ELAC Debut 2.0 OW4.2: 21st Century Hi Fi Budget Wonder?

When it comes to entry level hi fi loudspeakers in the 200 to 300 USD price range, is the ELAC 2.o OW4.2 represent the 21^st Century’s hi fi budget wonder?

By: Ringo Bones

Before ELAC’s designer Andrew Jones joined the German based hi fi manufacturing firm ELAC, he began work at KEF from 1983 until 1994. Then he later went on to Infinity and later with Sony and it was with the Japanese firm that he gained familiarity with designing hi fi loudspeakers using “exotic” materials like beryllium for tweeter diaphragms. But does his engineering experience translate to finally making an entry level budget loudspeaker in the 200 to 300 USD price range that would be universally loved by audiophiles the world over?

When I first heard of the ELAC Debut 2.0 OW4.2 last year, memories of budget loudspeakers of its price class made during the past 25 years came flooding in and begged for comparison. Fortunately, one of my audiobuddies kept his old Mission 731 LE loudspeakers bought back in 1995 – though he has moved on to much better speakers – i.e. his mega-buck albeit entry level Magneplanars. If 25 years of inflation is taken into account, the mission 731 LE would be much more expensive today than the ELAC Debut 2.0 OW4.2 and yet the 21^st Century ELAC’s raison d’être is to provide novice audiophiles a taste of the high end with a much lesser impact on the wallet.

The entry level ELAC’s Kevlar cones (Kevlar is the same aramid fiber used to make bullet proof vests) allows it to be played loud without breaking up and yet maintain reasonable efficiency, but unfortunately, there’s a somewhat broad suck-out in the midrange which if your idea of hi fi loudspeaker fidelity is how close it replicates hearing baritone Leo Nucci belting out the best parts of Verdi’s Rigoletto at La Scalla while sitting only 50 feet away without any electronic amplification, then you may find the entry level ELAC a little lacking in this department. If your loudspeakers you currently have can do that much better than the budget ELAC, then maybe you should spend your upgrade money in buying records and CDs instead. Nonetheless, the ELAC Debut 2.0 OW4.2 is very adept when it comes to mainstream pop and electronic dance music reproduction, albeit only up to a certain volume level and it serves as a gateway for millennials wanting a taste of high end at beer budget prices like the Mission 731 LE did for gen X’ers during the 1990s.

DNA: Music Recording And Playback Format Of The Future?

With traditional independent record stores now closing and malls no longer selling Red Book Compact Discs, will DNA prove to be the “future-proof” music format of the future?

By: Ringo Bones

With traditional independent music stores – ones that sell vinyl LPs and Redbook 16-bit 44.1 KHz sampled compact discs closing and big malls no longer selling Redbook CDs, it seems that it would only be a matter of time that every Generation-Xers music collection could be consigned to the dustbin of history much sooner than expected. Thankfully, to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the release of their most successful album, UK based electronic music group Massive Attack released their Mezzanine album on DNA back in October 2018.

Massive Attack worked with Andrew Melchior at the technology consultancy 3^rd Space Agency – the man who helped Bjӧrk convert her performance of “Stonemilker” into virtual reality for her 2015 MOMA show. According to Melchior: “The advantage with DNA is that our civilization could crash into dust and rebuild itself using entirely different technology, meaning they couldn’t access our computers or disks, since every human carries DNA, we can expect any future civilization to work out how to play back DNA-stored information. Which means the first thing a future civilization would learn about us might be Mezzanine.”

Using the DNA molecule to store vast amounts of digitally encoded information is more than just a science fiction pipe dream that was first popularly presented in the Superman movie franchise Man of Steel. The idea has first been published back in 1964 to 1965 when a Soviet era physicist named Mikhail Neiman published his work on the subject in the journal Radiotekhnika. But the first successful execution of encoding digital data onto a DNA molecule was back in 2012 when Harvard biologist George Church encoded one of his books onto a DNA molecule.

The electronic musicians Massive Attack worked with scientists at TurboBeads, a commercial spin-off from the Swiss science, engineering and mathematics university ETH Zurich, to adopt a technology pioneered by maverick US biotechnologists Craig Venter when he created a synthetic chromosome of a bacteria species in the laboratory with four “watermarks” written in the DNA. Robert Grass, professor at ETH Zurich’s Functional Materials Laboratory and his colleague Reinhard Heckel used similar chemical techniques to translate Mezzanine’s digital audio stream into genetic code. “We store digital information in a sequence of zeroes and ones, but biology stores genetic information using the four building blocks of DNA,” Grass explains. “We compressed Mezzanine’s digital audio then coded it as DNA molecules by converting the binary 0s and 1s into a quaternary code – with adenine representing 00, cytosine representing 01, guanine representing 10 and thymine representing 11. The resulting DNA resembles natural DNA in every way, although it contains no useful genetic information.”

