Audition Sessions

Hi everyone! thanks for taking a look at my new website! My company is in its infancy, and I am still looking for an audio shop to carry my speakers. In the meantime, however, if you are in Canberra, or will be in the near future, you can drop by my house and have a listen for yourself. This is not a creepy post; I have been happily married for the past 16 years and have a teenage child. I just want to extend an opportunity to anyone who would like to listen the finest pair of audio speakers I have ever listened to hear the mesas for themselves. Yes, I have a bias, but I have an extremely high-end system in total, and I have auditioned, B&W, Kef, Thiel, Martin Logan, and my last pair of speakers before the Mesas, Legacy Audio–Whisper.

When I bought the Legacy’s my audio genius friend who is a magician with electronics suggested that we rebuild the crossover network and upgrade the wiring. So, we took the existing crossover from the 17kUSD speakers and took the values from it. We replaced the horrible magnet core inductors and cheap caps, with 12-gauge copper foil inductors and used Multicap film and foil caps, their copper caps at $300/USD for a 2-microfarad cap, and Mundorf silver/gold caps. We then removed the literal lamp cord from the cabinet and replaced it with Nordost SPM reference speaker wire, and paralleled this wire with LAT International speaker wire for the woofers and mids, and 5 nines pure silver wire, with the LAT and the Nordost for the midrange drivers. Above the mids, the mid tweeter started at 3k Hz, so no need for deep bass wire, just silver. This goes for the super tweeter as well. What we did not do, was create a new crossover that was a 4th order crossover instead of the existing 2nd order crossover. Two reasons for that: no manufacturer we could find in 1998 used a 4th order so it did not occur to us, and when we calculated the space that we could use inside of the cabinet many years later, there was not nearly enough space to put a crossover that would have been two to three times larger than the original one.

Many years later, we have designed the Mesas with enough space to fit in a 4th over crossover, that is wired with a clone of Nordost Valhalla wire. Ironically, when I bought a pair of Valhalla clones from Ali Express, for $72.00 including shipping, I thought it could not possibly work. Not only did it work, it surpassed my genuine Valhalla speaker cables by a giant margin. Further inspection revealed the Chinese manufacturer had actually followed the Nordost process perfectly. However, they used a silver plated 20awg conductors instead of the 24 awg that the original Valhalla used. Stripping the clone wire revealed that the clone company had actually done an even better jog than Nordost had done. First, when you set your wire stripper for 16 awg, the over shrouding Teflon comes away from the inner individual tubing surrounding each conductor cleanly, they are not fused to the inner tubes. Then when you set your stripper to 20 awg, the conductor with a healthy large spacer, is so precisely wired that you can see the tiny indentions in the wire that the spacer made. This reveals that this cable was made to Nordost standards, exceeded the sound quality of the original Valhalla’s, and is a fantastic cable in itself.

Sorry for the long winded post, but I am passionate about my speakers and if you have the time and the opportunity, please contact me via email or phone to arrange a listening session.

Cheers,

David