Élménytúra az első magyar DAD Blue Cat rendszer tulajdonosnál

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2022. április 16., szombat, 19:40

DAD audio hifi erősítő hangfal DAC lemezjátszó high end Blue Cat sztereó erősítő high end hifi high end hangfal high end erősítő Danish Audio Design

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First DAD Blue Cat stereo system purchased in Hungary

Blue kittens in the house

We traveled to Denmark this March, to pay a visit at Danish Audio Design headquarters and gained some insights about this relatively young company. Alexander Schmidt, sales manager for Europe was so kind to give us this new opportunity. To see and hear the first DAD stereo kit that was purchased in Hungary.

Why Danish Audio Design?

The owner (who, as it founded out, is our returning reader, which is such a pleasure, but his name remains without mention, for private reasons) lives in a detached house at the countryside. At first, he did not want to buy DAD products. He and Mr. Schmidt were in a good relationship for years, purchasing several hifi components already. Then Mr. Schmidt told him about this "cat man" gentleman, creating sound systems. The customer was at the 2019 Budapest hifi exhibition, where he met one of the DAD Blue Cat flagship speakers, driven by The One power amplifiers (260 kg each). That system would have been too big and expensive so it didn’t make it to the wishlist.

In the meantime, our reader moved into a bigger house, that had capacity for building a dedicated listening room. With Mr. Schmidt’s help, he had a possibility to try a DAD Blue Cat sound system in his home. A complete stereo kit, that was cheaper than those at the Budapest exhibition, but absolutely high end in global measures. While listening to his albums in this well-known environment, it became clear for him that the talk around "cat systems" wasn’t just empty gossip. Our reader already had his own, good quality hifi system. He spent years and years, swapping components for better ones, building up a proper music listening apparatus. Like many others in Hungary, he also started with Telefunken/Videoton components, devices that were available in that time. Now, jumping back into present times, he sold all the main components from his chain and kept the DAD Blue Cat system.

Short note: The user’s room isn’t finished yet. It will get more acoustic developement in the future.

Configuration

A ROSE DAC (weights 30 kilos) functioned as the system’s brain. Able to receive digital signal via coaxial, optical and USB, including AES/EBU. From the same product range, a ROSE Pre-amplifier was used for volume control and source selection. The DAC sent signal tot he preamp through a pair of balanced XLR cables.

The system contained a turntable, CD-player and a network streamer as well. Our host is an LP collector, but if he wants to explore for new music, a Lumin U1 helps him to browse from millions of songs, through streaming clients such as TIDAL.

If you’re sitting in front of The Red Diamond loudspeaker, you see a rectangular trapezoid. The sounds are coming from a 2,5 cm dome tweeter, a 17 cm midrange driver and a huge low frequency unit, measuring 48 cm in diameter. These boxes were tuned using a special algorithm and they weight 85 kilogramms each. They seemed enormous while standing next to the system, but after sitting down to our music listening couch, their size wasn’t dominant at all. If you go to DAD Blue Cat’s website, these speakers appear in white only, but they can actually make many other colors by request.

Own impressions

We spent only a few hours listening the system, which perhaps was not enough for deep knowledge, but quite a lot for strong impressions. We only had one reference in our memory: Jan’s living room, where the floor area was obviously bigger, but with more echoes. Compared to that large space, this small room with it’s calm acoustic properties shown obvious benefits. Also, the power conditioning and cable selection here was handled conciously. All these decisions made a shocking revelation and definition gain for sound.

We listened to a lot of music, that contained old works and some of our reference tracks as well. Deep Purple, Jeanne Lee & Mal Waldron, Riccardo Chailly, Blind Faith... these folks, and a bunch of bands with similar tones. Then we switched to some Stockfisch-Records discs, Cassandra Wilson, Dire Straits, Eliane Elias, and just to make sure, The Dave Brubeck Quartet as well.

The system was coherent, fast and joyful. We liked the honest presentation, how details could place themselves in the center of sound image, without any feel of bad coverage. The speakers were big, with 3-way configuration, but from our couch, we weren’t able to differentiate the position of the drive units at all. All the bass, mids and highs arrived from the same direction, with masterful integration. The speakers contained bass-reflex ports on their side. Despite the edges of these holes were not rounded at all, we heard no portnoise. In this room, The Red Diamonds produced so tight and grabbed bass frequencies as closed boxes used to. Besides (at least for our taste) the low sounds had better directionality and precision than what we heard in Denmark. Kudos for the load capacity too. We could rotate the volume knob almost anywhere, without getting a harsh sound or fatiguing experience.

Please note: as we mentioned earlier in our DAD Showroom visit tour article, they are already working on a dedicated music listening studio, that will have much better acoustics compared to their living room. Also, the new music listening room will contain more proper accessories. We don’t have exact informations about the finish date of this project. But hopefully we’ll have a chance to pay another visit and show the new "catcave" to our respected readers!

További cikkek:

• CEDIA 2011 - Polk Audio
• Meghallgattuk, mit tud a REL
• QUAD Artera Play és Artera Stereo
• ISE 2012 - Monitor Audio
• Pontosan olyan, mint a moziban

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