October 19 2008, Saucalito CA:

This is me on the beach with the Golden Idol Sound Tao Speakers

My friend Robert is a hearing aid dispenser for Costco.  He and I are into music and audio Hi-Fi stuff.  We pal around on the weekends and he and I went to Burning Amp last Sunday in Saucalito, just north of San Fransico across the Golden Gate Bridge.  We also share a like of bitter hoppy ales and off beat music.  Since they had a bar and music at Burning Amp, it was basically a no-brainer.

The main man was a fellow named Vlad.  He is a big bear of a man with silver hair and a high energy level.  He was kind enough to show me where to unload my speakers.  He also owes me a pair of RCA cables I loaned him and never got back.  It was a fair trade if I don't get them back.  We had a great time and I'm already planning next year's gig.

The Above Picture is Vlad

I worked the night before so being there at the ten AM open was not going to happen.  In fact we didn't get set up until around three in the afternoon and it ended around seven.  Four hours plus an hour each way was a perfect day trip and the weather was spectacular.  Going across the golden gate bridge, we carefully watched for suicidal people...I wanted to get a picture but we were moving too fast for anything but a quick glimps.  Hardely enough for a thourough psychological examination.  I guess the main thing is to ask them if they have a plan to do the deed and since they were on the bridge I guess they did.  I couldn't make out the suicide hotline but I know there is a phone there.  I guess so you can let someone talk you out of it... or to say goodbye to someone, anyway.

This is a side show of us going over the GGB

The Presidio Yacht Club apparently has no address so the directions were given to a set of coordinates by mapquest.  Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to input coordinates into the Pioneer AVIC Z-1 that we have installed in our Honda Element.  I kinda knew where Saucalito is but the Yacht Club was a bit difficult to find since there was a lot going on there on a Sunday.  The only signage was right at the facility so there was no glide path orientation to tell if we were exactly on course.  After just a few hiccups we arrived and found parking.   The famous Nelson Pass was holding court on the back patio and he seemed like a very nice person.  I think he gave out a lot of free stuff because he asked me if I needed a transformer...but I really didn't need one.  I like to make friends by giving stuff out too.  I brought chocholate brownie bites and they went over very well.  There wasn't any food there except liquid bread that I could find.

This is me and the understated Nelson Pass!

The website to Burning Amp is found at www.burningamp.com

I set my home built speakers up in front of the room.  Using my phone as a music source and Robert's tube amp rebuilt from a Stromburg radio chassis, I stood up in front of the small crowd and introduced myself as well as my gear.  The speakers were built using plans from www.frugal-horn.com.  They are the "Olivas" from the "Spawn" series.  I picked what looked like the easyest build from among all the plans.  They are all pretty simple in design but some of the folded horns needed more clamps then I could ever hope to amass in a lifetime (but I'm trying.)  After my short introduction, I played a few selections from the phone and showed both the strengths of the speakers and the weaknesses.   As a single driver design, they are very power efficient.  I could have driven them with just the phone and no amp to be honest.  With the amp, the sound is more mellow and since I built them to go with an amp, that's what I used.  The volume was set at two and a half and any more would just overdrive them.

Notice my cap disguise?  The speakers to my left are WAY expensive and I couldn't help but get a chubby standing so close to that much African hardwood!  Oh...to touch them was nice.  To hear them...devine.

Playing some light three piece jazz or some jazz vocals really brings forth a very natural sound stage.  The horns at the bottom and tops of the speaker project the bass and slightly cover up some of the "beaming" of the drivers.  With a big room to fill, I think they stood up to the test very well.  After that I put on something a little more complex and the illusion broke up in the rafters and made it's way down into the crowd.  The sound stage became spotty and then dissappeared all together revealing the flaw in single driver designs.  One driver, when it tries to do too much, just can't keep up with all the sound.  Even though our ears are bascially one driver, the room can take three sound sources (from a bass, midrange, and treble driver) and put them together into a finer package that then comes together at the eardrum.  Without three drivers, the lone speaker, trying it's best to reproduce all the sounds in the recording, simply breaks up, leaving an unpleasant mess.  However, when you recognize the systems weaknesses and don't try to ask more then it's capable, the speakers really shine.  Soft passages are crisp the room sound of the recording studio can be brought erily to life if you close your eyes.


Robert standing beside the speakers for scale.  He can't help but smile...



This is the size of the room.  I think the speakers did pretty good and I got great feedback on them.

I think the two horns really open up the room behind the speakers, 'showing' what was actually in the studio for the recording.  That's the amazing part of your brain.  Not exactly as good as, say, a bat, but surely, with the right passage on the right speakers, the illusion of space and depth to a recording is truely a transporting experience.  Your brain decodes all the sound waves and differentiates the leading and following pulses of the same waves and projects a space into your brain.  I remember before I lost a great deal of my hearing, when I was 16, I would go into the woods and just listen to the sounds around me.  I could close my eyes and "see" where a bird might be in the canopy.  Or perhaps I could hear the rustling of a wave of a breeze as it moved through the treetops.  I would anticipate its touch on my face and sure enough, it would arrive just as the wave of sound of it's passing, touching leaves and branches, here and there through the woods would tell me of it's immenant presence.

