SBAF & Schittr-less CC Meet Round Two: Part 1, or the Night I Spent at Erro's

Caution: This is gonna be long and boring. If you're expecting impressions from the actual meet, that'll be in part 2, so you can go ahead and wait for that one and skip this one if you want.

The three-and-a-half-hour drive to Austin was rather unremarkable. Plains, some slight hilly regions, little elevation change—the same flat, green open field, sometimes cow-filled scenery from the window of my SUV, barb-wire fences enclosing wide open spaces that are owned by some anonymous oilman or the bank—it’s Texas after all—endless highways, but great for going 90mph and just thinkin’ on things.

Once I got there, that’s when the fun started, @Erroneous is a casual, gracious host, makes you feel completely at ease when you meet him—you can tell the moment you shake his hand he’s now your friend: a man of integrity, straight shooting, fundamentally honest, but with a youthful hint of impishness that imparts a, let’s say, coloration to his funny as f**k dry humor.

I got there around 7:30pm, he had already made sloppy joes and mac ’n’ cheese and a seat at the dinner table awaited me. I met his wife and kid, both of whom had already eaten by the time I arrived, just as the sun had set.

We had planned for me to drive up there a little earlier, around 1pm, but my psychoanalysis session got in the way, so I left directly after it at 3:20pm. As an aside, my therapist was thrilled I was going, as I generally hate driving and barely leave my room much at all (in a terminally online, hermit mode kind of way), so this was already a big W.

He told me to write some impressions of the meet, so here I am, writing as an exercise, hopefully it will be at least mildly entertaining to folks here who may have never met Erro or @ColtMrFire or been to a Schiit meet. My gear impressions will be limited by my sonic lexicon, so if you’re here for anything else but to waste time, you should nope out now. Hopefully Erro and Colt don’t mind my rough sketches of them and the Schiit dudes, of the meet. If one of you do, please let me know and I’ll delete this little bit of nothing!

After dinner, we got to listen to his vinyl-fed speaker setup for a bit, before his son had to be in bed for school the next day.

First up was a Stevie Ray Vaughn song I’ll probably always remember quite clearly, I had never heard the song before, but it was so gorgeously rendered by Erro’s impressive vinyl setup—a VPI Classic 30th anniversary TT with DL-301MKII cartridge into Allnic H-1202 phono stage into Icon 4 Zen AVC into a “maxxed out” Elekit TU-8800 (that @tommytakis built) into modified Klipsch Quartet speakers.

The soundstage was particularly breathtaking, the plucks of guitar seemed to trail across the room, inviting one to imagine the recording room or venue in which he played. His voice was ethereal in an actually good way, haunted the room like a phantom, it was warm, inviting and beautiful.

I was hooked, thought for myself, I know there’s no way I could a) spend that kind of scratch, b) have the room for that kind of setup or one like it, c) have a living situation in which a use case for a vinyl rig like his makes sense.

Also, and this is a pretty big one, I don’t even own any records lmao. But it’s nice to dream, no? One day, perhaps all that will change and I’ll relegate my headphone setup to secondary duties like a lot of you guys.

We listened to something else but I forgot what it was, maybe Pink Floyd? My memory is p bad these days (thanks AP!), much more so for songs I’m not familiar with.

But he knew I liked Big Thief so he threw on the excellent U.F.O.F., and insisted that I sit the “good spot”, the middle of the couch, and I was sat there in awe of what I was hearing. Erro even mentioned that he thought most Big Thief records sound rather compressed, but me, a vinyl-fed 2 channel virgin, heard none of that compression, I only heard, hands down, the best sonic representation of that the record that I have ever had the privilege of hearing.

After his son went to bed, we switched his digital rig, which consisted of a Roon sent to a Pi2AES that fed into a Holo May KTE (in NOS mode), which fed both a DNA Stellaris with Elrog rectifier (and some other primo tubes) and a Moth prototype with some expensive looking tubes, and a shitton of Sennheisers, seriously, like 6 or 7 rare af Sennheiser 6x0 series hp, and his 3K SN JAR800v1, which he told me he uses the most.



