The Audio Eagle - Berlin School of Sound Audio Fest

After having attended two great audio gatherings the 'Munich Triode Mafia' so generously had hosted in Oct. 2007 and Oct. 2008, this year's early highlight was the Berlin pendant, the so called 'School of Sound Festival'. This festival took place from May 21 to May 24, 2009 in the Felix-Mendelssohn-Bartholdy School in a former part of East Berlin. About 40 audio friends from various countries, mainly Europe but also some from the US attended this time. Our Berlin friends, amongst them Frank Wogatzky, who by the way did an excellent job as 'headmaster' of the festival, Thomas Schick, Frank Schröder and Michael Ulbrich to name a few of our hosts, came up with a great location and so the three and a half days were pure and plain fun. Besides, there was also beautiful Berlin waiting to be discovered, so all in all an unforgettable long weekend ;-).

Due to the beauty of Berlin itself, and also to a great record store Frank recommended to us, we three Austrians (Alexander, loudspeaker expert David and me) didn't attend all the music demos and presentations of the festival, but below you will find some pics and my personal highlights:

Attending a presentation of Frank Schröder, whose tonearms enjoy a world class reputation, was definitely one of my highlights. And we had the luck that he did two different and informative lectures. In the first one, we compared two broadband loudspeaker chassis of the same brand - one with alnico magnet and one with the field coil magnet technology. Frank chose excellent-sounding mono music from his vinyl collection for the comparison - a stunning late 50s Glazounov concert was a true gem - and more than forty pairs of ears tried to find their favorite of the two speaker technologies.

Surprisingly to my ears, the alnico magnets held the game even, although most of us had expected the field coils to excel. Great comparison, Frank! Besides, Frank turned out to be a really nice and highly charming person, a great honor and pleasure to meet.

His second lecture was also a treasure, because it dealt with the 'Myths and Truth of Turntables'. In this one, he gave great examples of how important it is to set up a tonearm/cartridge combination as correctly as possible to minimize tracking errors for optimum performance. It was excellent to learn about common user mistakes, like one alignment tool fits all purposes and what 'a little bit off the correct alignment i.e. the two given zero points' really meant. Back home, I checked and rechecked my own setup carefully - a process of some hours - and could at the end improve my cartridge alignment a bit further.

Thomas found them to be 'sleeper' tubes for use in audio amplifiers, due to their availability/low price and superb linearity. He uses them in triode mode and brought SE and PP versions as well as an octal tube based preamp with RC phono stage to the festival. He also had a newly designed switchable 45/2A3 SE stereo amp and a 801A SE stereo as well as SE 300 B stereo amp (both with separate power supplies) in Berlin. See some photos below of these impressive amps.

6CB5A SE Triode monos with great-looking oil caps, Lundahl interstage & output transformers

More of Thomas Mayer's amps, left side front row is the affordable RC coupled 6CB5A SE stereo amp

The comparison was great, although the speaker, Rolf's Coral Beta 10 in a bass reflex cabinet, didn't permit hearing the amps' strengths over their full frequency band. Under these limited conditions, my favorite amp was the most emotional one, the awesome sounding SE 45 triode output tube in Thomas' 45/2A3 SE stereo amp with Lundahl output transformers and interstage transformers between driver and output tube. Then the 801A SE stereo amp (this one with Tango output transformers and Lundahl interstage transformers and a lot of other Lundahl iron in power supply and DC filament) as well as the 6CB5A SE stereo amp in the Lundahl interstage/Tango output transformer top version) followed closely. Surprisingly, the more entry-level RC coupled SE stereo version of this 6CB5A output tube with choke and tube rectified power supply came quite close performance-wise and sounded impressive too.

The best is, however, that all of these amps can be bought as kit versions from Thomas for prices, which are in my opinion, extremely fair given the fact that you also get an amp designed by one of the leading tube aficionados out there in the DIY scene. (The above mentioned more entry-level RC coupled 6CB5A SE stereo amp kit for example will cost under EUR 1.500,--; definitely a bargain in my opinion.)

