Installations

Yesterday, Justyn and I, along with help from our friend Alex from United Moving & Storage, delivered yet another pair of the beautiful Focal Maestro Utopia EVO loudspeakers.

For going on 13 years, my good customer and friend, Robert, has allowed me to guide him on this journey towards audio utopia. About once or twice a year, Robert and I have great conversations about our next upgrade to improve his sound systems. I say systems because Robert is a snowbird and winters in California. He also allowed me to design and install a custom Focal Utopia and JL Audio system in his beautiful desert home.

As you will see from the photos, this is a vast open space, and we needed the best possible choice in speakers to fill the room. We wanted a full-size concert-level presentation. Focal does make two larger brother versions in their Utopia line but we were physically limited by the hallways adjacent to the fireplace. This, however, was not an issue as we incorporated JL Audio’s massive Fathom series F212 subwoofer to take up any slack in the deepest of bass regions.

We had custom-ordered these beautiful speakers a few months ago and I have been quite excited to install them. So after uncrating these heavy buggers, we opened the large double doors to roll them into the room. All of a sudden a hummingbird flew in to join the party. He was, needless to say, quite a distraction. After flying around the room for a few minutes, he calmly sat down on the window ledge. I walked over to him and explained that as beautiful as he was, he had to go!

Obviously, the last thing you want in a system of this caliber is “humming.”

I was able to pick him up and carefully carry him outside. Then off he flew. I felt sort of sorry for him that he wouldn’t be there to hear the finished product but I’m sure he had a great story to tell his friends. After all, it’s not every day you get to witness this level of high-end audio.

The sound in this room is quite amazing even though the speakers will have a week or so to break in.

His Aesthetix pre-amp and amp, Molo Mola Tambaqui DAC and Nordost cabling he has purchased from us over the years will allow these speakers to sound their very best.

Thanks again Robert for allowing us to be a part of this. Enjoy!

Yesterday, Justyn, Eli, and myself installed this beautiful pair of Focal Maestro Utopia EVO speakers for my longtime customer and close friend Scott. I can tell you that Scott is as nuts about hi-fi as Nuts About Hi-Fi. He and I have created some of the most amazing systems for over thirty years.

We have now completed four homes with him and currently maintain 9+ systems, some of which are so elaborate that they actually make this incredible system seem fairly tame.

This room is an outbuilding with a second garage about 250 feet from his main house. It sits in a beautiful wooded area that feels magical. This gives Scott a place where he can truly get away and enjoy music or concerts in total privacy any time he wishes.

We are planning our next steps to improve the acoustics and take this system to its next level. Also, with the generous trade-up program from our friends at Nordost. We will upgrade his cabling to keep up with the evolution of this system.

Thank you, my friend, what a fun one this is!

I want to share with you one of our most interesting clients. Bob is deaf in both ears, and yet is truly one of the best Audiophiles I know. He cannot hear a word I say. We communicate using handwritten notes, along with his ability to read lips.

I first met Bob about 15 years ago. He had initially found out about us because of an article he read in one of the trade magazines on the breakthrough technologies Nordost had made on cabling and noise isolation products. He asked if I would bring some to his home for demonstration. I remember feeling skeptical. Thinking “If he can’t even hear my voice, how would he be able to perceive the differences in cabling, noise isolation products, etc.?” I was intrigued, so we scheduled an appointment later that week. He ushered me to his listening room when I arrived at his home.

At that time, the room was pretty simple. As I remember, it had a small sofa, a listening chair, and a fairly decent stereo system. Next to the listening chair sat a few balloons and a small air pump. He played a short repertoire of music for me through his system. I’ve been accused of sometimes playing my music fairly loud. I can easily justify this because I want to feel I am at the recorded venue. And sometimes that venue happens to be a Rock Concert.

But let me tell you…
Bob plays his music loud!

He sits in his listening chair, closes his eyes, caresses a balloon inflated to the appropriate level and feels the vibrations of the music through his fingers.

After listening to his system, that first day, I swapped out his speaker cables with a pair of Nordost. He and I went over the same tracks, and all of the sudden, a huge smile came to his face and he spoke loudly “Much better!” I asked to borrow his balloon and almost immediately, I was able to feel the vibrations through my fingers. It gave me goosebumps, and I suddenly understood how this remarkable man had trained himself to adapt to his inability to hear with his ears.

Years have passed and Bob’s listening room has now transformed into what I can only describe as a very comfortable music sanctuary. It is indeed a tribute to the art of recorded music. He has hundreds of albums, not one but two elaborate stereo systems set up on opposite ends of the room facing each other. Located between these systems sits a listening chair that he swivels 180 degrees depending on which system he wants to enjoy. His various balloons and air pump sit close by.

