Greetings from the cold Pacific Northwest. Snow today! I hope you are well. 🙂

Tone Poets

The vacuum tubes are full of fire on a cold winter day, and I've been spending the afternoon listening mostly to vinyl with the Tone Poets.

I really have to hand it to Blue Note President Don Was, and the "Tone Poet" Joe Harley (Music Matters) for the superb series of  reissues they've been doing from the Blue Note family of labels. 

Take Grant Green's Feelin' The Spirit,  mastered by Mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original master tape, plated and pressed at RTI. These reissues exude quality. The 180 gram LPs felt solid in my hands. Quality album covers. Quality record sleeves. Just really nicely done. 

The vinyl is dead quiet. The overall tone is remarkable, satisfying, and beautiful, making me feel like I was at a late night jazz club performance, courtesy of the Tone Poet. 

I'm not in a late night jazz club performance though, I'm in my living room enjoying some remarkably good music on the HiFi. 

I'm listening with a full front end, suite of amplification electronics, and cables, from Audio Note (UK).

The Level Four Tomei 211 integrated SET amp, Level Four M6 RIAA phono preamp, and Level Four AN-S4 step-up transformer are amazing performers. 

I've really been enjoying Jim Hall's Good Friday Blues with Red Mitchell and Red Kelly. It's been given the same deluxe treatment as Feelin' The Spirit. 

The sound quality of this studio recording is superb through the M6 RIAA, feeding the Tomei's big 211 valves, which is powering my West's into rarified air.

The tone is as perfect as I've ever heard it. All the visuospatial attributes are in full display too: wide, deep, and naturally tall soundstage. Vivid aural images with a real sense of spaciousness around them. 

The Level Four Tomei & M6 are doing something that I've been very impressed with, and I'm trying to figure out how to adequately explain it.

It has to do with bringing out the full drama of the musical performance. While sound quality is very impressive, this Level Four combo's ability to deliver the full drama encoded in recordings is just next level.

This level of dramatic ability is missing from a lot of / most HiFi kit, and once becoming aware of how important this is for being wowed by the musical performance, it sets a new benchmark for me for comparisons. It's one of those performance attributes that one doesn't realize the importance until you hear components that can do it this well. 

When I'm listening to music I enjoy being wowed by excellent sound quality from records as good as these jewels. 

Yet what I really want is to also feel wowed by the dramatic quality of the musical performance. The artistry of the musicians in evoking feelings. Their choice of tone color chords to evoke feelings. The sub-bass range hitting me with the power of the music. The agile dynamics that bring melodies to life. The smooth, natural, airy high-frequencies that are so beautiful to hear. An information rich presentation with so much music coming through, so much feeling coming through.

These Level Four components really make the music feel full of emotional life. Like with the Tone Poets reissue of my favorite Joe Pass album, For Django. 

Nothing makes the drama of the music, the unique artistic fingerprint of the musicians, unique imprint of the recording arts on these musical performances, so full of life, like these Level Four Audio Note (UK) components are able to do with my Westminster loudspeakers. The best I've heard here at my place, or actually any place. Just superb. 

These Tone poet reissues are superb. If you don't have these yet, be sure to get them before they're all gone. 

Yazaki-san's Ultimate Ruby Mica Capacitors

Yazaki-san sent me a nice surprise, four ruby mica capacitors to add to the circuit of his hot-rodded U4 Bluetooth streaming DAC, that I've been enjoying in my office system with the vintage "Stokowski" Altec loudspeakers & their Duelund Coherent Audio crossovers (more HERE), powered by the impressive Triode Lab 45 EVO SET integrated amplifier.  

Yazaki-san's Improved U4 Bluetooth streaming DAC.

Mine was one of the earlier hot-rodded U4s he built (above), and since then he's improved them further. To bring me up to date with other iPhone Adventure participants, Yazaki-san sent me these Ultimate Ruby Mica Capacitors to install.

Yazaki-san's instructions:

"Simply solder both channels in parallel to the Ultimate Ruby Mica already installed for coupling purposes. Solder the leads of the Ultimate Ruby Mica to the leads at both ends of the two Mallory capacitors used for power supply decoupling. Note that the Ultimate Ruby Mica is a layered type capacitor and has no actual polarity."

I warmed up my soldering iron and soldered the ruby mica capacitors in place. 

I then installed Yazaki-san's U4 back into my "Stokowski" Altec loudspeakers based system, powered by the Triode Lab 45 EVO SET integrated amplifier. 

I started streaming Jazz24 from my iPhone, and wow, the upgrade was superb. Installing Yazaki-san's additional ruby mica capacitors let lots more musical information come through - "information rich" we like to say - but with beautifully natural and liquid tone. 

The presentation of the aural images became much more vivid, the overall tone improved, more high-frequency definition was evident, in an utterly natural sounding way, and dynamics improved.

Dare I say it, but the stream from Jazz24 sounded remarkably good. If I told you that you were hearing the raw microphone feed from these recordings, I think you'd believe it. I'd believe it too if I didn't know these were low-rez streams of music from my iPhone. But they didn't sound low-rez. It's amazing how good the sound quality was. 

It's been a nice audio afternoon listening to music and playing HiFi games. It's always fun to do a little soldering and hear a big improvement from some easy hot-rod mods. 

Audio Q & A

Oh ... I almost forgot! I added a new "page" to Jeff's Place called "Audio Q & A". I spend a lot of time answering correspondence with my audio pals out there, and given a lot of the same questions come up over and over, I thought I'd write them up as a reference, in the hopes that it might provide some handy information for you. It's a work in progress, and I have quite a bit more to add. It's all from my "10,000 foot view" of things. 

Ok, that's all for now, and as always, thanks for stopping by!