Rick continues on to talk about our fondness for fat LiniPur conductors:::
-jaems
Rick continues on to talk about our fondness for fat LiniPur conductors:::
-jaems
Posted at 09:28 AM in Audio Cables, jaems suther, Rick Schultz | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 10:57 AM in Audio, jaems suther, Rick Schultz | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 01:56 PM in Aspiring Audiophile (James Haitel), Jeff Sutherland, Rick Schultz | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
We had a great show, I mean with the music and all of the wonderful audiophiles listening to that many systems, and that much music, who wouldn’t have fun? If you’ve not been to an audio show, you’ve got to treat yourself. It’s a blast.
What did we come home with? Well, a number of things. One, Montreal is a fascinatingly beautiful city. Warm friendly people, it is one of the most beautiful cities in Canada, a far cry from our little town of Barrhead, Alberta; you can bet we’ll be back.
During the show we did a presentation talking about how our cables are built and helping people to understand that energy efficiency has EVERYTHING to do with building a good audio system. With this many years of being a manufacture, and working on the same thing, just trying to make it better, I forget that that’s what I have not communicated well. For those of you who are interested in knowing what makes an audio system perform better, the answer is not only good for you, but good for the environment. It’s energy efficiency.
Since Montreal and the feed back we received from sharing how this works with consumers their, we realized it was vital information for consumers - that as an industry we have forgot to mention the simply truth of how audio and energy efficiency are directly related. So my marketing team has their work cut out for them . . .
On another note, if you haven’t read Stereophile, in the May issue you will see that in Sam’s Space he does a review on the amplifier. Not to quote him, because that would be wrong, but he does say something about our little KSt-150 from Luminance Audio, (which by the way is about 90% efficient), would be a marvel and a breakthrough, if it were $18,000. He eludes to the fact that there is some head-scratching about how, or why, it could only be a $3000 amplifier. Personally I can relate, that’s how I got involved with Steve Keiser! You hear something like this once and it changes the way you understand audio reproduction. Glad to see that Sam was willing to put such a strong statement and strong review to paper, in such a volatile audio community. Of course, making a statement like that, and you should read it for yourself, could possibly create some waves with a number of other people building similar types of products. We were surprised and very thankful to see the support in a magazine we are not a regular advertiser in . . . Hey, maybe we should be!
-Rick
Posted at 01:45 PM in Audio, Audio Shows, Rick Schultz | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
President of Virtual Dynamics and Luminance Audio, Rick Schultz speaks on “How to Purchase Audio Gear Using the Newest Discoveries and Knowledge.”
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April 9, 2007 - In an effort to make the show-going experience as captivating as possible, Virtual Dynamics will be making daily presentations for Festival Son et Image 2007 attendees. Hosted in Salon Frechette the talks will be given at 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Refreshments will be served, with the presentation being open to all public attendees, members of the trade, and members of the press.
In recognition that FSI attendees are investing their time to learn and explore, Virtual Dynamics offers this free presentation as part of their mission to help audiophiles build exhilarating and truthful home audio systems. As the President of Virtual Dynamics and Luminance Audio, Rick Schultz personally started on his quest to enjoy music at its fullest over twenty years ago, and has made it his vocation to help others avoid the common pitfalls he experienced.
Being exposed to and participating in many new discoveries, Mr. Schultz will share from his experiences as an inventor, collaborator, salesperson, and consumer in the high-end audio industry. Of this journey Rick Schultz expresses, “I’ve spent countless hours and exorbitant amounts of money in an attempt to re-create in my living room, what the artist originally intended. Along the way I’ve discovered what creates system synergy, and the good news is that it isn’t money. The end result is that I have been experiencing music in a way I never imagined possible; my desire is to share this experience as far and wide as possible. Advancements in technology have brought this industry a long way, and I’m a firm believer that the best is yet to come!”
Virtual Dynamics revamped the high-end audio industry in 2001 with the introduction of brand new cable technologies. Virtual Dynamics continues to introduce envelope-pushing cable designs; transforming audio systems with their unconventional “Speed of Light” and “Dynamic Filtering” technologies.
