| | | | | | Interior View
Auditorium
23 was not founded, in the common sense of the word. Rather, it
playfully came into being through our enjoyment of music in the early
80s. Soon this love of music led us to France, where we encountered
people who'd gained a certain notoriety by following a path entirely
different from the rest of the world: L'Audiophile. At a time when the
power output of a transistor amplifier was as prestigious and coveted
as horsepower is with sports cars, L'Audiophile boldly moved against
the mainstream. They unearthed historical tube amplifiers with a mere
3-5 Watts output, connected them to sensitive horn speakers and had the
audacity to present this to an amazed public. The results struck us:
Here, we experienced a quality of music reproduction that modern
components had so far denied us. The annual presentations which
L'Audiophile held in small movie theatres are now legendary, their cult
status secured
We understood that this could be our only way.
What we had experienced at L'Audiophile's shed a critical light on
so-called technical progress and made us look back. On our journey into
the past we learned a lot: It became evident just how much had been
sacrified on the altar of cost-efficient production, of analytical
measuring and of blind trust in the alleged advantages of modern
materials.
But to say so was considered heresy. Consequently our
road in Germany was hard, and we polarized the field from the
beginning. The first 300 B amplifiers, efficient loudspeakers of
Triangle, Roiene, Altec, Vitavox, Klangfilm and WE, a mass record player with
magnetic bearing of Laboratoire Verdier, Ken Shindo's tube amplifiers
in Europe... all of these things came too soon for the German market
when we set out in the early 1980s.
Times
have changed since then. The market share of Triode amps keeps growing,
and tubes are back in production. Efficient speakers are being
developed left and right, horn speakers are in vogue again. Mass record
players with or without magnetic bearing are in, lightweight record
players, on the other hand, are almost extinct. By looking forwards
with eyes attuned to the past, many people have begun to collect
historical hifi gear, and are amazed by the new worlds of sound they
encounter. People start to re-evaluate things almost forgotten.
Reissues by Macintosh, Marantz and Quad are being launched and lauded
as if they'd never disappeared from the market.
However, a few
companies like L'Audiophile with its authors Jean Hiraga and Philippe
Viboud, and Uesugi, Eltus, Kondo, and Shindo in Japan didn't have to
make this laborious, retroactive comeback: They hadn't veered off
course in the first place, always using small output (Triode Watts) and
large speakers like Onken, Altec, JBL, Siemens, and WE to enjoy music
to the fullest.
Sadly, the chances to obtain good pairs of
authentic old speaker units diminished with time, while the production
quality of later models didn't maintain previous standards for cost
reasons or the altered requirements of modern amps. Hence, speakers
became the problem. Auditorium 23 concepts like Latour, Marsannay (best
sound of the High End 1995 in Stereophile) and Morgane each were unique
designs created from our historical stock of Altec, Siemens, and
Western Electric and thus limited. Thanks to Bernard Salabert and his
company PHY-HP who developed a 21 cm full range and a 30 cm wide range,
we can now construct speakers on a par with historical models, even
surpass them at times. The H21LB15 proved the absolute equivalent of
the legendary WE 755 wide range unit. "Not a single present-day speaker
can compare to H21LB15 - the only competition comes from the best units
of the 40s and 50s," wrote Jean Marie Piel in one of his editorials in
DIAPASON.
With another master in his field, Ken Shindo, we made
further forays into old knowledge, sharing his grasp of the use of
energy. The magic didn't reside in comprehensive, allround dampening;
it didn't lie in "deaf" wood kept from vibrating; neither was it found
in sandfilled soundwalls nor in lead-mantled cabinets. We learned to
appreciate a speaker cabinet as a supporting body of tone, similar to
the corpus of a musical instrument.
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