Oskar Kitharas
Posted by: Don Braid on 17 October 2001
After making myself scarce on the forum for more than a year, I’m dipping a toe back in with something interesting to report.
Speakers – sensational, wonderful speakers for less than $6k Canadian – speakers to match anything I’ve heard for $20k, including NBLs and JM Labs Mezzo Utopias.
I’m talking about the Oskar Kitharas, from Switzerland, which use a Heil tweeter that goes down to 700 hz. The rest is covered by a mid-bass unit that fires staight up in the air, but, musically, goes down to 28 hz.
Altogether, they’re the oddest things you’ve ever seen, although not unpleasant to look at, and beautifully finished.
They’re efficient at 94 db – you can drive these things with a light bulb – and they’ll play insanely loud with no sign of stress. At the dealers (the Audio Room in Calgary) they were being driven comfortably by a pair of 8 watt SET monoblocks.
After I bought them, they went to a friend’s house for a few days. He has a CD 3.5 w/flatcap and a Nait 2. The system was suddenly glorious – in fact, better than my entire system. This is not an exaggeration. He could have blown down the walls with his 17 watts.
My system is CDS2/52/250 on Mana 5-tier that sits on Soundstage with Reference top (no Mana talk, please – it’s so boring.)
My system sounded pretty damned good with my Acarian Alon IIs, fine American speakers that I’ve had since 1993. They brought me through every level of Naim from an original Nait.
But with the CDS2/52/250, it was obvious that more was available. That’s why I went hunting for speakers in the first place.
After my friend and I salivated over the Kitharas at his house, I took them home and, hooked them up (biwired with twin runs of NAC#5) and was simply stunned. They moved into an entirely new level that consigned my earlier speakers to the dustbin of memory.
The freedom, openess, power, detail and musicality of this tweeter/midrange thingy have to be heard to be believed. The speakers are very casual about positioning, yet place instruments and voices precisely in space. There is tremendous detail but no harshness, and an awesome sense of fullness to the musical picture.
The loudness isn’t important to me, but the efficiency of the Kitharas give them a great sense of ease, especially with a 250.
They’ve made me re-think my whole attitude toward source-first. That tends to happen when you stick a new pair of speakers on an entry level system and it suddenly system crushes your own.
Something about the Heil tweeter appears to abolish the resonance artifacts so difficult to tame in conventional drivers. We spend fortunes on electronics to defeat that problem; these speakers do it right off the top.
Apparently, any resonance from the Heil tweeter is outside the audible range, so no damping is needed. They drivers are right out there in the open, pushing enormous amounts of air (5.3:1 ratio) just like a real instrument or voice.
Damn, they’re good – and a glorious match for Naim gear.
Posted on: 18 October 2001 by Don Braid
I can't see where you put the cup dispenser though.
Funny, my wife asked that too, after I scraped her off the ceiling.
Posted on: 18 October 2001 by David Antonelli
Don,
I have no doubts that your new speakers are grooving to new levels of excellence in your system. (I'll be in calgary 27th and 28th of this month, care to give me a brief demo before I rocket off to lake Louise?). I went through the whole naim heirarchy with Numen speakers (Candaian) and then Albions before moving to Wilson Benesch ACT 2s and the leap to the ACT 2s was by far the biggest, almost matching the difference between my early CD3.5/102/180 to the CDS2/52/250. Why is this so? We have all seen that source componets are so crucial to performance, yet a pair of superbly engineered speakers can sound great with very modest upstream components.
I think there are speakers which require fabulous electronics to sound good (the albions) and they can seduce us into thinking that electronics or set up issues are the only thing that is important because every time we make a tweak or an upgrade another layer of harshness dissapears. Yet in all my electronics upgrades I always found myself about six week later back in the same old rut. Certain disks sounded harsh/ Others, better engineered, sounded dull. I upgraded to ACT 2s a good 7 months ago and my stereo is so awesome I leave it on no matter what I am doing, even when I am reading or watching TV. As Don seems to have found with his new swiss gems, source first is thus not the be all and end all. There are great speakers out there (bust out of your shells and hunt them down) that sound fabulous with only modest electronics.
Lets face it: source first, yes. But at what point do the distortions introduced by the speaker start to dominate the picture? Maybe this happens much lower down the ladder than we think. It seems to me that a well engineered speaker with fabulous responsive drivers and a sonically innert cabinet (not just dampened, as this leads to a certain flatness in the music) should work very well with only modest components. As DOn found out with his digital TV demo of the Oskars, even the mighty CDS2 can be embarassed by a pair of top notch speakers driven by mediochre electronics.
Music is a sound wave propogating through a room and it seems that mechanical distortions caused by poor speakers might really mute our enjoyment of the music alot more than we think. With many speakers source first seems logical as most speakers are poorly enginneered and going from Albions to Proacs to whatevr else doesn't make such a big difference a sthe electronics. But there are a few wandering stars out there that you have to chase down and hook up to your system. And only then will you truly "have the music"
Cheers,
daveÔ
Posted on: 18 October 2001 by Don Braid
Your thoughts reflect mine, Dave. My world turned upside down when I heard my new speakers sound so insanely good on a modest system. I was forced to rethink everything. Obviously, the electronics and source are still important - the Kitharas sound very much better still on my setup. But if I had it to do all over again, I'd buy these speakers first and then work up the electonics chain. That would have avoided so much teeth-grinding at the harshness.
Yeah, come for a listen when you're here. I'll e-mail you my # in case you don't have it.
