There’s an established standard protocol one observes when entering a room at an audio show. First, you stand in the doorway and listen for a couple of minutes, then check in with the exhibitor and if necessary, introduce yourself. Next, you exchange pleasantries and catch up while idly thumbing through whatever literature is displayed. Finally, and only at the exhibitor’s insistence, you make your way to the best seat in the house while apologizing to everyone you step over, around, and displace. That’s not what happened when I visited the NOLA room where Carl (left in photo), Marilyn, and Kristen Marchisotto (right) were overseeing the west coast debut of the $150,000/pair Baby Grand Reference Gold 3 loudspeakers, the midpoint of NOLA’s reference series. Stepping into the doorway was as far as I got before bee-lining to the front and center, shoving aside anyone not fast enough to get out of my way.
Cat Stevens’ CD Tea for the Tillerman was playing and I was immediately taken by a level and subtlety of detail and dimensionality that’s all too rarely heard in well-sorted high-end systems and almost never heard at an audio show. Most striking was a dimensionality to the images and stage, a walk-into-it feel that once again, you just don’t hear at audio shows. The same was true for a CD of Shirley Horn’s first appearance set at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the result being a presentation that sounded a little more live and a little less like a recording than is usually the case. And Eric Clapton’s new lockdown-era CD Lady in the Balcony? Well, let’s just say that it sounded great, as did all the CDs that we listened to and leave it at that. CDs? That’s right, CDs. Not high-res streaming, not master tapes, not even LPs and a great analog rig—just standard Red Book CDs played through an Audio Note Transport and an Ideon DAC.
Carl then walked me through some of the changes between the Series 2 and Series 3 and to be honest, it seemed to me like an entirely new speaker that just happened to look like the old one. There were new or substantially revised drivers, the crossovers were new all the way down to their passive components, and cabinets that were quite a bit larger internally than their predecessor and now had the two woofers each ported into an individual chamber. Even the cabinet bases were new, now being NOLA’s Twin Ball-bearing Isolation systems. Carl went on to explain that in many cases, the Series 3 incorporated technologies that had been developed for the latest evolutions of the $350,000 Concert Grand Reference and the $500,000 Grand Reference.
The NOLAs weren’t the only parts of the system making their debut. The system also included VAC’s new Essence phono and line stages, $7000 each, and a pair of the new Essence 80 monoblock amplifiers, $9000 each. The Essence components (above) may be reasonably priced by High-end standards but the overall system’s performance made it obvious that there were magical things going inside their understated chasses. I hope to corner VAC’s Kevin Hayes before the show is over and get the full scoop on the Essence pieces.
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