We are now in the process of upgrading his main system with some of our favorite Aesthetix gear and Nordost Sort Kones and their remarkable Q-Base MK 3 primary earth grounding system. I will follow up with some more photographs when this upgrade is installed.

This week Justyn, Eli and I had the pleasure of updating this exceptional listening system for two of my favorite customers in Port Angeles. I met these folks about 15 years ago when they were building their home. I remember during our first meeting they told me they wanted to be able to sip wine, enjoy their view and simultaneously feel as if they were at a concert.

Definitely our kind of customers!

They stopped into our showroom a few weeks ago to see and hear what is available today in the world of high end audio music systems. We auditioned our Mola Mola Tambaqui, Aesthetix Memus, Focal Sopra No. 3 speakers (which I have been bugging George to come in and listen to since they first came out), along with our Nordost array of support for cabling and noise isolation products.

Fortunately we had originally pre-wired this room with Nordost speaker cabling so we have the ability to get every last drop of detail to our speakers fully intact without problems with phasing or noise issues. We had originally installed a pair of Focal Chorus 936 tower speakers which are still sounding quite good. I know this as I am listening to them here in our showroom as I write this. We traded them towards their new Sopra 3s.

We also originally employed one of our favorite of all time subwoofer, JL Audio’s F113. After 14 years, it still is reaching down to the last octave of bass and providing a believable impact of a kick drum, even in this very large space.

We are retiring the original Krell integrated amplifier and will be replacing it with our Aesthetix Memus. The Memus, for those of you who are not familiar with Aesthetix, is their award winning, “affordable” hybrid tube-preamp and solid state output integrated amplifier. This beautiful hand crafted component not only sounds like silk but also has an amazing ability to allow a listener to find the perfect volume level. This might seem trivial to some but anyone who owns a goose bump machine like this will tell you getting the volume level not just close but perfect is quite satisfying. The Krell Integrated amp we are replacing utilized a digital volume control and it has become a bit finicky, sometimes jumping up the volume steps when it shouldn’t.

I know I have said this before, but the Mola Mola Tambaqui is a truly musical game changer. The way it presents digital recordings goes well beyond anything we have ever been able to offer a customer. After every customer demonstration I have done it is always the same response, “I want this!”

We will have to wait on Memus as they are built-to-order. Jim White, the owner of Aesthetix, will not release any product until it is thoroughly tested and listened to. It sort of reminds me of the old TV commercial, “We will sell no wine before it’s time.” But in our customer’s case this actually works out just fine as the Sopras need to break in for a few weeks anyway.

Here are a few photos of this lovely listening room. I will post an update as soon as we are able to finish their upgrades.

Here are a couple of photos of a fun installation we did this week. Our customers asked us to provide a durable low profile ceiling mount speaker system for a new custom wood shop they recently built. These speakers are actually made by a local Mount Vernon WA. company called Stealth.

And Good News! So far no tariffs have been announced between Silverdale and Mount Vernon.

They are designed to be used either inside but even in severe outdoor weather conditions. One of these speakers is actually able to take high resolution photos of the surrounding environment where they are installed. The folks at Stealth will customize a finish to blend in with their surroundings.

After auditioning these in our showroom, I knew right away these were definitely a Nuts About Hi Fi kind of product. Our next adventure with these will be for a green house our customers are building. I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing this and will share pictures when we are finished.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of putting the finishing touches on this truly amazing Home Theater System. We originally designed and installed this system a few years back. These folks have become very good friends and also very supportive customers of our business.

They joined us a few months ago for one of our open house events. Later that evening after most everyone had gone home we sat around and listened to music on our Focal Stella Utopia EVO speaker system. They already had purchased from us a beautiful pair of our Focal Sopra 3s but knew they would appreciate these amazing speakers as an upgrade.

Yesterday, after dialing them in to the system, we watched and listened to everything from Mad Max to a Star Is Born. All I can say is I wish everyone one I know could experience this level of performance. It makes it so difficult to get the smile off your face.

Yesterday I had a really great time upgrading a beautiful stereo system in Sequim. It had been almost 2 years since our last upgrade for this customer. David, like many of us, loves his music and is definitely Nuts About Hi-Fi. Even as a young teenager he subscribed to high end audio magazines and over his adult years purchased the best gear he could find. He has owned some true classics, from early Sansui, McIntosh, Dynaudio just to name a few. He tells me he was never really satisfied with his sound until now.

As a retirement gift to himself he decided to start from scratch and put together a system he could enjoy for the rest of his life. We helped him buy and install our Focal Sopra 3, Anthem 2 channel amp and preamp, JL audio F113 subwoofer and some lovely Nordost speaker cables and interconnects. Originally his room was a bit on the acoustically reflective side so we helped him design and install our Vicoustic panels to calm things down. He has been using Roon and Tidal software to find and stream his music and for the last couple years has been loving his system.

