Pete isn't a member here but we thought we'd post details of our session at his place, listening to his fascinating cinema-based system.  Perhaps we can persuade him to join us, too?

Pete's enormous Western Electric copy stereo horn cinema speaker, stood on two PA-style bass bins on their sides.  Speedy Steve (who is tall) standing next to it for scale.  Ribbon tweeters seen standing on the bass bins.



One compression driver feeding the left horn.



Power amp for the main horns.



Power amp for the ribbon tweeters.



Sony solid state amp driving the bass bins.



The system is listened to as a near-field speaker due to the small size of the room.  Stereo image is completely different with strong mono positioning and the tweeters providing some sense of space and air.  It's not what most of us would call a stereo image at all.  The sense of effortlessness is strong and most voice (male and female) are rendered with palpable detail.  We hit a snag with Hope Sondoval, though, who just sounded swimmy and boomy.  Otherwise delivery seemed very even no matter where we were in the room, a feature of good horn systems.

I thought the sound from vinyl (a rather nice Voyd deck with Alphason arm and strain gauge cartridge) outperformed Pete's Najda DAC and Tidal, although most of the digital material sounded very good.

I learned once again that there are many ways to skin a cat and this take on sound reproduction couldn't have been further from my system, yet I learned things from several familiar songs being played.

We finished the day with an absolutely top class curry in Hatfield, one of the best I've had in decades.  Thank you, Pete.