Master of Sound with Everett Porter at Chattelin Audio June 29, 2018
 

A couple of weeks ago, we were invited to a very special event.

Everett Porter is the lead recording and audio engineer of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam since more than 14 years.
He also recorded for the Wiener Philharmoniker, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Lucerne Festival Academy, etc.

When I asked him if he had also recorded for some known orchestras, he had to laugh.

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My wife and I photographed, but we only took our phones, so please excuse us.

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Chattelin Audio Systems is not a large store, but they aim to bring the high end to the people.
Situated in a nice neighbourhood in Den Haag (The Hague).

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You will certainly recognise some well known brands in the artsy pics of my better half.

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We started the evening with a nice Indonesian buffet.

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This is me talking to Ben van Leliveld, the man from Acousticmatters, a company that gives advice and executes room treatment (review in the make!).
He is now also one of the owners of Chattelin Audio.
And he bought the young label trptk, that makes fantastic recordings.

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Who said cables don't matter?! :D

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Porter examined a lot of speaker brands for his recording and mastering studio in the Concertgebouw.
Finally he chose these Grimm LS1 monitors in a 5.0 set-up.

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Chattelin wanted to do better and installed and tuned a 5.0 system with LS1be monitors.

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Everett Porter is a very agreeable, entertaining person, talking with visible passion about his beautiful profession.
The evening was full of anecdotes.
The crowd was hanging at his lips.

Here's Ben introducing him:

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As you see, focus was on the music, not on the image (small 32" screen).
But the images helped us to understand what a sound engineer can suffer when the solo soprano moves all over the scene.
We enjoyed immensely the recordings with this fascinating diva:

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Another passionate and gifted man: Eelco Grimm, creative director of Grimm Audio.
He was also enjoying the event.

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Everett Porter showed us how the mastering is done.

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Equipment: Merging Nadac and Grimm Audio.
There is a consumer version of this DAC, that piqued my interest (one of the best DACs for surround on the market?).
Source: the DXD files on Porter's PC.

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They used 2 kinds of connection: DXD into the Merging then analogue to the Grimms, and PCM 24/192 via the Merging digitally to the Grimms where the internal DACs did the conversion.
Both ways sounded extremely well.

The room was well treated, but absolutely not 'dead'.

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The Grimm LS1be.
It has a digital Motion Feedback upfiring woofer system.
More details on their website.
Very flat frequency response curve (down to 16 Hz!).

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I think the WAF is good.
Meta liked them, and they're rather small and not intrusive for a full range system.

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This is the link
http://www.grimmaudio.com/

;-)