crown Plaza Hotel located a few miles south of SFO near San Francisco. It was a great success, lots of exhibitors and lots of visitors. Constantine Soo, head of the show's hosting organization DAGOGO, contacted us for some assistance. He wanted to ensure that visitors would be enjoying great sounding rooms, that would compliment the great gear being demo'd in the hotel rooms. He hoped we could supply TubeTraps to the exhibitors at the show. To sweeten the deal he offered Art Noxon, our president, a slot in the lecture/panel part of their program. Art loves to lecture/teach acoustics and the deal was done as quickly as it was heard.

There were 46 exhibitors, most with live rooms. We ended up supplying TubeTrap bass traps into half of them. Some of the others brought their own TubeTraps as well as other acoustical products. Most, but not all of these hotel rooms did have some sort of acoustic conditioning which is a good sign, showing that most manufacturers agree that the last link in the audio chain is not the loudspeaker as most people think, it is the last interconnect, the acoustic interconnect.

We were very fortunate for this show because we happened to be working up a large order for a distributor in northern Europe. They agreed to let their TubeTraps be used at the Cal Audio Show before being shipped to them. We built their order and added a lot more TubeTraps into a truck and our one and only Chris Klein drove it to SF and distributed all the Traps into the rooms at the show. Chris also helped exhibitors dial in their rooms and Art showed up the next day and we worked late into the night dialing in one room after another.

Art got his lecture scheduled at 10 to 11 each morning and even got a second hour on one of the days, for a total of 4 lectures. Magazine reviewers and TubeTrap owners seemed to be in attendance for his talks. He talked about the 20 year evolution of trying to understand from an engineering viewpoint, why TubeTrap customers are so happy with their TubeTraps. Everything he used to explain the dramatic acceptance of TubeTraps in the front corners of the room, all the standard acoustic tests and concepts, didn't work. Then, he tells the story of the discovery which leads to our present explanation of what is going on in audiophile listening rooms. Click here to download Art's complete lecture in .pdf format.

As with all shows the sweetest sounding rooms out in the crowded halls were the TubeTrapped rooms. We went to all the exhibitors that didn't use TubeTraps, left cards and invited them to be sure to reserve traps with us for their next show.

After the show was over Art drove home leaving Chris to pack up the order for Northern Europe and take it to the freight forwarder at the docks in SF. Of all the Tubes used at the show, only one got damaged and Art had brought a replacement so the order went out complete. A number of exhibitors bought their traps at a "show special" price and Chris happily came home with pretty much an empty truck.

We can't end our show report without mentioning Constantine Soo of DAGOGO and his happy crew behind the ticket tables. These shows are his idea and we were there with Tubes at the first show and this is the second of many more we hope. Constantine is tireless, seems to be everywhere at once and yet always has time for even the smallest of details, a smiling gentleman of Audio if there ever was one.

We are setting our sights on the big show, the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Colorado this October. We'll be running an even bigger truck there, and no doubt Chris will be the wheelman/room tuner for that job as well.

Some of the TubeTrapped rooms were:

MBL amplifiers and speakers
MIT Cables, partnered with Spectral Electronics & Magico Speakers
AudioVision of San Francisco with Dynaudio, KEF & Nola speakers, Naim & Simaudio Moon electronics
Music Lovers Audio with Wilson Audio speakers and Spectral Electronics
High Value AV
Loggie Audio
Angel City Audio with ACA Trinity speakers and Melody Valve electronics
JIB / One World Audio with Lindemann speakers and electronics
Soundscape
Electrocompaniet the Sound of Norway
Neko / Chapman, Neko Audio electronics and Chapman loudspeakers
Dan D'Agostino / Master Audio Systems
Amarra / Sonic Studio with JM Lab speakers
Audible Arts / Wells Audio
Fritz Audio / WyWires / Zesto Audio / Modright
Margules Audio with the Grand Orpheus speakers

Here's just one of many stories about dialing in rooms at the show.

MIT had two rooms, one static and full of cables while the other next door was live. It sported small Magico speakers, Spectral amps and impedance matched MIT cables of course. The live room was small and set up to play the long dimension but when it was lit off, the bottom end sounded awful. It was too heavy at head height when standing, and almost nonexistent when sitting... and yes, too heavy again when lying on the floor.

Although a healthy dose of TubeTraps did make notable improvements, it still wasn't really delivering sound the way the gear in the room deserved to be heard. Art finally got to town, breezed into the MIT room to say "Hi" and ran into the bloated small room problem. After being unable to substantially dial the room in after about an hour of playing with TubeTraps, he stopped working and just stared. Then he took a deep breath and said, ..."let's rotate the room, we'll play it wide and short." It was already late at night and the show was to open early the next morning but nothing was working so far. Everyone groaned and decided the MIT cables were long enough to move the speakers into the new position for a test run and it sounded great!. By three in the morning, the room had been completely rotated and setup.

Why did rotating the room work? Art says, "Well, a long time ago, when Mark Levinson was just developing his Cello line, he was exclusively using a lot of TubeTraps to help dial in the rooms. One day we were trading room setup stories and Mark told me how he kept running into long skinny rooms that never worked but when he rotated the setup and played the room wide and added TubeTraps in a special pattern, the rooms worked great." Art goes on to say, "Narrow rooms don't let the bass in the front end of the room expand enough, which causes very strong vertical resonances. Rotate the room so it plays wide and that bass expansion away from the speaker is free to really expand, which ends up producing more diffusive bass and less vertical resonance."

Whenever someone checks their room into ASC for a tune up, the first thing we do is to double check the room setup. Play the room correctly and half of the room problems go away immediately. The lesson is to remember the first rule in setting up a room: Check the orientation of the listening setup to get the best natural play of the room then add TubeTraps to dial in the detailing.

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Acoustic Sciences Corporation, makers of TubeTraps - the REAL bass traps.

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