NINTRONICS – HOME OF ULTRA HIGH END
Are you, dear reader, a long-term Rayner content consumer? Are you a member of the Brethren of Audiophile Lunacy? If so, I thank you and can let you know that you are in a kind of cool group, with more reach to more deep tech people than you might expect! I have only ever really discovered this when I truly messed up. The places where the fire storm would range from were truly scary on those few occasions when I put my foot in my mouth and then rammed it to hip height. After fixing my foul-ups on at least a couple of occasions, I kind of took it as deep profound genuine compliment! You just want people to read your stuff after all… but I do like to get it right.
In a strange way, it is rather lovely to have such a high-end audience. If you have just happened upon this, then be prepared to marvel, visibly. For there exists a sector of hi-fi known as the ultrahigh end. This is where cost genuinely is no object in the pursuit of the beating up of the gods of physics. And whilst they start at the level of bloody good but sane-price, the guys I went to visit recently called Nintronics, sell audio all the way to the utter top end.
There is so much hotter hogwash, horse feathers, nonsense and entire emotive piffle spoken about high-end audio. I have read reviews of cables where they have been described as having rhythm. And I admit that I had no idea what the hell they were talking about. The review made me feel ignorant and stupid rather than informed and enlightened. But no matter the price, truly good electronics and genuinely innovative loudspeakers are always engineered in a way that can be called elegant. This is when it sounds simple in concept, when the idea can be understood by anybody without stupid blinding jargon designed to confuse you. That the engineering remains only within the capability of that manufacturer, plus of course the judicious and cost-effective use of a patent here and there, is how the manufacturer makes sure that their innovation is a benefit just to them rather than a gift to the trade.
I had been invited to Nintronics’ beautiful new showroom and theatre demo by my favourite PR in all hi-fi throughout my entire career. We shall simply call him the Surrey Viking. There is a distributor called Padood, who fixed up a post-CES event at Nintronics in Welwyn Garden City to show off the new NAGRA Digital to Analogue Convertor that had been exhibited in Las Vegas, along with a commensurate collation of truly delicious audio.
Nintronics deal with B&W, Focal and other top end loudspeaker manufacturers, as well as a carefully curated stable of electronics manufacturers like Macintosh. All top-quality and some of it terrifyingly huge!
But what we had demonstrated to us in the bigger of their two elegantly acoustically treated rooms, was the latest turntable from SME, the CES-launched DAC from NAGRA, along with amplification, power supply and pre-amplification also all by NAGRA.
Now these things interest and excite me but I am open about my reasons. It is because they make suitable meat for loudspeakers to eat. From Fleming’s left-hand rule to a goose bump, I have always wanted to know how the bloody hell that works! And YG Acoustics, based in Colorado USA, were the manufacturers of the loudspeakers.
A quarter of a million pounds or a hundred grand more than that, were the two salient price points of their top two loudspeaker arrays.
The engineering that created these loudspeakers is so far beyond profligate compared to nearly every other thing that you could make in terms of materials usage and time spent, that I am sure it compares with ordnance launched into space for science, in manufacturing cost per gramme of finished item.
We were given talks by the chap from NAGRA, as well as from SME and the gentleman from YG Acoustics.
Gramophones have always frightened me, being a dyspraxic fool. Yet I have always loved the analogue absurdity how they can sound so beautiful. But only when some other bugger handles the records and tonearm for me.
NAGRA has been the fridge, Xerox and hoover of broadcast and film recording for ever. The brand name comes from the Polish for ‘it’s recording’ and they were the definitive analogue broadcast tape recorder supplier forever. They only started to make home audio once the home user did not need to know how to professionally lineup an analogue tape recorder/player. Their professional audio DNA is deep in the very ‘studio’ looks of the front panels and their sound is breathtakingly clean.
But oh my WORD, those loudspeakers! YG Acoustics’ promotional material is even thicker and glossier than the stuff that Monster cables produced for their Lamborghini collaboration at the CES. Yet despite the toweringly fancy presentation, the information in these promo datasheets is entirely understandable even to the not terribly technical.
So aluminium cabinets made of stuff so thick and massive that means the biggest array weighs 1.3 tonnes delivered. Up to 21 inch bass cones carved from a single billet of aircraft aluminium and 6 kW of amplification, strictly for headroom, not boom in their biggest sub-bass system. But the sound of YG Acoustics is all about delicacy, soundstage, accuracy, placement and the most lifelike sound imaginable from loudspeakers. We were played a cluster of 45 second clips of music ranging from opera to complicated guitar based stuff.
I got more goosebumps than a session of ASMR video watching on YouTube. The placement was unlike anything I have experienced except in a recording studio control room once or twice.. This is the point where poncier writers than me would be comparing them to having experienced a live show. Yes they really are that good. The speed and effortless accuracy of it all was awe inspiring.
And to come to the point about long-term readers, you guys will know that I find the manufacturers of tweeters utterly fascinating. Always about micro-engineering and tiny little wavelengths and how to fettle and contain the materials they use so that they do their bidding without their own agenda -ringing.
I will let the gentleman in the video explain… but Billet Dome is the name of the technology.
It simply means a soft dome tent with a very, very expensive one-piece tent pole in it.
And it bloody works!
