HiFi visiting in Sarawak

[jb]

haha, will post during this weekend....

[jb]

Side track from Hifi, went to visit Bau lake in kuching and climb some of limestone cave. The lake use to be a gold mine but as the production decrease and stop operation and later the water spring fill up and become a beautiful lake.

Story have that as the 600 hakka who mine the gold mine here, lead a rebellion by Liu shanbang against the white Rajah but later were defeat and retreat into the cave with many die in the cave and thus the name Bau town come from. Bau in Malay means " smelly" .

[jb]

The limestone cave...

[jb]

On the way back , we pass through a small town call Siniawan which is famous for their night market seafood BBQ. If you do visit kuching, this is the place that must visit at night for dinner.

http://www.igomakan.com/2015/05/night-market-siniawan-old-town-kuching.html

[jb]

and you must try the Midin with belacan and shrimp... is nice..

http://www.hungrygowhere.my/dining-guide/best-of-malaysia/what-to-eat-in-kuching-in-24-hours-*aid-f66b3101/






and if you see this in the wet market, buy it as this black rice is growth in the highland of Bario and is very fragrant! as there is no road to the highland, only way up is using helicopter.



Some local produce...

[jb]

Back to HIFI and this round we visited Mr. Choo house at Tabuan Jaya. He is using Rogers LS3/5A monitor speaker with Roger Sub woofer, also he has a REL active sub woofer just behind the listener sofa. This is a very clever way of implement sub woofer as low bass has long wavelength and is not directional, so putting it at behind your back will give u the low bass impact as you can feel the chair vibration when the low bass come.

He is using CEC as transport to DCS DAC, and preamp and poweramp using FM acoustic, his whole hifi room is acoustic treated at front, side and ceiling. we played some orchestra music and even the small monitor speaker can reproduce big sound stage with low bass impact.
As he listen mostly to classical and big orchestra music so the acoustic implementation is fine for the genre of music he listen to... as I find for vocal music , the mid range is muffler a bit as has too much mid and high frequency absorber that does not give as much ambient for jazz type of music. May be adding some wood diffuser at front and side will make it suitable for all genre of music. Neverless this is still a very well setup system with a lot of thought going into the implementation.

[jb]

CEC transport, DCS DAC, FM acoustic pre

[jb]

FM acoustic mono block poweramp, power conditioner

[jb]

Roger LS3/5A and sub woofer.  Notice the speaker cable is "airlift" by using fishing line to ceiling to prevent vibration to it.

[jb]

next up is George hifi room. He is using Marantz SA11S3 with Antique sound lab tube amp driving Audio physic speaker. The sound is very dynamic with very strong bass which is suited for rock music. Generally the system sound is not bad but need to tame the bass a bit as on some track the bass is quite overwhelming, the mid range and high freq is resonable.

[jb]

Audio Physic speaker and Marantz Sa11S3 and TT

[jb]

Next I visited Alvin Hifi cum movie room. He use full Naim system driving ProAc speaker and turntable is VPI. Alvin like to stream music through his sytem and he also pay a lot of attention to reduce digital noise vie fiber optic and linear power supply.

His system sound with proac speaker should tends to sound sweet as is strong character of this brand, but in his setup... the vocal mid range is not sweet sounding and seem like have more baritone voice...we try a few cd but all have similar sound characteristic.

So we decide to use REW and do a frequency sweep and look at the acoustic of the hifi room, well it turns out that his room has a lot of bass peak from 80 to 150 Hz that distorted the vocal voice, also it has a 39Hz bass peak due to length of the hifi room. As his room is treated with carpet and viscoustic wood absorber but none of them will really absorb the low bass, have advice him to look for some bass trap to put at corner at back of hifi room.

[jb]

Vpi TT and Proac speaker... and his NAS streaming system... look at the crystal and clock he put near his equipment!

[jb]

Viscoustic absorber on side wall first reflection point.... and Furutech destat III that use to remove ESD from cd... and fiber optic media converter to reduce digital noise..

[jb]

Alvin hifi room acoustic... notice the 80 to 150hz bass freqency response has about 15dB boost, also on the water fall diagram, it never die down even after 600ms, this need to be absorb to get the best sound from the system.

The 39hz althrough also has 20dB boost but it die down after 600ms so may not be as bad compare to 80-150 Hz range. Once this bass boost is reduce, I believe the sound will perform wonderful as it has quite a flat frequency response cover the full frequency range.