The crowd was very supportive.  I lost the room when I played the more complex passages, they evaporated like the alcohol in a flambe' but once I again put on something that wouldn't tax the design,  they miraculously reappeared from the bathrooms, the bar, and the patio to listen again to the illusion of another space where Cole Porter was standing, a microphone in his hand, singing, just for us...just for our group across the bay from San Francisco at the Presidio Yacht Club.

Great presentation by other speaker builders...The talent in that room was really incredible (and very nice too!)

After my time with the crowd, I took the speakers down to the water's edge for a photography session.  On the way down I looked through the displays in the downstairs area and there were really a lot of very nice specimins of workmanship.  Nelson pass had erected a great processor of sound that looked like it may have graced captian Nemo's office or workshop.  I wish I could have heard it play.  Unfortunately, my "A" hearing aids were in the shop and my "B" aids are really not up to the task of critical listening.  Too much compression and with the microphones on the back of my ears (they are behind the ear models), the sence of space or direction is ruined.  In fact I had to have robert set up his amplifier for me to play for the room.  I realized as I was setting everything up that I simply couldn't tell if they sounded good or not.  Very scary for a second but being hearing impaired is not something I can change, so I just went with the flow.  I had plenty of very positive feedback from the crowd so it worked out.


I think this may be Anton Singh.  He has an amp downstairs.  He was very kind and introduced himself to me when I was bringing my speakers inside.


Look at the precision here...drool.


I took a few pictures of various and sundry amplifiers including some very skillfull amps that, if they had been left unattended, I may have just made monkey love with them right there on the floor!  Ha ha, just kidding.





I took some nice pics of a tube amp with the Golden Gate bridge standing proudly behind them.   I tried and tried to get everything just right in the photo but for some reason I was having trouble getting both the foreground and the background to stay in focus all at the same time and still get the flash to fire and illuminate the foreground.

After moving the speakers out to the cove-front, Robert and I took some really nice pictures.  I really need to spend some money on a decent camera.  Everything you see here was taken with my camera-phone.  It's a Nokia N95.  Good for a camera on a phone but still lacking as a camera.  The nice thing about the Nokia is that I always have it with me.  So I get pictures that I may not have if I had to go get a heavy DSLR and upack lenses and stuff.  So the pictures are what they are.  Not excellent but probably not terrible for working with a camera-phone.





BTW, these speakers are for sale!  They are driven by Fostex FE 126 E's and are for a rated input of just 15 watts of power so they are perfect for your low power tube ampifier. I call them Tao's.  They are named for my partner of five years.  They are piano black finished and sound simply superb.  I have compared them to everything I own and they are just heads and tails over everything.  I woudn't trust just my own hearing of course, my impressions are reinforced by everyone I play them for, even when double blinded (neither them or me know what's playing!)  I call the company "Golden Idol Sound Inc." and have a nice name plate on the back of Rafiel's Moses coming down from the mountain to see his people worshiping the golden calf.  Of course I am having a bit of fun with the symbolism.  The Golden Idol is a false god but since I'm athiest, all gods have the same power and since mine are gold and Moses just has some stone tablets with rules written on them, pooey for that!  There are plenty of rules already.  I don't need more while I'm listening to my music.

To continue with the Tao's description.  They are made from sheets of Baltic Birch plywood that cost over $200 US per sheet!  Very expensive but were regular plywood will only have five or six layers, Baltic Birch has from ten to thirteen layers.  This makes for a very stable and homogenous stock.  There are no nails or screws used in structural components, everything is glue together using a very advanced product that is waterproof and UV proof.  The glue dries harder then the wood fibers do so once two peices are together, the bond is stronger than the wood so if you tried to pull them apart, they wouldn't break at the seem, they would split somewhere else.  I made the mistake of misaligning two peices on an artistic peice I did and the peices came apart between subsequent layers, not on my joint when I pried them apart with a crowbar!  The only parts that are MDF are the non structural "steps" that cascade from the mouths of the horns.  The step pattern serves to trap the higher frequencies that the Fostex like so much, while allowing the lower frewquencies that are larger than the steps to be projected outward.  It's neat to listen to the ports.  As you hold your head by the horns then by the drivers, you can really hear a difference.  It just dissappears a few feet in front of the speakers, however.  The sound reaches your ears as a whole unit, with reflective waves from your room placing the speakers in space and the waves from the speakers anchoring the instruments and vocalists on the recording somewhere just behind the cabinets.  It's like there is another room out there, just beyond the cabinets and Billie Holiday...she's right there with a cigarette you can almost smell as she tells you ..."God bless the child who has his own"..right there!



Please check out pictures and tell me what you think.  The speakers will cost $2799 per pair and are triple painted with black oil paint and have two coats of varnish or lacquer on top.   They come with an anchoring handle on the back that both serves to protect the gold plated speaker posts as well as giving you a way to secure them to the wall if you are in an earthquake prone area as we are here in San Jose,  or have small children that may be in danger of pulling them over onto themselves.  This is a very important function because at 38.5 lbs each and 64.5 inches tall, they could really do some damage if they fall over on something or someone.

Please let me know if you are interested in having me build a pair of these speakers for you.  I'm very proud of my work and you are welcome to come to my house to hear them for yourself.

Sincerely,
Spencer