“Big room, small problems.” Big room, BIG system.

It all began in the usual manner, with an email from John McGurk from Audioshield Audio Distribution: “Reaching out to see if you would be interested in reviewing any of our products…” This led to a phone call and the offer to review what is essentially the system I saw and heard at Axpona 2022. This system is fronted by the Credo Cinema LTM Loudpseakers, which are clearly a Barn-sized affair.

“Yes!” (OK, that’s a bit of a condensed version of my response but it gets us here):

Audioshield is located in NJ, Credo Audio Switzerland is from where the name says, while EMM Labs is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. John loaded up his truck and trailer, Credo’s CEO/Director Michael Kraske flew in, and they drove to the Barn.

My back owes John (left) and Michael a debt of gratitude for setting everything up, including the EMM Labs MTRX/2 mono amplifiers that weigh a formidable 180 lbs. a piece. These stately beasts deliver 1KW of solid-state Class A/B power into 4 Ohms. That’s one kilowatt. That’s one thousand Watts.

The Credo Cinema LTM loudspeakers very cleverly come in three separate pieces and go together surprisingly quickly, especially if you’re just watching.

The “Cinema LTM” is a passive filtered 3-way floor-standing speaker, with line-array technology. Each speaker comes with 32 ring radiator tweeters. A textile membrane with a diameter of 22 mm was installed in a special, extremely compact housing with neodymium drive. This allowed us to mount the tweeters extremely close to each other, which is absolutely essential for a high-performance line array. The distance is only 0.7 mm.

The fourteen high-end mid-woofers feature a 4″ Kevlar diaphragm and a low-loss drive with neodymium magnets. We use our proprietary high-pass filters, so they play at very low-distortion even at high SPL and down to 100 Hz.

In addition, four passive 12″ subwoofers with almost 60 mm stroke are installed per loudspeaker. Thanks to our proprietary crossovers, the unique 4″ mid-woofer and the special tweeter design, we were able to create a loudspeaker with incredible dynamic range, whose distortion values are extremely low.

The rest of the stack is comprised of the EMM Labs PRE Reference Preamplifier, EMM Labs DA2 DAC, and EMM Labs NS1 Streamer. Cabling from Van den Hul ties everything together.

Here’s the shopping list:

Credo Cinema LTM Loudspeakers: $199,995 EMM Labs MTRX/2 Amplifiers: $85,000 EMM Labs PRE Reference Preamplifier: $25,000 EMM Labs DA2 Reference D/A Converter: $30,000 EMM Labs NS1 Streamer: $4500 Van den Hul Cumulus Loudspeaker Cable: 2.5M (2-2 Stereo Pair) $6735 Van den Hul 3T Rock Interconnects (XLR): $699/1M

The setup process for the Cinema LTM loudspeakers includes a suite of measurements followed by listening followed by more measurements. Credo’s Michael Kraske provides this setup for every Cinema LTM owner, and I’ll be digging into the process and the Cinema LTM in a future post.

There’s clearly a lot of ground to cover with any system, especially this system, which will happen in a series of posts, culminating in a complete system review and a Listening in the Barn video. Consider this the amuse-bouche.

Audioshield Audio Distribution Credo Audio Switzerland EMM Labs Van den Hul

Listening in the Barn 2 (Video): Marten Parker Trio, Constellation Inspiration Integrated 1.0, and more…

Bluesound’s POWERNODE EDGE: the Budget POWERNODE

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