We drank whiskey, I—whiskey and brown soda, and him some mystery drink in a silver tumbler, perhaps straight whiskey with ice? He’s a pirate, after all, so that would make sense.

Now onto the gear, what you actually want to hear about: the audio gear was something of a surprise, and I mean that in both a good and bad way.

The Stellaris with Erro’s JAR800v1s was extremely pleasing, euphonically wet, with just the right amount of bloom, and was tonally warm, again, just enough warmth, but with my JAR600B, I thought the sound was a little too rounded. I’m not sure why it worked so well with his 800v1, but it really did. I also got the chance to demo a rare black paper 650 along with not one but two white paper 580s on the Stellaris, both of which were beautiful. In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “if you have the means, I highly recommend one [Stellaris].”



And then there was the curveball—his Moth Prototype OTL, or an amp Craig cobbled together from spare parts (only @purr1n knows the full lore behind this amp). It was a shining example of synergy with my JAR600B, which sounded open, expansively large, with pure gorgeous tonez and exquisite spatial cuing and layering.



I loved this amp, Erro at one point, after his second drink, offered to sell it to me, but I declined, before he offered, he told me he intends to modify the coupling caps and other capacitors on it in order to get it to sound more “clear”. He, knowing I’m only working with a Piety, he is just that kind of guy—to offer a TOTL amp at the same price he bought it for when he really didn’t even want to sell it.

I couldn’t take advantage of his kindness though; I was already staying at his home! And he was driving us to CC, and back, and I didn’t know this, but he also paid for most everything.

He did tell me a story about selling his Stratus v3 to someone else in need of a good amp, and stuck with his ZDS instead while on the wait list for his Stellaris, even though he preferred the sound of the Stratus, I’ve said it before but I will say it again, this time in an official, if boring thread, he just a mensch like that.

Well, what did the Moth sound like to me? It was warm, threw a huge stage, had an addictive tone, and was slammy when called for. What else could one ask for? However, it wasn’t super detailed in the microdynamics dept.

Erro has an odd habit of holding eye contact a bit too long for comfort, which is both endearing, in its almost childlike innocence, and intimidating at the same time, as he has the frame of a Celtic giant (the man stands at least 6’4” tall) one that should only exist in mythical, prehistoric times, like the Nephilim.

His mustache adds to the flavor of puckish piracy that he exudes, he does his own thing and that’s good enough for him, he’s not one to buy into FOTM in anything, much less audio, and he went straight for what he knew he’d like, after churning gear and finding out his preferences. I respect that. I want to emulate that, only without the gear churn, I’d love to go to more Austin/Taco-Fi meets and hear more setups, esp. @famish99’s setup and others.

Well, that’s Erro, from my pov.

We both stayed up to about 1:30am exchanging the Roon controls for music, swapping headphones, switching amps, and then he went to bed, having to be up at 6 to take his kid to school. I had an article to work on for my job, and I wasn’t yet quite tired, so he offered to let me stay up and listen to his setup while I worked. I definitely took advantage of this. I stayed up an extra couple of hours listening so critically to the setup that my article had a bunch of clerical/grammatical errors in it. Oh well, that’s why my boss (who is also coincidentally my ex) has Grammarly. But it was a learning experience, for sure, since the highest end amp I had demoed in the past was the SW51+ (thanks @yotacowboy! You’re legendary, mate).

I fell asleep on his couch after I couldn’t possibly listen anymore (that’s a lie, I was just drunk and tired, I could have listened way more).

Day 2: Drive and Meet

Since this is already so long, I’ll cut right to the chase (if you ever wondered where this little turn of phrase came from, it’s from Old Hollywood, when movies tended to end in an exciting chase scene, and was first used in 1929!): we’ll skip the boring drive to CC and begin our scene at the meet in part 2. Exeunt.

 

this is absolutely in the style of @Thomas Seok Hwan Kong's stream of consciousness thread lol.