Apparently, Klaus Bunge of Odyssey Audio was up till the wee hours of Friday morning, attempting to chase audio gremlins out of his system. While 10am saw some progress, it wasn’t until my visit on Saturday that things were humming along.
For those of you that don’t know, Odyssey has a bit of a rep for being wildly over-performing-for-the-money, and has been a perpetual best-buy recommendation from The Absolute Sound because of that.
Shown here were a new 2.5-way floor-standing loudspeaker, the Kismet Liquid ($5,900/pair), which feature Scanspeak Revelator drivers and Beryllium tweeter.
Alex Gonzalez, Klaus’ partner, was showing off his designs — the Candela tube pre ($1,600) and the Suspiro ($1,250) phono preamplifier, which matched up to a pair of Khartago monoblock amplifiers ($1,995/pair).
Up on top of the rack was an aging HRX turntable from VPI. Some strategic mid-room placement of some freestanding panels & diffusors from GIK Acoustics helped take the giant room down into manageable pieces. This, plus some sweet laser/LED scattering, took me to a pretty awesome place.
Imaging is spectacular, and bass response from the new speaker is controlled and deep.
More bargains from Odyssey? Mos’ def.
How do his monoblocks compare to the $10K+ crowd? How about the innards…the quality of parts he uses? His business is a 15 min drive from my house…would love to visit..
I think his work would compare well on both — to others, and on parts. TAS has several reviews.
The TAS review comes this close to comparing with $10K electronics. Very favorably.