![]() ![]() Masaki Ashizawa: “I was born to be a kid with high curiosity to sound. ![]() Peter Katsoolis: How did you become interested in music and playback as a young person? What are your musical influences? I couldn’t wait to get home and email Masaki to find out what’s in his stash. The bass is powerful and extended with great timing and pitch definition. The midrange is breathtakingly transparent and detailed. The sound is dynamic and has incredible scale and separation. Whilst each amplifier did ample justice to the qualities of the particular output tubes used, the common, wholly immersive Audio Note DNA was felt throughout. This speaks to Audio Note designs having significantly extended bandwidth compared to competing DHT SET amplifiers. It never sounds overly rose-tinted or soft and saggy at the frequency extremes. It is tonally rich and teeming with energy, life and colour. The Audio Note house sound – no matter what the particular output tube deployed – is big, bold and beautiful. As a supreme musical communicator, it gave up little in comparison to its higher-priced siblings. There is nothing quite as sweet as a great E元4 amplifier and the Melius is definitely many leagues ahead of the earlier Overture integrated which also uses the same pentodes. This included the Souga with its quartet of parallel 2A3s, the 300B-based Gakuoh II and the Big Kahuna flagship 211-fueled Kagura monoblocs – as well as the startlingly good new E元4-based Melius stereo power amplifier. ![]() Over the course of the evening I got to hear, and go back and hear, whichever model I wanted in the current Audio Note range. A clearly humble man, he presents as a gentle and reflective soul but certainly more grounded and business-minded than his flamboyant forbear. It is arguable that the Audio Note legacy is now as much his as it is Kondo’s. Masaki began his hi-fi career building the Ongaku and has helmed the Audio Note company since Kondo passed away in 2006. Whilst respectful of the design tradition he has inherited, Masaki is a no less talented and insightful designer in his own right. His successor Masaki Ashizawa is a rather different personality. As much as he championed Toscanini, I have it on good authority from a former employee that Kondo really got his creative juices flowing by listening to porno soundtracks. The products this self-styled “Audio Silversmith” designed – involving ubiquitous use of silver trannies, caps, and wire – are still name-checked by rival manufacturers seeking to cash in on the Kondo zeitgeist of natural, unforced musicality. As an audio innovator and visionary, the literally silvery and wiry Mr. It was a drunken shambles of an evening only the Japanese know how to properly conduct. I met Hiroyasu Kondo, the founder of Audio Note, once in the late ‘90s. Nothing much grows in Yokohama except a few good Chinese ex-pat restaurants and the Jett Sett, a great Joan Jett-styled group led by the impossibly sexy, Gibson SG-toting Mah Ogawa. But, Kawasaki is almost at the southern port city of Yokohama. Train travel around Japan is an essential and mind-bending trip in itself. That’s a good hour or two by suburban train from central Tokyo. My mood didn’t improve when I found out the Audio Note factory is now based out of Kawasaki city. It also meant cheating on my main man Robert Koch (of Robert Koda LLC) who always gets my days off on a trip to Japan. Like I had time to spare doing a factory tour of Audio Note when the likes of Sato Sally Yoko, the bass player of the Tokyo Cramps, was asking me to stay. I was at a major punk rock festival in Shinjuku, contentedly ticking off my J-punk bucket list but Peter Vo, the Australian Kondo Audio Note distributor, was driving me crazy. I was in the city of neon sulphate wonderment and I was pissed off. Tokyo, Halloween 2019: Pre-zombie apocalypse. Above: The Kondo Audio Note listening room in Kawasaki city, Japan. ![]()
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