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RMAF 2015

Posted by Pjay (A) on October 5, 2015 at 18:08:18

Last year when I wrote up RMAF I dubbed it the Rocky Mountain Audio (Love) Fest. I see they have added "International" to the show so now it is the Rocky Mountain International (Love) Fest (but not RMILF).

This year as much as last I must say I still like this show and think it the best in the US. We owe our gratitude to the Rocky Mountain Audio Society and their fearless leader Marjorie Baumert. Why is this show different? My co-conspirators and I talked about this long and hard over a bevy of Avalanche beers and decided this show has three distinct differences. First, almost all the rooms are presented by manufacturers while other shows are presented by dealers. This means the people most interested, the movers and shakers, are at hand to meet and greet with the audio community and to assure their products are seen in the best light. We are meeting with the people who had the vision, built the products and founded the company. Second, I think this show draws more national over local participants. Many of the people are flying or driving long distances to RMAF. I always try to look at the name tags and Colorado was just a small part of the herd. Third, this show draws many of the smaller manufacturers so we can see not only who is at the top but the (mostly) good, (sometimes) bad and (very occasionally) ugly. Some of these are products that will be on top later and challenge the big boys. See it here first! This makes for an interesting show that brings international audio to the personal level. I love it.

As long as we are commenting in threes, I do have to three nits to pick here and rant a little before we get to the rooms. This year and every year we found a number of rooms simply poorly set up, playing ridiculous poorly recorded music or simply playing way too loud. I find it hard to believe some of these people sell anything. First the music: I am a pretty versatile guy when it comes to music and I can enjoy many genres. It is not the music genre that is my plaint but understanding how someone can honestly select such poorly recorded music and think it benefits their room. There must have been ten times this weekend when there was no chance of me staying or sitting in a room simply because of the music quality.

My second nit is music volume: What are you trying to prove here? If I am walking by and see a room that looks interesting I will walk in but many times I turn and leave before I get anywhere near the seat. I try to let one of the attendants know on the way out why I am leaving. They usually offer to turn it down but for me it is too late. If you are playing way to loud then I don't need to speak to you. You are either deaf or don't know good sound. We are not aligned.

My third nit is about room setup. I personally know this is a challenge as I had to set up a room at RMAF and at the Stereophile NY show some years back. It was a challenge but after walking the speakers around the room and one time stuffing a pile of pillows behind a curtain we did it. If I can do it then you can do it. It was not just the small businesses who had this problem. Some of the big boys had pretty poor sounding rooms while others with the same room configuration were doing just fine. Why is it that every year at every show Jeff Joseph can get his speakers to sound great? How is it that the Wilson rooms always sound great? Why does Focal get it right? This year the high crimes were the JBL and Revel rooms, both owned by Harmon. Harmon has the most resources of any company at this show and this is the second year they appear to have made make zero effort in producing good sound. Yes those horns looked great but I would not keep them sounding like that even if given to me. The other crime was the KEF room with the big blades. Someone in the room told me they could not get the image in place but he was not from KEF. Where was the KEF guy? Those are odd speakers and really should have the experts setting them up. The bottom line here is that it is shocking to see people put all the time and expense into this and not impress us. I really question some of these people on knowing good sound or not. I am picking on the big boys here but there were also a number of smaller manufacturers with poor results. Once again over beers we talked at length about this, there was a lot of beer this weekend. Next year we figure we can offset the cost of coming all the way from the east coast on our own dime by offering room setup consulting services. For ten bucks we will just tell you if your room sucks or not. For another ten we will tell you never to play that song again.

Enough ranting and let's move to the rooms.

Wilson/D'Agostino. Best in show for me. They had a wonderful warm natural sound with very clear image and separation. We were on there our third visit to the room and some woman started playing a series of LP tracks that simply blew me away. The King Singers "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" had a very fast close harmony about 2/3 the way through and you could hear every voice clearly and placed perfectly. I honestly did not know vinyl could do that. Neil Young never sounded better. At one point a song ended and I almost started clapping with the audience on the track. We could have stayed in this room all day. Wow. The new smaller Wilsons sounded great as well. I heard them in two different rooms, both very good.

Jeff Joseph. Another fine performance by Jeff. These were outstanding speakers with pretty good Bell Canto electronics and I don't know the server setup. I think something in the electronics pulled the speakers down just a little this time. Jeff's speakers are very articulate and I think this setup pushed them over the edge just a tad into the clinical range. Still outstanding bass not only for the size but for any sized speaker. They also have a very smooth balance top to bottom. I have heard these sounding better on other setups so no point off this time. I could be happy with these speakers.

Sander's room. I have heard these before and was unimpressed. It seems they came out with a new model last year. These were definitely the best electrostatics at the show. They produced a balanced rich sound without that upper mid harshness found in most electrostatics. They also had a good image, something else electrostatics sometimes struggle with. Here was a case where the setup person knew good sound and could hear the room and ended up with an asymmetrical speaker location with the listeners in tandem configuration. It worked for me.

