To Doug Schneider,
I saw you liked the Dynaudio Confidence C1. I’m interested in it or the Focal Sopra No1. Have you compared them? I also want to get the Simaudio ACE, a Devialet, or the Micromega M-One. The Devialet has SAM but the Micromega will have some kind of room correction. Which program do you think would be better?
Thanks,
Wolfgang Tober
Canada
I reviewed the Focal Sopra No2, but I did not review the No1, though others have told me it’s excellent. Still, I can’t know for sure just how good it is or how it would compare to Dynaudio’s Confidence C1.
Insofar as your amp choices go, you’ve narrowed it down to what appears to be a good group, though, again, I can’t tell you anything about the ACE or the M-One since we have not received review samples yet. We have reviewed a few Devialet amps, mind you, and they have been off the charts in terms of how well they perform. Compare them all if you can.
About SAM and room-correction programs -- they’re not the same thing. SAM was developed by Devialet and stands for Speaker Active Matching. Its goal it to correct inherent bass errors that pretty much every loudspeaker exhibits. To do so, the people at Devialet must measure a loudspeaker and create a specific profile for it that the DSP section in their amps use. Supposedly, they have SAM profiles for over 700 speaker models now. You can turn SAM on or off, which is handy. However, SAM doesn’t run on anyone else’s amps. What room-correction systems do is correct for the behavior of a loudspeaker or loudspeakers in a specific room, so that’s not the same as what SAM is doing, which is really speaker correction. Some room-correction programs run on computers, while others are built into components. The M-One seems to have a room-correction system built in, but I don’t know what it is or what it’s capable of doing. I hope that helps. . . . Doug Schneider
