Sonus Faber Venere 1.5 Speakers, Now On Demo At Pefrect Hi-Fi.

The latest range of affordable speaker series from Sonus Faber is called Venere, available is a variety of sizes and models to suit stereo & AV use. I heard the Venere 1.5 stand mount model as pictured above singing at Perfect Hi-Fi Amcorp Mall showroom, and they do sound like a great value for money speaker option for those shopping at below RM$10k budgets.

Contact Jepson at 012-3930263 for enquiries and details.

Perfect Hi-Fi To Launch Sonus Faber Aida & KEF LS-50 At KLIAV 2012.

Sonus Faber Aida.

Folks, KLIAV 2012 show is only a week away, starting next Friday, 20th July, at the JW Marriott hotel Kuala Lumpur. I've learnt that most hifi dealers will be using this year's show as a platform for domestic launches of hot new products.

First up is Perfect Hi-Fi. They will be launching the latest luxury speaker design from Sonus Faber called Aida. As you can see that Aida is a beautiful speaker, and I wonder how they will sound like powered by top grade ARC electronics?

KEF LS-50.

Perfect Hi-Fi will also be launching the KEF LS-50 speaker, a product celebrating KEF's 50th Anniversary in the business. Also on demo will be the mid-line R-Series speakers and wait, the cutting edge Blade will be on demo too.

More hot news on KLIAV 2012 to come!

Various Perfect HiFi Demos At KLIAV 2011.

Perfect HiFi, being one of the big boy dealers in town will have various brands on display at various locations during KLIAV 2011.

At the Linn room, who else better to take charge, other then Gilad Tiefenbrun him self!

The Linn room will feature the latest Akurate system(pictured above) and Majik Isobarik speakers(below).

The Linn Majik Isobarik is an interesting speaker with excellent sound vs value for dollar ratio, because of it's relatively affordable price!

Sonus Faber Amati Futura

Sonus Faber Guernari Evolution

ARC 40th Anniversary Reference pre-amp, which cost more than six figures of  local currency!

The latest ARC Reference 150 power amp

The ball room will feature top dollar stuff  in the form of Sonus Faber Amati Futura and Guernari Evolution speakers, powered by Audio Research 40th Anniversary Reference pre-amp and the latest Reference 150 power amp.

Other Perfect HiFi brands like KEF and Pass Labs, will be on static display.

More KLIAV 2011 updates to come!

Perfect HiFi Offers Sonus Faber Speakers.

Sonus Faber Toy book shelf.

Lusting after those Italian speakers that come with exquisite wood work and cow hide decorated front baffles? You want to enjoy the charismatic warm sound of Sonus Faber? You feel like you can't quite afford them?

Now you can do so without feeling the $$$ pain! Because Perfect HiFi, the local distributor of Sonus Faber is offering the latest Toy, Monitor and Liuto series speakers by up to 30% discount.

The offer is valid from now till end of June 2011, so get em' real quick.
Sonus Faber Liuto floor stander.

The recent slew of hifi sale and promotional offers is making me feel like Father Christmas is here already, even though the actual year end is more than six months away! He! He!

Call Andy Tan at 019-2112566 or 03-58821693 for further enquiries.

My Centre Channel Conundrum

A Sonus Faber center chamel shown here.

If you are a home theatre purist, please don't read this post. You would probably find what I did as 'sacrilegious' to Home Theatre.

When I was planning the home theatre package for my new home, the location of the centre channel came as a headache.

The problem was two-fold. One was the location of the centre speaker itself; The other was the distance relationship between the centre and the left-right (L-R) pair.

The central position where the centre channel speaker was to be located was occupied by my hifi rack. A possible solution was to get a tall stand, so that the centre speaker could be positioned behind the rack and be higher than the rack, so that its line of sight to the audience was not obstructed.

However, this meant that the projector screen got to be located higher off the ground. I calculated that for the bottom part of the screen to clear the centre speaker, it would have to be more that 36" from the floor. That was a position too high for my taste. I personally prefer the picture to be at eye-level. In fact, AV Designs' advice was for the bottom of the screen about 24"-30" from the floor.

Even if I decided to position the centre speaker thus, ignoring the fact that a screen positioned too high would mean I had to 'look up' at the screen like sitting in the cinema front row, the speaker's position close to the front wall would be 60"-70" from the plane of the left-right speakers (the left-right speakers are positioned about 90" from the front wall, a position I optimised for stereo/hifi). AV Designs' James Tan advised that this would likely cause a disjointed sound from the left-centre-right array, even after compensating for their distance difference in the AVR setting. His experience was that the distance differential between the centre speaker plane and the L-R speaker plane should not be more than 40".

Another possible solution I thought would be for the centre speaker to go in front of the hifi rack. That would look weird, I rejected that idea instantly.

So I toyed with the idea of not installing a centre speaker at all. Some people I spoke with thought that you would lose a lot of information on the movie soundtrack omitting a channel. The dialogue would be gone, as dialogue is usually encoded in the centre channel.

Well, not really. If you switch off the centre channel in the AVR, it will automatically route the centre channel sound to the left and right channels equally. This is called a 'phantom centre'. I remembered seeing this done in a Holfi surround sound demo in an early hifi show in KL, though it was meant for music. The argument was that the centre channel speaker would adversely affect the imaging as integrating and matching the centre speaker to the L-R was not easy.

The same was advocated by Jim Smith in his book 'Get Better Sound' too (tip #24). He put forth the same argument that the centre channel muddy up the sound. However, there is a price to be paid. The duty of the centre channel is to anchor the soundstage at centre for viewers who are seated off-centre. Not having a dedicated centre channel would mean that there would be no soundstaging for viewers who are seated away from the sweet spot, just like in a stereo set-up.

I briefly tested the 2 settings in AV Designs' showroom, one with centre on, one with centre off. Yes, with the centre channel off and listening from an off-centre position, the sound was not so dimensional. At the same time, vocal also sounded slightly recessed and thinner. I did feel that the vocal was smoother and the diction clearer though.

Anyway, I decided to ditch the centre channel in my own set-up.

Well, this was sure like listening to stereo. In the sweet spot, you'd get a nice soundstage, with depth and width. Off centre, the soundstage diminished. The vocal also sounded a little recessed. Though I feel these did not affect the enjoyment of the movie much, after watching close to 15 movies this way.

The disadvantage of not having a dedicated centre channel was that I could not adjust the gain of the centre channel independently, say, to make vocal more prominent by boosting it 1/2-1db higher. Anyway, the diction still came off very clear, so catching the vocal on screen was not a problem. This goes to show that a setup good for hifi should be able to tackle movie soundtrack well too.

If you also try this in your home theatre, I'd like to hear about your result.