If this whetted your appetite and you want more info you can contact Thomas Mayer via email (thomas'at'vinylsavor.de).

Thomas agreed to visit us in Vienna later this year and will leave some of his amps for a longer evaluation period. (I will report in a separate article about this visit and my experience with some of his amps. So stay tuned!)

There were two other amps which also impressed me at the SOUND festival. One was Andreas Schuberts' Parallel SE VT-25 stereo amp with conventional RC coupling between driver (6SN7) and output tubes and highly acclaimed Tribute output transformers (this amp sang beautifully with Michael Ulbrichs 12" Schulz coax chassis in bass reflex cabinets during our last evening session).

The second one was Michael Ulbrich's 2A3 SE amp design (two mono block amps), which sounded excellent - colorful with this special midrange 2A3 magic - on his above-mentioned speakers and a Hartmut Quaschik's Garrard 301 used as source. (The preamp and phono stage used I can't recall, but it was definitely a tube-based one)

Here are some photos of the room and equipment as well as the relaxed atmosphere during this session...

There was only one thing I was not to happy about and this was the absence of a true full range speaker to evaluate the real quality of all these gorgeous tube amps and turntables. This is definitely something worth of improvement for next years festival, which we want to organize in Vienna.

Ok, that's enough of criticism, because there was another worthwhile part of the festival. This was the excursion of Frank Wonneberg into vinyl labels and pressings, which was definitely the highlight for my friend Alexander, who by the way is a connoisseur of jazz music, preferably on vinyl.

Frank's presentation was highly interesting due to the deep knowledge about labels and different pressings as well as funny insider stories about the history of the making of vinyl records. By the way, Frank Wonneberg is the author of two excellent books about our beloved vinyl 'Labelkunde' and 'Vinyllexikon'. Both are as far as I know only available in German.

Frank Wonneberg's lecture on vinyl and labels

Mr. Wonneberg's lecture was presented with a lot of passion for and extensive knowledge about our beloved vinyl

Last but not least, there were two excellent workshops, one with Andreas Schuberth about 'hum problems in electronic equipment' and how to find out the reasons for it and how to solve such problems. The other one was headed by Michael Ulbrich and dug into 'the measurement of inductivity' and DIY transformers.

Oh and before I forget, there was also a fun and interesting presentation on different record equalization curves of mono records held by our Munich friend Dietmar Hampel.

Here are some more photos of the festival:

Hartmut's excellent sounding Garrard 301

Mainly Thomas Schick equipment as far as I remember. Unfortunately, in this room there was no TT playing during most of the festival time, so no possibility to listen to his superb 12" tonearm...

Jonathan Weiss of OswaldsMillAudio, USA brought a pair of this vintage 15" Stephens Trusonic coax chassis with a built-in 8 cell multicell horn tweeter to Berlin, which Thomas Schick had won on Ebay some days before in an auction were the seller only delivered within the US. It's always good to have friends... (By the way, have a look at OswaldsMillAudio's underground web-section, great stuff!)

Thomas Schick informed me that in the 1940 Mr Stephens designed together with Mr. Lansing the legendary Altec 604. Later he founded his own company Stephens Trusonic and designed and manufactured speaker gems like the above...

Tube amps definitely rule...

Photo courtesy of Alexander Schunack

For more superb photos of the festival, feel free to visit Thomas Schick's great website.

I hope I didn't forget anyone... if so, I have to blame it on the beauty of Berlin, because we Austrians explored the town quite a lot.

Berlin is apparently a men's town. Here is the proof as the menu states clearly 'Choice of the day for MEN'...

No comment...

Photo courtesy of Alexander Schunack

Many thanks to our Berlin friends for their hospitality, the great food and superb espressos they provided - kudos to our barista Michael Vrzal - and to all attendees for the fun and relaxed atmosphere and nice and informative talks during this unforgettable weekend.

PS: As it looks, next year the Austrians want to host a similar event in or near Vienna and I can confirm that the motivation and commitment to do so is quite high. So, stay tuned what will happen in 2010!