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Contact:
Jeff Sutherland
Virtual Dynamics
(877) 347-4489
jeff@virtualdynamics.ca
www.virtualdynamics.ca
Posted at 01:39 PM in Audio, Audio Shows, Rick Schultz, Virtual Dynamics News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
First, I want to apologize for being absolutely so unavailable. Many of you I consider dear friends, and I know it may seem like I have been neglecting or ignoring you. I can say though, I have been busy with some projects that have been really exciting and I am back in to my creative groove. After the launch of our entire new cable series I felt a little overwhelmed. As a company we've worked hard on trying to educate and market the new wares, so on that subject, I want to inform you that the new series of products are not like the old. I encourage you, if you get an opportunity, try some of your old favorites again; like Master 3.0, or Revelation 2.0, you'll be delighted and I think agree, that the improvements are a little more than substantial. But that's not what I've been working on.
Lately I have been putting my efforts towards Luminance Audio and the KST-150. For those of you who don't know the history, Luminance is built upon a merging of 3 individuals. Mike Tseng is really the head of it all. Mike is one of my first Virtual Dynamics customers, and one of the most wonderful, loving people I have ever met. His generosity and his heart towards other people constantly remind me of who I want to be, and what I want to accomplish. I am proud to work under Mike. Mike had asked if I knew of an investment that might make sense in high-end audio. He was interested in getting into the business and trusted that I might know something that was worth investing in. At the time, I thought I wanted the help here at Virtual Dynamics but Mike insisted I had built it on my own, and needed to keep it to myself. He simply didn't want to have a piece of something I had deserved and had worked for. Shows the character of Mike.
However, he was interested in investing in something else, and I just happened to know of something else. A designer of amplifiers who I had come into contact with through a mutual friend, who was interested in getting back into the audio game. This gentleman, Steve Keiser, had been one of the legends of audio designing one of the most famous amplifiers to ever hit the planet, the B&K ST-140.
As time rolled on the three of us entered into an equal partnership. Steve designing a new circuit that was sure to be a modern day replica of the success story he had experienced with the 140. Out of this, the KST-150, which stands for Keiser, Schultz, and Tseng - 150 watts, was born.
So, what would cause us to want to get into a totally saturated audio amplifier market? Well, quite honestly, the same thing that caused me to launch Virtual Dynamics: the audio industry currently offers nothing like this amplifier, period. That's an unusual statement, but Steve is an unusual guy. The KST-150 is a simple, svelte pure black box. I hope that one day it will pick up that nickname; the black box. That's sort of what it is. It is an amplifier that is way ahead of its time, and completely out of its league. In the last year of having the KST-150, probably one of the simple, greatest challenges I have had, in marketing the KST-150, is that it is about $10,000 under priced for its sonic performance. People just do not expect an amplifier at $3000 to do what the KST-150 does sonically.
Why is the KST-150 so special? Well like anything else it has taken me a lot of work, and a lot of time, trying to understand the world of amplification, and I won't claim I know much. There is just too much to know. When times were simpler, I just looked at the "watts" and my buying decision could be easily made. Now I am being educated about things like slew rates, damping factors, square wave rise times, phase margins, bandwidths, dynamic headroom, and a host of other terminology used each integral in describing the actual working of an amplifier circuit. Down this road of discovery I have learned two things. Choosing an amplifier is far from easy. Actually understanding them is not simple, and they indeed are a relative to the computer.
I'm not sure what you're supposed to do on a blog, but I'm just here to communicate like I have from the beginning. I would like to save people from having to go through the incredibly difficult learning curve that I have had to go through in order to discover great audio for themselves. So am I trying to sell you a KST-150? Of course, that's the only kind thing to do! If you had a $3000 amplifier that was simply one of the best ever made, and you knew it, wouldn't you tell me?
Now, the last part of our investment in research and design has been committed to furthering the already stunning KST-150. In Montreal we will be showing a simple $3000 amplifier that has been modified into a 3 chassis beast. It has been taken from 54000 uF, to 1.2 Farad or as Jeff explained, 1.2 million microfarads. I believe this is about the largest amount of capacitance of any amplifier ever manufactured. Along with our own Speed of Light technology borrowed from the soon to be revealed Judge Series . . . our new, or soon to be, flagship audio cable for idiots like me - who want to break off connectors more than anything else in the whole wide world.
The KST-150 has had the mechanical damping face-lift that is seen in our cable technology. Using solid brass clamping foundations to solid brass feet draining every resonance we could get our hands on. This is something I've wanted to do for years, to any amplifier. Early on some of you may know through testimony I have shared before, that these are some of the first things that I started working on, and had used a Bryston 3B as one of my first projects to understand mechanical vibration in an amplifier. If you remember my testimony, I said it outplayed and out-powered the Bryston 7B's. Well this takes that mod and makes it look simple. I spent 2 days at our local machine shop hand-in-hand (maybe not exactly!) with a machinist whom I could have built me any part I wanted to stick inside the KST-150. So I did. I stuck all sorts of wonderful little gizmo's inside that amplifier. It included some audio points, but where they were not practical (and only 2 were), we devised our own method of grabbing vibration.