According to Massive Attack band member Robert del Naja: “The storage potential of DNA is huge.” Indeed, one milligram of the DNA molecule could store the complete text of every book in the US Library of Congress and have room to spare. Del Naja also states: “If you think about DNA versus the ridiculous amounts of server farms that have got to be cooled 24/7 all around the world, this looks like a much better solution going forward. It allows us to archive music for hundreds of thousands of years.” Unfortunately as of late no word yet on the newfangled format’s sound quality.

MIT Terminator Network Loudspeaker Cables: A Misadvertized Audio Product That Actually Works?

Despite of the rather “misleading” efficiency graphs in their adverts during the 1990s, does the MIT loudspeaker cables actually a “misadvertized” products that actually does its intended purpose – i.e. improve sound quality?

By: Ringo Bones

A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to rummage upon a used 1990s era MIT Terminator Network loudspeaker cable in a garage sale. Priced at around 20 US dollars a set, it was almost a steal. Even more fortunate, the former owner who is a radiologist used the box of the cable when testing a newly purchased CAT scan for a hospital and noted the values of the capacitors and inductors in the box from the X-Ray results – i.e. the component labels of the capacitors are clearly visible and the inductor’s values are determined by its dimensions and number of turns. I wonder why these products managed to improve the dynamics of solid-state amps by making them perform dynamic swings that has only been previously the domain reserved to classic McIntosh vacuum tube power amplifiers. With the LC filter component values sets its working frequency at around 45 Megahertz, I started to wonder if the working principle of how the MIT loudspeakers improve sound quality is similar to James Henriot’s  Whest Dap 10 Processor – i.e. the elimination of the so-called “analog domain jitter”?   

  

When Stereophile reviewer Jonathan Scull quoted Matthew Bond of TARA’s white paper on the difference between Musical Interface Technology’s products versus TARA’s from an August 1998 review of TARA Labs The One interconnect, loudspeaker cable and digital datalink. Most readers are familiar with cables that use network boxes in-line with the signal – i.e. MIT (Musical Interface Technology) Fadel Audio Art and Transparent Cable come to mind. According to Matthew Bond’s own view regarding these   issues: 

“These boxes contain low-pass filter networks that filter radio frequencies (RF) from the audio cables. These should not be confused with TARA’s Isolated Shield Matrix. The differences in both function and effectiveness are extreme.”

“A filter network removes RF from the audio signal by filtering out or rolling off all high-frequency energy above a certain range. This generally affects the upper end of the musical spectrum. Furthermore, these filter networks are directly in the signal path. When the signal is interrupted and fed through these low-pass filter networks, the cable’s electrical characteristics are changed to make a modified cable interface with limited and unnatural filter characteristics. The high-frequency bandwidth is reduced. The audio band is affected also, as it is subjected by the filter network to rippling, and slower rise time (in the case of the fourth-order Bessel low-pass filter). Furthermore, in a filter network RF modulation has not been addressed properly because of the heterodyning effect still occurs in the audio band. Additionally, the amplitude of the extremely high-frequency harmonics of the music are filtered off, along with the RF distortion, by generic capacitors and inductors in the network. The effects of a filter network are therefore subtractive and ultimately color the original signal. The Isolated Shield Matrix does not filter RF it grounds it outside of the signal path. It transfers RF and EMI energy from the cable without filtering the signal, thereby allowing ore high-frequency information to be passed through unaltered.”

The problem is unofficially known as “analog domain jitter” and even though Whest Audio founder James Henriot doesn’t understand the disease but thinks he’s found a cure while promoting his Whest Dap. 10 Processor featured in the July 2005 issue of Stereophile. Could Musical Interface Technologies MIT network cables manage to improve the sound by the same principle of eliminating “analog domain jitter”?

The Whest dap.10 works entirely in the analog domain above 30,000 Hz, far above the range of human hearing. It is also well above the 20,000 Hz limit at which your DAC’s filters curtail CD sound. According to James Henriot, frequencies you can’t hear affect the ones that you can hear. Other audio designers since the 1990s have stated the same thing and so have musicians talking about their instruments. Musical Fidelity founder Antony Michaelson who is also an accomplished musician who plays the piano and clarinet in a classical setting also stated that things occurring above the audible range have an effect on the sounds that you can hear.

According to James Henriot:“All amplifier circuits produce a set of harmonics related to the incoming signal. The output of a CD player is no different. Often referred to as “ghost images” in a Fast-Fourier Transform display result, the time shift causes minor ripples above 30,000 Hz. We think that these ripples have a profound negative impact on CD reproduction, possibly by beat interaction, which dribbles its way down into the audible frequency range. All electronic circuits – especially sold state ones – may have a way of knocking harmonics out of sync, resulting in a less musical and more electronic sound. Does this mean that building a musical sounding solid-state amplifier is akin to building a concert grand piano with all those string compensators?