Belated Report on CAS-6 last weekend
73.222.105.47 |
||
| Posted on August 19, 2015 at 22:04:39 | ||
|
Posts: 26483
Location: SF Bay Area Joined: February 17, 2004 Contributor Since: February 6, 2012 |
In fact, this is a VERY belated report with far less scope than my report from last year. Sorry in advance - think of it as a tiny vignette of the show! I attended all three days, although I didn't stay too long on Sunday. What makes this show more and more fun is that I get to meet and talk with more "virtual friends" from here at AA and from SA-CD.net every year, and they become real friends in the course of attending the demos and discussing music, audio, and life in general (as well as having lunch in the middle of it all)! As was the case last year, I met up with Ivan303 (moniker only - not his real name!), who is a aficionado of of all things tubular and hornular. This year, at least on Saturday, we had another couple of folks join us: tgr (Tom Ream) from here at AA (who also brought his lovely wife, Denise) and euell neverno from SA-CD.net. I confess I did not know that euell's name was actually a moniker - especially since I kept pronouncing the last name with an accent on the second syllable. My bad! My wife, Madeline, also attended on Saturday and took some pics of some of the rooms we visited. Unfortunately, something is not allowing me to embed her jpg's the way I usually do in my normal posts, so I'm forced to use links instead of actually embedding her pics. Burwell and Sons - Beautiful Cabinet Work The Tape Project - Playback Machine I think I must be mellowing out, because I actually enjoyed most of the rooms we visited. But it was hard for me to judge the tape project room, since the tape didn't land on any classical selections while I was there. ;-) The Burwell and Sons horn speakers were also at the show last year when I was sitting in the sweet spot, so I got a good impression of them - even though I've never owned a horn speaker in my life! Maybe our resident horn enthusiast (Ivan303) would like to comment! ;-) Grant Fidelity Audio - 1 Grant Fidelity Audio - 2 We got a real surprise when we went to the room shared by Grant Fidelity and a few other companies, and Ivan303 began to examine the tubes on display. He soon got into a discussion with a woman who seemed to know all there was to know about tubes! As they got into the conversation, the two of them began throwing out tube designations at a mile a minute. It turned out that this was Rachel @ Grant Fidelity, who now runs the company. Very impressive indeed! I'm sorry to sound sexist, but you just don't expect this level of audio knowledge from a woman! ;-) The last thing Rachel said to us as we left was that if you buy certain tubes and hold on to them, you can probably outgain the stock market when you sell them back! LOL! Bricasti - 1 Bricasti - 2 One room that got lots of buzz was the Bricasti exhibit, where the musical selections included the new Channel Classics Mahler 9 with Fischer and the BFO. The Peter Takacs performance of the Beethoven Piano Sonata in E-flat (Op. 31 No.3) was also featured. This recording provoked one comment from a guy behind me: "Hearing the ambiance in that room and how the piano interacts with it. . . it's like feeling the road as you floor it in your Maserati!" Uh. . . yeah!. . . right! ;-) We did not go to all the rooms, but it was interesting that three of the rooms we visited all played the same selection, the "Dance of the Tumblers" from Rimsky-Korsakov's opera, "The Snow Maiden". I couldn't help but think that, since R-K is my favorite composer, the NSA must have alerted each room as I was about to enter! (At least they were different performances - Pletnev/RNO on Pentatone and Oue/Minnesota or Reference.) Another strange coincidence was that we heard the Janis/Dorati performance of the Rachmaninoff Third in two different rooms - one on vinyl, and one on a ripped SACD. GamuT RS3 Speaker - 1 GamuT RS3 Speaker - 2 I must say that one of my favorite rooms this year was the GamuT room - where they exhibited their small-sized RS3. (I think Madeline liked this room too - not least because the speaker sizes were so small!) I was impressed by their gapless and stable coverage of the sound field, as well as by the fact that they went as low as 35Hz. Euell thought that there must have been some pre-amp equalization help for the bass. But whatever it was, it was certainly a great sound from these little guys (with a big price tag however!). As for the presentations, I enjoyed seeing Mark Waldrep (Aix recordings) again (Ivan303 and I attended his lecture on Friday), and was amused by his discussion with Ivan303 and me as he left the show on Friday. (I'm pretty much in agreement with Mark on things digital, but Ivan303 was a bit less so - LOL!) I was also there earlier on Sunday and was disappointed that Mark had already packed up his table and left by the time I stopped by. On Saturday, we heard a talk by the venerable Keith ("Prof.") Johnson, who discussed how he prepares for recording, with all the myriad details he thinks of, including, at the very beginning, checking the score(s) of the music to be performed - all the better to anticipate any potential problems, such as who should be sitting next to whom, etc. I was very impressed by this talk and can understand why his Reference Recordings are so highly esteemed by audiophiles (including me)! I also heard a couple of talks on Sunday, one by speaker designer Andrew Jones (also VERY informative and interesting!).  BTW, I obtained a Reference recording at their table - the HRx 24/176.4 WAV file data disc of Hindemith, Prokofiev and Bartok works in performances by Michael Stern (Isaac's son!) and the Kansas City Symphony. Reference almost always does a fantastic job with their engineering, although I don't think some of the newer efforts with the Pittsburgh Symphony (done by Soundmirror) have been quite as good as the Keith Johnson / Tam Henderson efforts which comprise most of their catalog. One striking thing about this year's show (and it could have been due to pure chance or exactly when we happened to walk in to a particular room) is that NONE of the audio companies in rooms we visited was demo'ing equipment with the traditional audiophile-favorite "little girl with guitar" recordings! LOL! - What's going on? That's all - just a brief souvenir! ;-)
|
|
| Maybe next year? [nt], posted on August 21, 2015 at 00:05:28 | |
|
Posts: 26483
Location: SF Bay Area Joined: February 17, 2004 Contributor Since: February 6, 2012 |
|
| RE: Belated Report on CAS-6 last weekend, posted on August 21, 2015 at 12:59:39 | |
|
Posts: 15524
Location: Alabama Joined: September 11, 2010 |
Thanks! for sharing- Chris. Excellent pics as well!
|
| Thanks - good to know! [nt], posted on August 21, 2015 at 20:58:20 | |
|
Posts: 26483
Location: SF Bay Area Joined: February 17, 2004 Contributor Since: February 6, 2012 |
|