Von Schweikert: I guess we were listening to the Aktiv. This was the first very good room we found on Friday and they were quite nice. The bass in the small room was a little elevated but just enough to make it fun without overpowering the room. The balance low to high was excellent, something I have found to be a challenge for active speakers. So high marks here. Consider that the more we move to server based listening the more attractive self-powered speakers will be, I think particularly to the younger audiophiles.

All the Focal rooms. Top to bottom all the Focals sounded very good. I think the big boys with the VAC amps, while excellent, were a little pulled back from how impressive they were at the 2012 show but that could have been my luck of the draw on the music. The medium unit also sounded what I would call very competent but not best in show. I did not feel drawn to stay in the Focal rooms like some of the other rooms.

ELAC el-cheapo: There was a lot of attention around Andrew Jones moving from TAD over to ELAC and then producing these $275 mini towers. These were quite impressive but when you read the reviews note that they are quite impressive -for the price-. They had solid bass that was pretty tight and respectable highs. The mids were good but not world class. So what do you want for $275? For any audiophile who wants to get their kids interested with their own gear this is a great option. If they paint them pink and put stickers on them you won't be angry. I would not class them as giant killers, just very good for the money. When I hear a cheap speaker this good I always wonder "what could you have done for another $100?"

Linkwitz: I am delighted that Sigfried chooses to put in the effort to get to RMAF. He is a small manufacturer and probably does not need the money in his retirement. I heard his Orion some years back in a home environment and was awed. This was the third show I have heard his speakers in a show format and while they were good they did not match that moment I had in the home environment. This year he has a new version of his open baffle speaker and it was very good. This is the only manufacturer I have heard year over year that has made open baffle work in the hotel room. The bass was clear and strong, the mids and highs were well done but a little clinical for me. I know these were probably room corrected and they ran off a special custom made digital crossover. So I suspect I was listening to a near perfect in room response but that came out just a little on the dry side. These come in kits and the whole speaker was around $3000, a steal for anyone wanting to move up. I am so tempted to get these just to compare to my current speakers.

McIntosh: One of the many eye-candy rooms. It was a good room this show and they had a lot of units on racks each with their own mission and they were all active in the main system. I think I counted nine devices, no turntable. This was the first room for us on Saturday and we were happy we started with a good room as Friday was a little weak. So the Macs look great and the room sounded very good. They had a full sound with good integration from the real speakers to the array of those toy drivers. No complaints here. It was interesting in that from here we went from the Mac room to the Joseph room which blew away the Mac room for about 1/5 the cost. I would love to hear Jeff's speakers on the Mac system. McIntosh should not be in the speaker business anyway.

Kimber room: We are talking about the big Martin Logans/EMT (?) here. I understand he had another room but I did not get to it. I love what Ray brings to every show. Here is someone who pushes the envelope every year, sometimes for better and sometimes not. This year I thought the rooms sounded very natural and mostly balanced top to bottom. I could hear the difference between the woofer and the plates but only a little. I have always felt there a little congestion in the upper mids of ML speakers and, psycho-sematic or not, I heard it here. Other than that the room was really in the mood of "does it get any better than this?" Did you see those monster amps?

YG Acoustics: Another year another yawn. I am totally aware of how awed everyone is over these speakers but once again they did nothing for me in any of the rooms. Sorry. You can pound on the "reply" link now and trash me.

Magico: As long as I am asking for trouble I will note that the Magico room did nothing for me this year either. I usually like them a lot but I got off to a bad start when I walked in and the purveyor was in a 500 hour description of the product and what we should be listening for. He was holding an LP and would motion toward the TT and then jump back to cover some salient point he missed. By the time the music started I was mentally vacant.

Zu also was a non-starter for me this trip. I have liked them in the past but for some reason none of the Zu rooms did it for me this trip. I think poor setup in both rooms.

KEF Blades: Another speaker everyone likes and I just don't get. I must be deef. In this room we could not find the image at all and it just got kind of mushy in the center. I am also pretty sure I could hear the exchange from the low mid driver to the high mid driver, not a smooth transition. On top of that I heard a little congestion in the upper mids which may have been a due to the missed imaging.

I am not a "can" person but it was a fun walk through CanJam. Someone else has to write up this section.

I find it interesting taking the past 12 years of RMAF in perspective. The early years were all about CD and SACD with nary a turntable in sight. Then we saw the mad rush of turntables with them in almost every room. Some years back I was having a beer with some guy who said he just opened a TT company and was thrilled to be in the US at the show. Continuum. Just a few years ago everyone was talking about servers and most of us swearing we would never own one. Now we rarely find a CD player in the place. This year I found that if the room did not have a CD player that many times the server had my tracks anyway, just ask. This was a good thing as there is nothing more tentative than a manufacturer taking your CD and asking which track you want. So many times they about play garbage and lose the people in the room or have some guy like me write them up for playing poor quality music. If it is on their server they know where they are headed. Just a few years ago we were hearing the first "high-end" class-D amps, another technology we all swore we would never own. Today class-D is common and mostly accepted. I think we simply do not like change. What is the next? Where to next?

P

As I slowly slip into the dark cesspool of audiophalia neurosis. . . .

My speaker building site

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