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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: anyone at the montreal audio show posted by rosconey on April 2, 2005 at 12:51:07:
For me the show was a lesson in the realities of the bell curve. It was the first show I'd been to, and even though I was careful to do my expectation-lowering exercises beforehand, I found there is no exectation so low that it cannot be undercut.I have to admit that I didn't give most rooms the benefit of the doubt. My analysis by and large consisted of sticking my head in the door and saying "Sucks. Next!" I was pulled by good classical music and anything acoustic - especially blues. I was driven away by dark rooms with "TV screens on Viagra", and rooms that sounded like a Honda Civic with fart pipes being driven by a cracked-up 20 year old with his gimme hat on backwards - you know the sound: "Whoom Fuppa Whoom Fuppa..." This cynical approach may have caused me to miss a whole lot of rooms that actually had great sound. Or maybe not.
About that bell curve thing - there were in fact a couple of rooms way over to the right of the curve that rang my bell.
One outstanding one was the Globe Marketing room, featuring Audio Aero Prestige amps and SACD, running into Wiener Lautsprecher Manufaktur speakers (Lyras, I think). Wonderful, magical, smooth, sweet, open, realistic sound - I was enchanted from a foot past the threshold. It was the only room I went back to, just to reassure myself that the sound was as wonderful as I had thought, and to take a break from all the Hondas. I talked to a dealer later who said the speakers would never gain a toehold in Canada because of their name. What audiophile with $20K to spend wants to walk into a showroom and say "I'd like to hear a pair of Wieners"? Maybe that's why I've seen other reviewers studiously referring to them as "WLM" speakers... No matter, they deserve to succeed because the sound is magick.
Another room I thoroughly enjoyed was the totally homebrew-looking room involving Poth cables et al. It's referenced in a post above, with a picture of the system - big maple plank panels with bent-back wings housing big-ass bass drivers in cutouts for a dipole configuration, mated to a pair of Dr. Edgar's turned wood horns and a couple of teeny-weeny ribbon tweeters in beautiful carved and lacquered housings. These monsters were driven by an even more Frankensteinian assembly of amps, crossovers and buffers, all given over to the noble cause of pumping out Billy Idol and Bob Seeger from an old LP12. The sense of "doing it for fun" was palpable in the room, and the sound wasn't anywhere near as bad as it could have been (from what I heard, getting really bad sound at this show required an investment of at least $100,000).
I was also swept off my feet by the little flying saucer CD player from Shanling - it looked like a cross between and Oracle and one of those previously mentioned Hondas - you know, the ones with the blue neon tubes underneath to light up the road. The look was totally cool, and the sound was first-class.
The vast middle of the bell curve was an equally vast wasteland of same-old same-old. Poorly set up rigs with speakers that were too small, driven by indifferent elecronics, playing music that someone must have thought was interesting but I sure didn't. Clue up guys, Harry Manx and the Wailing Jennies can salvage even a mediocre system.
About the truly bad systems, of which there were several, the less said the better. Frankly I don't even remember much about them - I think it has something to do with hysterical amnesia.
So will I go to another show? Oh, probably. After all, it's a good way to establish your creds - "Yeah, I heard them at the XYZ Mega-Fi Expo. I don't think the cables they were using leveraged the synergy of that system effectively." On the other hand, I may just stay home and listen to more music.
Paul Chefurka
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Follow Ups
- Re: anyone at the montreal audio show - GliderGuider 11:05:53 04/04/05 (3)
- Re: anyone at the montreal audio show - golden_ears 17:39:00 04/10/05 (0)
- POST OF THE WEEK AWARD... - Steven R. Rochlin 12:00:30 04/04/05 (1)
- I'd wait a bit - it's still pretty early in the week. - GliderGuider 12:24:48 04/04/05 (0)
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