He stopped into our showroom a few weeks ago and I showed him our amazing Mola Mola Tambaqui and also gave him a Nordost Sort Kone demonstration. He immediately heard the benefits and decided he had to have them. So yesterday we gradually took the time to listen to each upgrade one component at a time using the same track at the same volume as a reference. We started with Sort Kones on the preamp and then moved to the amp. The Sort Kones revealed details that were totally lost without them. Finally we added the Tambaqui and suddenly the sound stage opened up and David told me that he was getting a little emotionally overwhelmed. Even his dog Hoagie was impressed but I think he misunderstood me when I mentioned the possibility of adding another “woofer”.

Thanks David we appreciate you.

Yesterday Michael and Eli installed this beautiful home theater system for one of our favorite customers in Snohomish County. This was actually a retrofit installation upgrading a system that was originally installed, using contractor grade speakers, when the home was built.

The original system design presented an immediate challenge as unfortunately the center speaker had been located several feet above where it should have been. To solve this problem we eliminated the center speaker all together and installed an amazing pair of Focal Utopia 1000 series in-wall speakers. The originally installed center speaker will be removed and patched as our customer has been planing to repaint the room. When this is done, the new speaker grills will also be removed and painted to match.

There are several unique aspects to Focal’s Utopia in-wall speakers. They come complete with acoustically tuned enclosures, magnetic removable, paintable grills and use their finest speaker components, which of course incorporates their exclusive beryllium inverted dome tweeter. These babies sing! We often use them even for precise audiophile level 2 channel stereo installations when floor standing speakers are not an option.

We replaced the original in wall subwoofer with the 1000 IWSUB Utopia and in-ceiling surround speakers with the matching Focal 1000 series speakers. The speakers had been wired to a closet area in another part of the home and the components were to placed on wire racks, which are subject to extreme unwanted vibrations. We modified these racks using high density fiber board and several Nordost Sort Kones to dissipate any vibrations both external and internal from the components themselves.

Over the past few years, Marantz has been hard at work elevating their already excellent home theater components to a whole new level with their top-of-the-line A/V processor and multi-channel amplifier. These units are hand-built and tested at their factory in Japan and have quickly become a go-to choice for high-end home theater enthusiasts looking for something that stands out from the typical mass-produced options.

The amplifier is designed to power up to 10 channels, or 10 individual speaker connections. However, you can combine two channels into one, which effectively doubles the power output for those connections. Since we only needed this amplifier to drive five speakers, including the subwoofer, we took advantage of this feature and “bridged” all 10 channels down to five. This doubled the power and gave us excellent headroom, delivering effortless control over the stunning Focal speakers with exceptionally low distortion. To further enhance performance, we used five Nordost balanced XLR cables, which helped lower the overall noise floor even more.

Now because the components live in a separate area of the home, Eli programed an RF Universal Remote Control to easily access every function of the system including calibration of all video and audio functions.

I spoke with my customer over the phone and he tells me he could not be happier and wanted me to give big Kudos to our team.

Thanks so much!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of helping a good client place a new pair of Focal’s Diablo Utopia speakers in his recently finished entertainment room. Over the last year or so, he and his wife remodeled a room in their beautiful home where they could relax and enjoy movies and music.

Brad is not at all new to high end audio. Actually as a young man he worked for a local high end audio dealer. I’ve always considered him as a very astute audiophile. For most of his adult life he has collected some of the best audio/video components available: Aesthetix, Focal, Nordost, Krell, just to name a few. His vinyl collection is also nothing short of impressive.

This entertainment room is on the smaller side and required a main speaker that could create the illusion of a large open sound stage without overloading or confusing the presentations of music concerts. In my experience, this is not an easy task and there are less than a handful of speakers in the audio world that can pull this off.

Focal Diablo Utopia to the rescue!

Brad and I spent over two hours meticulously adjusting and finally pin pointing the exact location within 1/32nd of an inch where they were to live. It was well worth the effort. Brad smiled and said. “It is like the speakers have totally disappeared.”

Thank you again Brad for choosing Nuts About Hi-Fi and thanks also to the incredible engineering team at Focal for making musical Utopia possible in any room.

Edit to Add: I just received a text this morning from Brad. He told me that when his wife came home last night, he was playing music for her to show her the changes we had made. The sound stage was so enveloping she thought he was using the surround system instead of just the Diablos in stereo.

We recently delivered a beautiful pair of Focal’s Scala Utopia speakers to a new customer in the Seattle area.

He just set them up and is in the process of letting them break in. He tells me they are already performing well beyond his high expectations. Thank you Brian for sending me this photo and allowing me to share it. Can’t wait to hear this in person.

Happy Holidays!