CAS5 - Day 1 - Classical Music View - Three Rooms
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| Posted on August 15, 2014 at 20:39:08 | ||
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Posts: 26476
Location: SF Bay Area Joined: February 17, 2004 Contributor Since: February 6, 2012 |
I spent only a couple of hours at CAS5 today. The parking at the Westin was full and I had to find another lot which turned out to be considerably more expensive per hour. Grr! I visited only three rooms. Starting the day by visiting the Music Lovers Audio room (featuring Audio Research electronics, Transparent Cable, and the Wilson Sasha W/P Series 2’s), I had a bit of a shock in the sense that this was the best Wilson exhibit at CAS I’ve seen. (And AFAIR, I’ve been to all of the CAS’s so far.) The previous Wilson exhibit that sticks in my mind is a year or two ago when they demo-ing in a much larger room and with a much higher-end model pair than the Sashas. What made that older exhibit distinctly unimpressive in my view was the use of source material that was IMHO far from state of the art: early London/Decca LP’s. (I remember that one of the tracks featured pianist Peter Katin, and there was some very early, pre-Chicago Solti too – not the VPO Ring Cycle however!) I’m sorry, as holistic and well recorded for their time as those recordings invariably are, they just do not challenge SOTA systems like the best modern recordings do, so I just saw the whole demo as wasteful and unimpressive. Today’s demo was in a smaller room – I walked in during the playback of some organ music I didn’t recognize (to demonstrate the reproduction of the instrument’s 32-foot stop). The music continued with a new cut from 72-year-old Tom Jones (he of the animal magnetism!). Peter McGrath then asked the listeners (about 6 of us), “What music would you like to hear?”. I couldn’t resist answering, “We’re audiophiles – we listen to sound – not music!”. For whatever reason, Peter then put on the first movement of Mahler’s Fifth – very well played and recorded. After a few minutes, I asked him whose recording this was. It turned out to be Michael Tilson Thomas – NOT with the San Francisco Symphony however, but with (Florida) New World Symphony. This was a recording that Peter had made himself at 24/88.2. He had actually recorded in 4-channel, but the demo was set up only for regular stereo. After awhile, just to prove he had really recorded in surround, he fed the rear channels into the two front stereo speakers that we were hearing. It was as if you had moved far back into the hall and then turned around with your back to the orchestra. “Some listeners prefer it this way!”, he joked! In any case, the sound was amazing, especially considering that there was no mix-down of the rear channels into the original front channel sound that we heard. Very impressive! Next he played an excerpt (again his own recording at 24/88.2) from a recent Florida recital by pianist Benjamin Grosvenor: the Waltz from Gounod’s “Faust”, transcribed for piano by Liszt. As we’ve mentioned on this board just recently, Grosvenor has the chops to play anything, and overall, this was an excellent performance (even though I felt that the melodic eighth-notes in the introduction were consistently under-accented – they hardly registered as they should have, and they were played the same way when they returned later in the piece). The rep from Music Lovers Audio (sorry, I forgot his name) made a comment about the piano being used, and Peter revealed that the piano had had some significant work done on it recently. To give us a taste of what the piano sounded like prior to this work, he then played another of his own recordings of an earlier recital by Grosvenor: the slow movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E-flat, Op. 7 (not repertoire I would have associated with Grosvenor thus far in his career). There was a very noticeable difference in the piano tone, caused not only by the different states of the piano itself, but also by the different microphone placement in the two recitals. At this point I began to feel that I was hogging the “sweet spot seat” (first row, dead center), so I got up and moved to the back, and left shortly thereafter. It was hard to believe I had been there almost an hour. Overall, I was more impressed than I’ve ever been before by the sound quality of the Wilson speakers, even though these Sashas seem to be from the more “affordable” end of the Wilson line. I was also impressed with the willingness of Peter and the Music Lovers Audio rep to go into unhurried detail regarding the speakers themselves and the source material. This was one of the most pleasant experiences I’ve had at an audio show. My next visit was to the Ultimate Audio Sound Lab Room, with electronics by Ayre. What a surprise – I had seen photos of the Sound Lab Majestic speakers, but I somehow hadn’t extrapolated what I’d read into a realistic mental conception of their actual size. These babies are nine-feet tall! We would have to have our 8-and-a-half-foot ceiling taken out for them to fit in our living room. (Good thing we’re not in the market right now for a $40,000+ pair of speakers anyway!) They sounded wonderful, but they were just too big for the room (which was about half the size of the room with the Wilson/AR set-up – although both rooms had sufficiently high ceilings – LOL!). Also, I felt that the volume level was a bit too high for the size of the room. The source material here was a Delos recording of singer Sandra Radvanovsky in the aria from Verdi’s “Il trovatore”, “Tacea la notte placida”, with the Philharmonia of Russia, Constantine Orbelian conducting. I had not heard Radvanovsky before, but this excerpt makes me want to investigate her work further – this is a pretty imposing voice! I’m sure that in the right environment, these Majestics would sound great, but, just in summary, I felt they overwhelmed that small room. I next moved on to an even smaller room, which contained a pair of smaller speakers, the Magico S5’s, with Spectral electronics and MIT cabling. The source material was an audiophile favorite: the Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dance No. 1 with Eiji Oue and the Minnesota Orchestra (in their more halcyon days!) on a Reference recording. I have a 24/96 hi-rez download of this performance, so I’m pretty familiar with it. Here, it seemed to me that there was the opposite problem from the Sound Lab room in that the level was a bit too low, with not enough sound pumped out. This low-level was especially noticeable because of the open door and the sound of the louder music from a couple of adjoining rooms spilling into this room. From what I could hear, these speakers sounded airy and detailed, but perhaps a little bass shy (could be a function of level however). As is my usual habit, I did not sample rooms which were not playing classical music when I passed by (too hard for me to judge with music I don’t know), so I hope to get to other demo rooms over the next couple of days as the musical selections get swapped and updated. I don’t have any photos from today, but I did convince my wife (against her better judgment!) to attend on Sunday. She’s the photographer in the family, so perhaps I can post some of her shots after the end of the show on Sunday.
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| As of right now, it's looking good! [nt] ;-), posted on August 17, 2014 at 00:25:07 | |
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Posts: 26476
Location: SF Bay Area Joined: February 17, 2004 Contributor Since: February 6, 2012 |
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| If I get there today, my wife will take pics [nt], posted on August 17, 2014 at 09:25:06 | |
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Posts: 26476
Location: SF Bay Area Joined: February 17, 2004 Contributor Since: February 6, 2012 |
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| Thanks again, Chris! (And thank your wife, too!) ;-) (nt), posted on August 17, 2014 at 23:14:15 | |
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Posts: 2831
Location: San Francisco, California Joined: February 24, 2001 |
nt
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