Here's the Oskar website for anyone interested. It's fascinating:
http://www.precide.ch/eheil.htmPosted on: 18 October 2001 by John Schmidt
Just out of curiosity, Don, were you moved to try the Kithara after reading the review in UHF magazine a few issues back? Their reviews of both the Kithara and the smaller Aulos were rave, and I believe that one of the review panel took the Kithara home for his own system.
Cheers,
John Schmidt
"90% of everything is crud" - Theodore Sturgeon
Posted on: 18 October 2001 by Don Braid
Hi John. Yes, it was the UHF articles that first piqued my interest (for you outlanders, it's a Canadian audio mag.) I was captivated by the smaller Aulos model straighaway, but knew that over time I wouldn't be satisfied with the lighter bass. The Kitharas sounded very good but not exactly captivating when they first arrived at the store. They take a long, long time to break in - hundreds of hours, apparently. Their look also takes some getting used to. When I started on a serious speaker hunt many months later, and went back to the Audio Room, I knew from the first bars that the Kitharas were the ones I'd been hunting for. I bought the demos, so I didn't have to wait for those hundreds of hours.
Don
BTW, John, that's a fascinating system of yours. I used to have the Boston A200s and loved them.
[This message was edited by Don Braid on THURSDAY 18 October 2001 at 20:10.]
Posted on: 19 October 2001 by John Schmidt
quote:
...that's a fascinating system of yours....
That's very generous of you, Don, considering that your CD source alone is worth about 3x my entire system. I'm waiting (patiently, patiently) for the flood of discretionary income that will come my way on the magical day when I've discharged my obligations as a parent, before getting serious about putting together a dream system. I hope Naim is still around then! In the meantime, it's a few hundreds dollars at a time, which doesn't buy much Naim gear, even used. One other cost-effective upgrade I did do was to put 72 output boards into my 32.5. I think I posted about it back around March or April.
I bought the A200s back when I was still under the "speakers-are-all" influence, and was driving them with a Technics receiver rated at 85W/channel. I discovered Naim almost by accident, and brought home a Nait in 1985 for a demo. The Technics receiver was, of course, totally humiliated. I don't think that I've ever heard a more convincing demonstration of the uselessness of watts/channel as a criterion of quality. By a series of happy accidents, we wound up buying the shop co-owner's SNAPS/32/250 instead of the Nait.
Coming back to the Kithara, I notice that while it is super efficient at 94 dB sensitivity, the smaller Aulos is only so-so in this regard, about 89 dB. Any idea why? Perhaps because the Aulos tweeter crosses at 1500 Hz while the Kithara goes all the way down to 700 Hz?
Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience; I've got it stored away for future reference. Enjoy the music.
Cheers,
John Schmidt
"90% of everything is crud" - Theodore Sturgeon
Posted on: 19 October 2001 by David Antonelli
Don,
It's good to see some other more esoteric speakers getting used in naim systems. While SBLs and Kans and a lot of the more common speakers may have their strong points, I like to see a little variety out there. Many people seem to hold a fairly narrow view that naim amps only work well with a handful of speakers. You are the first person I know that has used a hybrid design with a naim system. Congrats!
The efficiency, as pointed out, is quite intriguing. Maybe the woofer doesn't have to work so hard when the tweeter covers it all the way down to the mid range.
I checked my ACT 2s out in this regard. they have a super revelator that goes from about 28 KHz down to 5 KHz, a Tactic driver that goes from 5 KHz to 500 Hz, and an identical driver that goes down to about 30 Hz (not so low, but very responsive to this level, so the bass sounds very deep and very clear). It is a 2 1/2 way design meaning that there are three drivers, two crossover points, and one capacitor feeding the tweeter and a second feeding the mids and bass to ensure they are totally time aligned. This gives a VERY cohesive sound. The minor drawback is that in music with very deep demanding bass a lot of readilly available power is needed to refuel the capaictor and the effect of this is that lesser amps will give the sensation that the mid is being swallowed by the bass. I haven't seen this with the 250. It seemed like it when I firt bought the speakers, but they take a long time to burn in. I thought they had burned in after 500 hours, but I was wrong. The bass improves in quality for MONTHS. So anyone demoing ACT 2s should keep this in mind. New ACt 2s can have pretty clear, but somewhat lumpy overdone bass. Six months later its a totally different story.
I am curious to hear your system as it is virtually identical to mine apart from the speakers. But ACT 2s are supposed to sound like very cohesive hybrids anyway. So maybe your sound will be quite similar to mine.
dave
Posted on: 19 October 2001 by Don Braid
I've just spend 20 minutes composing TWO messages that were both eaten by Infopop. I inadvertently hit an MS Word command that took me out of the forum reply window. No way of going back. I bet they think this is hilarious at the Infopop cybershredder.
John, my message to you - much more complete, was that money doesn't matter. The way you spend it does. This summer, my wife and I helped upgrade a friend's modest system in Vancouver. For $600, she got musical bliss - a system that I would put up against many of the jumbled, sterile setups we heard in the stores.
Dave, I agree that there isn't nearly enough adventurism about speakers. Naim gear will drive almost any competent, reasonably efficient speakers, with marvellous results. Why get stuck on a few brands when there's so much out there?
As for my escoteric new speakers, I think of them as quite practical. The Heil tweeter is simply bolted onto two rails - no damping needed. That's surely part of the reason for the low price. The guys running Credos and Kans would be flattened if they could hear these things.
Don
