I've come to realize that Bill Hart gives me some of the best advice of anyone out there. He understands the sound I'm looking for (I think) and has never steered me wrong. I always wish I had taken his advice earlier. And so it is with my visit to Pitch Perfect.
I don't think Bill knows Matt at Pitch Perfect personally since he is based on the East Coast, but he knew of them by reputation and told me 4+ months ago that I should seek them out. I finally made that happen this weekend and, of course, wish I'd made the trip earlier.
As many of you may know, Matt is the Shindo dealer for the West Coast. He owns Pitch Perfect and also carries the really amazing Line Magnetic stuff along with a few other brands. He's all about high efficiency speakers and tubey goodness. He was based in San Francisco (my home) for years, but now runs his shop out of Los Angeles.
About the shop... it's pretty much Disney World for audiophiles. I didn't take many pics, but you can find plenty online. The shop is perfect. It's intimate, but large enough to hold a ton of good stuff. There's really only one listening room. This makes sense since Matt is by appointment only (as all good shops should be). You get total distraction-free one-on-one attention. This certainly isn't a high volume, high pressure, move-'em-in/move 'em out kind of shop.
The loft is the perfect size with very comfortable and homey furnishings. It isn't set up like a professional listening room. I think this is absolutely key. It's one thing to make a system sound good in a professionally treated music-only room. But the reality is that a lot of people also need to live in their listening room. You can listen with a lot more confidence when you're listening to a system in a room that looks and feels like your living room at home. If you have the benefit of a professional listening room, well, you can just imagine that you'll probably get even better sound than what you hear in the shop. That's a big plus.
There's Shindo, DeVore and Line Magnetic equipment everywhere, but nothing feels cluttered. It's more like visiting an art gallery. If you go anytime soon, you'll likely need to wipe my drool off half the stuff.
Matt has great taste in music. By that I mean he listens to a lot of what I like.
There was a lot in the record collection. This was nice because I didn't want to bring any LP's with me since I wanted to hit up Amoeba Records before my visit which is only a few blocks away ($4 Uber ride as it turned out). I arrived and Matt had a ton of beer, wine and whiskey ready for me along with lots of sandwiches and snacks. We had an espresso first and I picked out some LP's to get started with.
I went down thinking I'd be getting the DeVore 0/96's, so we started with those. I'm very intrigued by the Line Magnetic 219ia SET integrated. We started there, but used one of the lower level Shino's as the pre-amp.
Even before anything had warmed up, you could immediately hear the Shindo sound everyone talks about. It's hard to describe until you hear it yourself. I guess the best way I can describe it is that it has this certain harmonic goodness where everything just sounds pleasing to the ears. Others call this "musical".
I realize this is probably an annoying description, especially if you haven't heard the Shindo stuff and makes it easy to dismiss Shindo fans as cultists. It certainly felt a bit like that before I made the trip. But it's hard to describe in audiophile terms precisely because it seems to eschew the typical audiophile approach of exaggerating stuff (soundstage, detail, bass, etc).
There does seem to be a certain coloration, almost like an Instagram photo filter. The Shindo filter somehow manages to color everything in this very harmonic way where EVERYTHING just seems to have this unified harmony. I realize I'm using that word a lot. It's just the only thing that seems like a good description.
The only negative I felt about the sound was that vocals sounded different. Not bad at all. Just different than I'm used to. It didn't take long at all for the vocal presentation to seem totally natural and "right", but it was the first thing that jumped out where I was wondering if there was too much coloration going on.
We spent 3-4 hours with the DeVore 0/96's and various Shindo pre-amp and amp combos. It's quite difficult to describe differences between the various components for two reasons. First, time was limited and so there were only a few tracks we listened to on multiple components (mostly stuff of Ziggy Stardust). Second, we hooked up the Vosne Romanee pre-amp pretty quickly and just stuck with that for the rest of the day. The pre-amp is amazing and definitely exerts a strong "sound" onto the other components.
