The Note Speaker System Plays Well in an Unusual Location

On Saturday 3rd February Porzilli Audio joined KLAUDIO at a meeting of the Pacific Northwest Audio Society to demonstrate both the KLAUDIO's Magnezar turntable with KLAUDIO’s tangential tonearm and The Note line array speaker. The listening events were held in the KOOLANCE warehouse that features a listening room used for the KLAUDIO equipment and, for the Note system, a large assembly space within the warehouse. The Koolance facility is owned by Peter Cheon, proprietor of KLAUDIO. The event was attended by approximately 40 PNWAS members.


Despite it being a less than optimized venue (unheated!), with industrial racking and so forth within the warehouse, The Note caused a few jaws to drop, with its exemplary imaging and ability to effortlessly energize the big room. During a passage from Berlioz’s requiem The Notes projected a clean image approximately 25 feet behind the speakers. We were standing only 4 ft from them at the time. In fact one member came, listened and asked where the speakers were located. He apparently thought there must be 'hidden' additional loudspeakers. Of course there were not. The Note is a speaker that can completely acoustically disappear as it paints a detailed, precise and accurately dynamic soundscape.

We are very impressed by what Peter has achieved with the Magnezar turntable. So much so that we recommend it as the ideal analogue front end for a 'The Note' system. The KLAUDIO Magnezar is an engineering and audiophile tour de force, featuring superb innovations, such as an automatic center and edge record clamp, a true tangential tone arm which describes a perfectly straight route for the stylus across the record, eliminating the need for anti-skating, a levitating heavy platter which is also fluid damped, foolproof cartridge fitting and alignment and other focussed refinements.

Full systems:

KLAUDIO listening room -
KLAUDIO Magnezar with Klaudio tangential tonearm and various cartridges
KLAUDIO preamp
Pass Lab amps
Wilson speakers

Warehouse -
16 core Memory Player - Porzilli Audio
DEQX eq system
Benchmark DAC3 B DACs
Pair of M&K 10 inch push pull subs (total of 4 x 10 inch drivers) - low distortion sub woofers
Benchmark AHB2 amps
Liquid Cable Litz speakers cables - Porzilli Audio
The Note loudspeaker in black - Porzilli Audio

Set up

Speakers 6 ft apart - no tweaking of distance apart - just set and forget. We are able to do this due to the omni-directional nature of the sound waves emanating from the Note speaker.
Sub integration, linear phase crossover at 180 Hz.

Tracks:

Berlioz - Requiem. Robert Shaw - Atlantic Symphony Orchestra
Elvis - ‘Fever’
Neville Bros - ‘Brother Blood’
Patricia Barber - Cafe Blue - ‘Nardis’, ‘Ode to Billy Joel’
Chants and Dances of Native Americans - ‘How the West was Lost’
Karen Mok - Somewhere I Belong - ‘Moon over Bourbon Street’
Mickey Hart - Dafos - ‘The Gates of Dafos’
Misa Criolla - Jose Carreras - various tracks

Garage Door test track - Calrec sound field microphone recording of a UK style garage door opening, slamming shut and then being pounded on by the recordist. This shocks folks when they hear it. The recording microphone was located inside the garage.

Hadestown - Anais Mitchell - ‘Why we build the wall’
Dominque Fils-Aimé ‘Birds’