AXPONA 2014: Volti Audio and Triode Wire Labs

I've been tracking Volti Audio for a while now, and I'm happy to note that I loved their flagship Vittora loudpseakers before Art Dudley did, so that's something. Maybe? Whatever. Shown here at AXONA was the up-and-comer, the $15,900/pair Alura loudspeakers. The top hat of this two-box/side construction is a dual horn arrangement, a 2" midrange compression sitting below a 1" high-frequency compression, both sitting in Tractrix horns and sitting atop the bass cabinet, dominated by a 15" driver. More relevant specs: 99dB, 35Hz-20kHz. I've always been a little perplexed by the look of these cabinets, but that aside, it's really hard to fault the sound Greg Roberts gets out of his speakers. Powered here by a pair of $1,895/pair Quicksilver EL34 monos and a $799 Peachtree Audio novaPre, the sound was dynamic and very quick. That tweeter, sitting so high, does tend to bring up the soundstage height, which is interesting and cool. Greg says that the top cabinets are tilted forward just a little, and that brings up the focus. May be hard to see in the photos, but I'll clue you in -- the speakers are very much a furniture-grade affair, and give every appearance of being extraordinarily well-made. They're solid Baltic Birch ply, about 1" thick throughout. The veneer shown here was Walnut. The "standard" finish is a "catalyzed lacquer" taken to a "medium rub", all of which tends to make it sound like a rack of ribs, but it looks dynamite.

Triode Pete was on hand with his now-full lineup of cabling, too. Triode Wire Labs has been making noise with their extremely high-quality and reasonably-priced power cords, and he recently started shipping speaker cables. AXPONA saw the launch of the matching “Spirit” interconnects. $299 for the single-ended and $399 for the balanced versions. Some details:

• Aircraft aluminum-bodied single-ended RCA connectors with equal, super low-mass & ultra-low capacitance center pin and ground. Both center pin & ground are high purity OFC copper with 24K gold flash plating.
• Brass-bodied balanced XLR connectors available with three equal, super low-mass & ultra-low capacitance positive & negative polarity pins and ground. All three pins are high purity OFC copper with 24K gold flash plating.
• Highly conductive hybrid materials, utilizing different conductors and dielectrics, synergize “perfectly” with each other, cancelling out their normal individual sonic anomalies.
• Deep HELIUM Cryogenically Treated Conductors & Connectors … Using liquid Helium, the components are very slowly, through computer control, drawn-down to near Absolute Zero – 0 Kelvin! (–450 oF / –267.8 oC).
• Very Flexible and User Friendly, a Triode Wire Labs trademark!
• 30 day trial available

Also new, but not yet available, was the brand new power cord “update”. Looking very posh with it’s up-market connectors, we’ll be seeing more of these soon.