I'm sure differences would have been more readily apparent if I had more time to do direct comparisons. Here's what I can tell you though... they are all amazing. You know that zone you can get in when the music is so good that you just close your eyes and almost nod off like you're a little stoned from the music? Well, I can tell you that was happening on just about every track and I was most certainly not stoned. I was hypnotized and mesmerized by the tone. It just really draws you in. I've rarely had that experience auditioning other equipment and never had it so consistently over such a vast variety of music. We pretty much settled into the Vosne Romanee and the Lafon GM70 monoblocks. They are gorgeous and delivered the punch I was hoping for in spades.
After 3-4 hours, we moved on to the big field-coil Latours. These are out of my price range right now, but I really wanted to hear what they're about. Matt played some percussion from an Indian drummer recorded in the 60's to warm the speaker up. Holy cow. It sounded like the musicians were in the room with us! The tone was amazing and you could really feel the music.
I didn't spend as much time with the Latour's as I would have like. There just wasn't enough time and I knew that I could afford the Latour's right now. It was pretty clear after 4 or 5 tracks that the Latour's are something more than special. Maybe one day.
The reason that we didn't have enough time to spend with the Latour's is that I eyeballed the pair of Shindo 604 AlNiCo's that Matt had in another room. They were as big as the Latour's, but with a very different approach. There's not a lot out there about this speaker, so I hadn't thought about it much and hadn't even planned to listen to them. I'm glad I did.
The 604's definitely share the Shindo sound. I'm lazy, so I'm going to borrow what I wrote about these in another thread earlier today...
It does a lot of what the Latour does at less than half the price. I'm leaning toward this speaker at this point, but I was only able to spend about an hour listening to the speaker and didn't get to throw a full barrage of musical genres at it.
We started with some Chet Atkins and the tone was incredible. I was immediately intrigued. Since we didn't have a lot of time, I wanted to test the 604's with some "thicker" more thumping music. We put on some Depeche Mode. Honestly, I wasn't impressed at first. It was way too relaxed, distant and polite.
Matt went behind the 604's and made some adjustments. Apparently, you're able to tune the speakers to your room and preference. We played the same Depeche Mode tracks and... holy smokes... it was like a totally different speaker. All of a sudden, it felt like Depeche Mode was playing right in front of me.
We threw on some Kraftwerk and it was like getting punched in the gut. Exactly what I was looking for. We finished up with some tracks off Ziggy Stardust which were the only tracks we played on every speaker/amp combo as our baseline. Frankly, that album sounded AMAZING on everything we tried, a testament to the Shindo pre-amp as well as the quality of the recording. It's one of my favorite albums of all time, but it's never sounded as good as it did on the Shindo stuff.
The 604's most definitely aren't 2-3x as good as the Devore 0/96's. There's definitely diminishing returns and I'd totally be happy with the DeVore's. That said, the Shindo 604's felt "worth it" for the amazing stuff they could do that the 0/96's just couldn't muster at quite the same level. You just feel the music more and the 604's seemed to get even better at the volumes I like to listen to music. They were effortless and airy.
So... I left Pitch Perfect to catch my flight. Matt drove me in his crazy tricked out Jeep. This is no small endeavor in Los Angeles. It seemed to take forever to navigate the Saturday evening rush hour traffic. I left tired, but wishing I had more time to evaluate the big Shindo speakers.
The next morning I woke up and kinda just said "eff it". I want the big Shindo's. The Latour's just aren't gonna happen right now, but the 604's are oh so sweet.
I'll be putting the entire system together over the next 6 months as budget allows. Right now the plan is to get the 604's and use my PrimaLuna to drive them. I'll get the Vosne Romanee in Jan/Feb and the Lafon GM70 monoblocks around March/April if things go as planned. My only regret is that I really want to live with that Line Magnetic 219ia for awhile. That things is NICE, especially for the price. I really wish I had another room to put it in.
Note: Apologies for the formatting. Apparently I don't have enough posts here to be able to post images.
