Yesterday I had the immense pleasure of visiting Roberto at his home and listening to music through his system. I finally got to meet the man!
Roberto is a very charming and gracious host. I went there with my wife and the son of a friend. His wife served us mandarin orange juice made with oranges from his back yard; it was amazing. Considerate as always, Roberto had invited his English-speaking sister-in-law so my wife would have company. Roberto and I then retired to his music room while the rest took off to play tourist.
In a nutshell, it was immediately clear that Roberto's CLXes are a bit better than my SL3s!
We listened exclusively to digital files, though there were three turntables in the room: Goldmund, Oracle, and Linn.
Roberto had also invited a musician/audiophile friend over. He brought a bunch of songs by his favourite Latinas, on his laptop. That last sentence is open to delicious misinterpretation.
At the start we noticed a harsh edge to the system while listening to the laptop music, so I suggested to Roberto in jest that he replace his SS power amps with his ARC VT100 (which had the "Roberto mod"), which he did. In doing so Roberto felt that he lost the highs, but the harshness was still there. Conclusion: it was not the amps. All this time he was insisting that it was the laptop that was causing the problem. Note: the laptop had replaced the Mac Mini in the chain. Roberto's friend felt that it was more a function of the recording quality, and indeed, on more recent recordings the harshness was ameliorated somewhat.
Putting the Mac Mini back into the system removed the harshness. I had taken a bunch of my music (WAV files) on a USB stick, so we transferred them to the Mac and listened to them off it. On songs with which I was familiar, listening was magical. The speakers were not relevant as they disappeared. There was a ton of information I was not aware of on those recordings, and they sounded great. One of the tracks was a transfer I had made from LP. The musician in Roberto immediately told me that the piano was out of tune, and that he could hear the wow in the piano.
We also listened to a recording of Roberto and his friend playing "La Chica de Ipanema", as well as a solo piano recording by his friend. They are both talented musicians. I also had the pleasure of hearing Roberto accompanying some of the songs I had taken on his guitar.
Then we listened to a YouTube piano recording (Murray Perahia playing Schubert's "Ständchen"). I was truly impressed by how YouTube sounded; a function of his Bel Canto equipment, Roberto tells me.
All of this equipment was sitting on a super-wide custom non-adjustable (welded) rack.
Roberto also demonstrated the effect of moving some Shun Mook Mpingo disks he had sitting by the sides of the CLXes; the effects were obvious. He had a very large number of these disks sitting under and on top of everything around. He even had three on top of each CLX. And no, we did not experiment extensively. After all, I was there to listen to music!
All of this was accompanied by an exquisite Rioja that Roberto served, in Riedel stemware, no less. It was super-smooth, with absolutely no harshness. It was truly music on my tongue. My apologies for gushing here, but the taste was unbelievable; absolutely the BEST wine I have ever had. The two of us drank the bottle over the 4 hours I was there; fortunately for us Roberto's friend (and Montis owner) is a teetotaler. Roberto suggested that he could open another bottle, but I declined.
My apologies for the length of this post, but I had a great time and wanted to do it justice.
That was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. THANK YOU ROBERTO!!!
