Lone Star Audio Fest 2010 Show Report
Text By John Semrad And Photo's Copyright Clay Grier

 

  A new and welcome addition to this year's show were the winners of the West Texas Science Center Junior Audiophile Project out of Abilene, Texas. Scott Clark organizes this end of year competition for his high school physics students. They utilize donated MCM 5" aluminum drivers and AV123 tweeters that are given to the students who are then assigned to design appropriate boxes and crossovers. The pair playing in this room used four drivers and one tweeter.

Electronics provided were a Cambridge Audio CD player into Gary Dodd's Buffalo battery-powered DAC then a Dodd Audio battery-powered tube pre-amp driving a Moscode 300 OTL tube amplifier. Thanks to all who contributed to a very worthy cause.

Wayne Parham puts a lot of energy into helping organize this show and making it run smoothly. He also designs, builds and markets some very fine loudspeakers. At the show were his new Pi three P speakers which are a bass reflex design built around the excellent Acoustic Elegance TD12S 12" woofer with a horn-loaded B&C DE250 compression driver. The Pi three P subwoofer handled the low end.

The digital source is the Audio Note AN CD 2.1x CD player which uses a 6111WA triode buffer. The line stage that was used is the Cary-design Audio Electronics AE3 MkII driving the triode-connected single-ended KT-88 Audio Note Kit2 amplifier. A class-A FET amp powered the sub-woofer.

Jim Harrell of Jumping Cactus Loudspeakers is another regular exhibitor at LSAF and has been steadily improving his product since he began coming here. They have now evolved into a system where the separately housed high and mid frequency enclosures can be arranged independently upon the bass enclosure. The boxes themselves are fabricated from aluminum plate with an exotic wood front baffle. Bubinga wood is shown here. All of the drivers are manufactured by Eminence: A Beta 10A 10" bass driver, an Alpha 6A 6" midrange, and an APT80 phenolic dome tweeter. The crossover is first order and the whole system sits on Jim's bubinga and stainless steel stand.

A Rega Planar 3 turntable and Rega RB300 tonearm mounted with a Shure V15XMR cartridge made up the analog front end with an Underwood Hi-Fi modded Denon 1290 CD player handling the digital side. The pre-amp is a vintage Dynaco PAS 3A with a Curcio power supply and the power amplifier is a Sound Creative single-ended with triode-wired KT-88s at the output. The line voltage to the electronics is filtered by a PS Audio line conditioner.

Udailey is Uriah Dailey and he showed a pair of bass-reflex speakers that utilize Audio Nirvana 12" full range drivers with a Fostex TA90A bullet tweeter on top. The crossover to the tweeter is a simple .68µF capacitor.

A Cambridge Audio 640C CD player started things off and Uriah's Lighter Note pre-amplifier provided volume control. The Lighter Note is a unique design that uses light dependent resistors instead of normally-used resistor network attenuators. Two different power amps were on display, both provided by Bruce Heron of Oddwatt Audio. The main amps were the Oddblock Series One KT-77 push-pull monoblocks with separate power supplies while the smaller stereo unit was the Oddwatt iPod push-pull EL-84 integrated amp with a dock for playing music directly from an iPod.

Audio Note has shown excellent sounding systems at LSAF from the beginning and this year was no exception. This year they showed a system upgraded from years past. It starts off with their beautiful CD4.1X CD player that pairs a CDT Two/II transport with a DAC2.1x DAC upgraded with Audio Note premium components. The only other component in this elegantly simple system is the Jinro 211 SE integrated amplifier which uses either a 12AU7 or 5687 twin triode to drive the 211 transmitter triode output tube.

The speakers are the E/Lexus Signature 2-way ported bass reflex type utilizing a hemp cone 8" bass driver with a silver wire voice coil and a 1" dome tweeter. The enclosure is constructed of Russian birch plywood covered with curly maple veneer. The large outboard crossover features a plethora of exotic looking Audio Note copper foil capacitors.

John Busch is a speaker designer who is able to get more good sound from inexpensive drivers than just about anybody. Every year he has made the long trek from California to show off his latest open baffle speakers. This year's model uses a pair of massive Goldwood 18" drivers on each baffle. The midrange driver is the SEAS 1411 with a 10" paper cone and the tweeter is one on Vifa's venerable fabric domes. The secret to John's success is his crossover which he constantly tweaks throughout the duration of the show until on Sunday the system sounds its best.

An Ah! Tjoeb 4000 CD player was the digital source and amplification was provided by a Musical Fidelity A308 integrated amp in this simple but effective system.

Smith and Larson Audio market loudspeaker design and testing systems for the designer that comes in neat packages at a very reasonable price. The Woofer Tester Pro, the Speaker Tester, and the Woofer Tester 2 are packed with features that make them popular with a number of designers, amateur and professional alike.

That ends the Lone Star Audio Fest for 2010 and I'm sure that next year will be better than ever. Special thanks are in order to Shane Moore for his tireless efforts in keeping this audio show alive and also to the others who have helped him out. 

 

Click here for the first page of our Lone Start Audio Fest Report