Meeting Minutes January 21/22 2005

Thanks first of all to everyone who attended the meeting, and a special thank you to Steve and Robert from RSAD for making the trip.

To those who could not attend due to the poor weather conditions, well we missed you all.

Robert and Steve arrived in a flurry of snow around 4pm on Friday. By that point Boss and I had already knocked a hole in bottle of 'Balvenie', so the two RSAD guy's could've been repo men for all I knew. Still, I let them in and we proceeded to stalk the grounds and they assessed what kind of mess they'd gotten themselves into.

Raggy, Greg and Nate rolled up shortly thereafter and the first part of the evening on Friday was spent playing music through my system and getting a feel for the room acoustics and the system components. Dinner was prepared with kind assistance from Boss, though poor old Raggy looked a little pale at the sight of all that red meat! 

Moving back into the listening room, Robert and Steve made some minor adjustments to my Magnepan's, and moved the seating around a little. We had a couple of people in the group that were keen to hear some music before any RSAD equipment was introduced, and Robert/Steve were extremely patient with us while we completed that part of the agenda. With hindsight we would have done things differently and provided more time on Friday to setup the Sason speakers.

We started the RSAD portion of the agenda by touching/feeling a variety of their cables. The Poiema!! (the two exclamation marks are part of the product code designation) speaker cables are very nicely put together with a professional fit and finish on par with the best that I’ve seen. They are extremely light and flexible, with good quality terminations that appear to be notches in the actual flat silver conductors, but I’m told are actually spades that have been attached to the cable with a cold compression technique.

The 4 inches or so between the end of the jacket and the spades needs to be treated with some respect, since excessive bending at the same point would probably result in a cable fracture. That is no different than with any other thin/flat cable design.

Robert installed the Poiema!! Bi-wires and we sat and listened to a few tracks to get a feel for what was going on. I plan to write a more detailed review of the Poiema!! since Robert has kindly loaned me a set for evaluation, but initial impressions were of a fast, open, detailed and dynamic presentation with a taught bass and good high end extension. I wouldn’t want to use the Poiema!! in a bright system, I think it may be just a touch on the brighter side of neutral, but I’ll bet these cables would be magical with tube amps in bringing them to life, or in waking up a solid state amplifier that was a little dark to begin with. Very impressive cables with further evaluation pending.

Robert then re-cabled the rest of the system, using Poiema’s from the preamp to power amp, and DAC to preamp. He changed both digital cables in my system and I believe they were from the Poiema range also.

We enjoyed the first part of the evening but had some problems with the Vpi. I’m not certain if the problems were related to the dry air and static that we were experiencing, but we seemed to have an issue with tracks skipping that did not generally skip on the owners TT’s. Some adjustment to the Vpi perhaps improved things a little but didn’t really resolve the issue.

For the remainder of the meeting we concentrated on using CD’s, though Gene was kind enough to bring along some classical vinyl on Saturday which he handed out to the group, and we managed to spin several tracks without a problem.

At around 11 PM on Friday, we moved the Magnepan's out of the room and unpacked the Sason Ltd speakers.

These are impressive looking speakers fabricated from granite slabs bonded together using a special epoxy. I don't know if these are the first speakers made almost entirely from Granite, I suspect I may have heard of this material being used for cabinet construction previously, though I can't just think where. I can only imagine the hassles involved in working with Granite, and kudos to Steve for even trying!

I have a more detailed review of the Sason here, so I’ll keep things fairly brief in these notes.

I will say this about the Sason, they look wonderful and sound wonderful too. If you'd like to learn more then please refer to the review above.

Robert/Steve struggled a little on Friday trying to dial in the Sasons. It's hardly surprising really given the odd room and the odd folk that were mulling around the place with shot-glasses!

It was late....let me see...early Saturday morning when the guy's threw the towel in and declared a recess, around 4.45 am when I finally hit the sack. 

Saturday began with a traditional English breakfast of sausage, eggs, bacon, beans, grilled tomato’s, mushrooms and toasted English muffins, and a couple of the group took solace from a stiff Bloody Mary or two. Breakfast seemed to be well received, though I’m sure most of the diners wondered what the heck they had gotten themselves into at that point. Hey folks, when in Rome….

It seemed to me that it didn’t take long on Saturday morning to get the speakers into a good place, and Steve announced that they were ‘happy’ somewhere around noon.

Personally, if I could have ejected Steve and Robert for a couple of hours and messed around with placement myself, I might have done so. One of the trial setups involved the speakers being well over 9’ apart with a higher toe-in angle, and that sounded really good to me. The final position I believe was somewhere around the 8’ mark center to center, with the chair perhaps a few inches back from being at one point of an equilateral triangle.

Anticipation was high among the ‘Old Faithful’ and there seemed to by a minor altercation or two as people clamored for time in the sweet spot.

My time came around and I slipped in a track from the Ry Cooder / Ali Farke Toura CD, ‘Talking Timbuktu’. My jaw dropped. I haven’t heard a soundstage quite as deep as that before, anywhere, ever.

Late afternoon Robert presented the group with a little insight on his life’s goals, his business philosophy and a little good humor mixed-in with a good amount of technical discourse and product design information.

Steve took the stage later and answered our questions with ease, providing us with solid technical explanation on the crossover design, cabinet construction and other essential elements of the Sason loudspeaker. I can’t deny chuckling to myself as I saw Steve talking informatively and eloquently to the group with a shot glass of bourbon in his hand! I think the NEWAS group have that affect on people, I was a tee-totaling church go'er before I got roped in with this crowd, and the rest is history. 

I’ll conclude by saying that this was a very enjoyable weekend and it was a real pleasure to meet with Robert and Steve. I’ve learned a good deal in a short time and I feel very good about Ridge Street Audio Design, their people and their products.

Thanks Robert and Steve, it was a real pleasure to have you visit us here in De Pere.

Rooze

Gallery: Thanks Raggy and Steve!

The Sason's looking rather elegant, though much nicer in the flesh.
	Roozer surveying the carnage in his listening room!
From left to right at the back of the room: Steve(RSAD), Robert(RSAD), Gene(NEWAS), Greg(NEWAS), Nate(NEWAS) and Roozer with Bandit the cat (NEWAS)
Bandit and Greg having a 'bonding' moment.    WOW - a psychedelic  shot or what...."ahhh it was all just a blur" said Raggy after the meet, now I know what he meant! On the other hand, I wonder if Bob actually sees his reflection in a mirror?