Jason Victor Serinus

Kerem Kücükaslan, whose surname means “Little Lion,” was born in Istanbul, where he resides for at least part of the year. Fluent in English, he received his BS in industrial engineering at WPI and a minor degree at MIT.

Kücükaslan founded Echole four years ago in New Hampshire. On display at T.H.E. Show was the complete line of Obsession Signature: speaker cable ($11,000/6ft pair), interconnects ($7500/3ft pair), and power cords ($6850/6ft).

Parts for Echole’s two cable lines, Echole Obsession and Echole Obsession Signature, are manufactured in both the US and Turkey. The wire, which is manufactured in Japan, consists of a proprietary ratio of silver, gold, and palladium. (The Obsession line has less gold and palladium that the Obsession Signature).

Nominated for a 2017 Grammy Award for "Best Classical Compendium," ECM's Gesualdo pairs arrangements of the haunting music of Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (1566–1613) with Gesualdo-inspired works by living composers Brett Dean (b. 1961) and Erkki-Sven Tüür (b. 1959). If at least one of those contemporary works, performed by Tõnu Kaljuste's justly famed Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, is not exactly what you'd expect, the "compendium" as a whole is unfailingly beautiful and engaging.

The sound was especially alluring in the Eficion/Stillpoint/Berning/Exemplar room. On display were Eficion F-250 loudspeakers ($8950/pair), Berning Quadrature Z 200W ZOTL monoblocks ($33,000/pair), Exemplar XP2 preamplifier ($12,999, and due for a new chassis of zero-absorption stablewood), Exemplar Expo multi-player ($2500), Stillpoints Isolation System rack ($4800), and prototype power cords, interconnects, and speaker wire. The beauty of Oscar Peterson's playing on First Impression Music's (FIM) We Get Reports, and the rawness of 96/24 Pink Floyd master tracks, left me both wanting to hear the Eficion F-250s at Casa Bellecci-Serinus, and lusting for a Stillpoints rack. The music was so compelling that I was left wondering what the larger, two-piece Eficion F-300 loudspeaker, which I've enthusiastically blogged on other occasions, would sound like when Stillpoints isolation is used under the speaker and between its two boxes.

Here shown in striking white, the F300 is a 3-way, two section ported loudspeaker whose two sections hold a total of four drivers. (The supertweeter is hidden in back.) The F300 boasts a frequency response of 25Hz–40kHz and, with the right jumper cables between its two sections, an especially warm midrange. Special to this loudspeaker is its Heil Air Motion Transformer tweeter, which produces striking detail.