You will see here the circuit boards are mounted to brass columns, and the t-bar that goes through the middle pressurizes the circuit boards as stress, mechanical stress, is one of the ways to induce the movement of mechanical vibration. There's a study from Harvard that I will make available to anyone interested in how this works.
But anyway, back to the amps, we pressurized the circuit boards through this new mechanism that is directly coupled to the brass footer on the bottom of the amp. It takes the energy, vibrational energy, out of the circuit board and drains it instantly through this massive sync. The transformer is mounted directly via AVM to a second footer on the front right. Now to add twelve 1000 uF capacitors took us two chassis, in addition to the KST-150.
These mammoth capacitors are 4" across and 8" long, and 4lbs in weight each. The caps are made by Nichicon, they are new/old stock caps that we were lucky enough to find. If you look closely, or maybe not that close, each capacitor has the logo of Wadia on the surface. Yes, this is the capacitor out of the famed power dac. However, they only used four.
Two 20 amp IEC umbilical cords feed the KST-150 from each one of these chassis. Each chassis contains Judge Series SOL for both (+) and (-) rail and the end result is something that I truly would love to share with you. We have crept our way up to an amplifier that will now sell for about $15,000 but . . . please, if you can, come to Montreal and take a listen. Partnered with the 9 Series Wadia computer, and our Genesis Series cabling, and a treat I was not supposed to publicly disclose yet, the very first Judge Series digital XLR.
Oh, cat's out of the bag! I won't say much, cause they're not much to talk about, just a 12 lb baby was born. It consists of 8 Judge Series Level 4 SOL modules, 4 gauge Linipur conductor, AVM from tip to tip, and a project that took as long and about as much money as the KST-150 mod. It is the proud creation from my head, and Daniel Jacobson's hands.
Dan is our top and most experienced builder. He is the only one who will be building a Judge Series cable for you, should you be insane enough to consider one. Come on . . . don't you want to come to Montreal??
In Denver, I sat with a room full of customers listening to one of my favorite tracks trying to hide the tears flowing down my face. Not only was the music connecting, but the sound was so obviously blessed - and I was so thankful. I feel the same way now, from the brief moment we had turning it one before we shipped it out, I personally cannot wait to show you what we have been blessed with to share with you.
Posted at 02:48 PM in Audio, Audio Cables, Audio Shows, Rick Schultz, Science, Virtual Dynamics News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I'm not sure if I'm authorized to be showing these yet . . . but it's not the first time I've used the "Shoot first, apologize later" philosophy.
ANYWAY, our shipment left today for the Montreal show, and with it went some "interesting" products.
Tweak isn't the right word, modded doesn't seem to quite fit either. Maybe we'll coin a new term here: "Rick Schultz'd". Yeah, that's better . . . Rick happened to it. You'll see in the photo that the Luminance Audio KST-150 is now THREE chasis, instead of it's usual, more than enough, one. It's also evolved some beefy brass legs! What's in the extra boxes? Let's start with about 1.2 million microfarads of capacitance (more simply described as 1.2 Farads). Throw-in some Level 4, Judge* Speed of Light Technology, Resonance Transfer Technology (audiopoints galore), oil & paper caps and you'll start to understand why there's now three boxes. Note: this is a brand-new prototype (a product of Rick's mad experimenting), and may or may NOT be offered by Luminance Audio.
Rick's been a busy boy.
Judge* Series
Also not yet available to the public, take a look at this 14lb digital interconnect about to make it's first public appearance in Montreal next weekend. It's job is to provide companionship to the Wadia 9 Series. Judging by what we heard in our pre-show set-up this morning - let's say they hit it off REALLY WELL!
I know this is just a teaser, but I may have already said too much, too soon. I'm horrible with secrets. Oh well. If you see a new ad in the paper showing that Virtual Dynamics is looking for a new marketing guy - you'll know what happened.
Keep watching for tons of updates on the Montreal Show, the new Luminance products, Judge rumors, photo's, and maybe even some video footage for you broadband users.
-Jeff
Posted at 04:24 PM in Audio Cables, Audio Shows, Jeff Sutherland, Rick Schultz, Science | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
