Allison Acoustics

I did make it over to the Alexis Park where the smaller audio companies hang out, and visited the Allison Acoustics booth in hopes of seeing Roy Allison. He didn't make it to the show, which was our loss, but there was a video of a talk he gave to the younger people working at the factory, giving them some context by going over the history of his seminal speaker design work.

The picture shows the reincarnations of the old Allison Four and Allison One. I listened briefly to the smaller one, but the larger model is much closer to the sound of Roy's old design, and the company representative was paying attention to all of us geezers who remembered the originals and who didn't hesitate (but when do we ever?) to mouth off about what was needed to bring the current version up to past standard.

I heard the familiar smoothness in the low bass because of the proper location of the woofers, one of the strongest points of the old design. But the crossover from woofer to midrange, and probably the midrange itself, needed more fine tuning. The system sounded slightly forward in the lower presence range and there was more coloration in the midrange than a speaker of this level of ambition should have.

NOTE: One of the pieces of equipment in the picture is a Sony S9000 ES SACD player. I tried two of my CD-Rs on this machine, and it played one of them very unreliably and the other not at all. If you're shopping for an SACD player, and if you ever plan to play CDs made by you or your friends, take one with you and make sure it will work.

Money Can't Buy Me Love

Speaking of levels of ambition, Owades and Foster went to hear a purported million-dollar system based on Rowland electronics and Wisdom Audio speakers. Owades found this installation unforgivably colored in the vocal range, and shares my opinion that if the midrange is wrong, the system is wrong. Foster, who melts at the mere sight of ribbon drivers these days (and each side had three vertical pairs, stacked to a height of twelve feet - this is a system for auditorium-sized rooms) heard the colorations too but forgave them because he liked the system's overall presentation and imaging. []