The Ferrum OOR headphone amplifier and matching Ferrum Hypsos power supply
At Upscale, we are encouraged to take home products and try them out over extended periods. In fact, as we've mentioned before, there's a touring band of electronics and smaller loudspeakers circulating across the country to our remote employees, and we regularly fly the team to the mothership to listen to the big stuff.
The standard joke when one of us takes home a great product is that we're never bringing it back. Most recently, it was sales associate Daelan Moreno refusing to return the Ferrum OOR headphone amplifier and matching Ferrum Hypsos power supply.
At the office the day after taking it home, Daelan told that timeless hi-fi story of it being late at night, and putting on just "one track before bed". Before he knew it, he had listened to the whole of Bon Iver's 22, A Million album, experiencing it in a way he never had before.
The sound of Ferrum, he said, was "big and really pulled out all the wild noises and samples used in that album."
The album's celebrated track '715-CRΣΣKS' is technically a capella, but messes with the traditional simplicity of unaccompanied singers by heavily processing the voice (using an effect called a prismizer which is like a combination of vocoder and harmonizer). It's surprisingly moving, and perhaps a song that will get more poignant as machine intelligence interwines with human life. "It is the perfect song to show weird samples," says Daelan. "The layering of different vocal tracks can be muddied sometimes, but not on the Ferrum stack."
The Ferrum OOR, from the designers of Mytek, is a balanced headphone amp with an amazing 8 W of power to drive even the most demanding headphones. It sounds great out of the box, but comes alive with the addition of the Ferrum Hypsos, a hybrid switching and linear supply that offers the advantages of both designs: Low ripple and noise, as well as fast transient response and high efficiency.
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Ferrum OOR Headphone Amplifier $1,995 |
Ferrum HYPSOS Power Supply $1,195 |
Six-Pack Saturday Was a Blast!
As we promised in our announcement, some of the most interesting demo tracks at Six-Pack Saturday, the REL Acoustics event featuring 18 REL subwoofers across three systems, didn't have any (intentional) bass to speak of.
In fact, Isaac Markowitz's track of choice involved just a close-mic'd and rather shrill harmonica, and he used this to demonstrate the power of three REL Carbon Special subwoofers per channel. Isaac, who has recently joined REL as director of sales, played the track and then took out the subs, pair by pair, from the top.
One of the attendees had his eyes closed and missed Isaac's visual clues as he and a helper disconnected the subs. "I just heard that harmonica get shriller and shriller, and the image get flatter. I couldn't believe it."
A harmonica has no bass, sure. But when it is played by a person in a room, there is bass energy from echoes, resonances, and even the workings of the musician's throat and chest as they bend notes and create vibrato.
When Isaac played us the track the day before the event, he did it without the subs, and then with all six. As soon as the subs came on, the studio appeared in front of us; we could literally hear the room. And as the track played, one of us said, "You can hear and feel the human creating the music." Quite simply, without subs, it was music playback. With subs, it was teleportation.
Six subs sound like too much for you? As REL repeatedly invoked at the event, "One is better than none," and a stereo pair is likely to keep you happy for the rest of your days.
Thank you to everyone who came out for Six-Pack Saturday. We can't wait to see you at our next event, tentatively in February. You live far away and can't make it? Reap the benefits anyway: We learn so much and gain so much inspiration from every gathering. Call us and tell us your hi-fi goals and dreams!
Though his room didn't feature six-packs, we just had to include a picture of the ever-dapper Lenny Mayeux of MoFi who is always happy to come up to demonstrate some great vinyl playback.