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CAS5 - Days 2 and 3

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on August 18, 2014 at 01:19:45

As mentioned previously, I met up with ivan303 on day 2 of CAS5 - it was great to meet someone you know only in the virtual world of the Asylum here in the actual physical world! I did not take any notes at all, so Madeline, my wife, graciously came along today to take some photos which would, I hope, jog my memory. BTW, ivan303 is a horn speaker enthusiast, so I hope he'll feel free to jump in if I misstate anything, horn-related or otherwise. (Madeline attended today only on the condition that she would not be required to talk with anyone speaking audiophile gobbledygook - "I don't want to hear about 24/176.4!")


Here's a shot of the Wilson Sashas I posted about on Friday. As I said, this was the best Wilson demo I've heard so far, with really interesting source material. (See previous post.)


Here are the SoundLab Majestics which gave such imposing depth to the Sondra Radvanovsky's great performance of the Verdi aria ("Tacea la notte placida") from "Il Trovatore" I heard on Friday. Although I didn't re-listen to this room on the subsequent two days, most folks I heard were raving about the the SQ, so perhaps the volume was dialed down a bit from when I visited. (BTW, pace Jason Serinus in Stereophile, there was nothing careful or precious about Radvanovsky's singing in the aria I heard - although it seems as if he listened to the other Leonora aria from that opera when he was there.) BTW, to get an idea of the size of these speakers, check out the chairs and the equipment rack in the photo!


So now we're into ivan303's horn speaker territory! These are the JBL Everests driven by Mark Levinson electronics. I can't comment too much on these, aside from their generally likeable SQ, since I was not familiar with the (non-classical) music being played. They had a big, big room for these babies.


Another large room featured Genesis electronics and speakers. This was an interesting demo from a pop singer (I forgot her name - I'm SO sorry!), who recounted the experience of making the particular album they were playing, using half-inch tape. (Nice voice too!) Before she was a singer, this woman appeared to have done everything under the sun, including teaching at Michigan State and winning international championships in ballroom dancing! (Once again, not being familiar with the music, I couldn't judge the SQ other than in very general, favorable terms.)


These are some speakers in the Sony room, where you had to pass through a Blue Coast records / Cookie Marenco gauntlet to get there. Fortunately, Madeline and I had the right secret handshake and the right password for Cookie (hint: it's "DSD"!) so we were able to get in and listen to a couple of tracks from "Morph The Cat"! I have another pic from this room of Madeline standing by a set of Sony speakers and (if I'm not mistaken) a HAP Z1 - but she won't let me post it! :-(


(Cookie discussing the finer points of DSD with a couple of her minions!) ;-)


(The Magico 5S's that I posted about on Friday - I should have re-listened, but did not get the chance.)

(back view)
This was a small room with the Spatial Hologram M1 speakers - open baffle design, about three feet high, driven by an Audion 300B amp putting out. . . (drum roll!) 8.2 watts per channel! I loved the holistic SQ from these babies (surprisingly satisfying bass too from this small package - although perhaps that shouldn't be so surprising, since the drivers are 15")! This was a beautiful design IMHO, and Madeline loved their looks too.


Some more horns! This was the Burwell and Sons exhibit (with Raven Audio electronics). This was another demo I loved, partly because (as with the Wilson exhibit) they used source material that is not generally available commercially - in this case, a performance by Jeffrey Kahane and the Santa Rosa Symphony (about 75 miles North of the show) of the second and third movements from the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto. (This was a recording done on behalf of the Santa Rosa Symphony.) SQ was excellent too, although these speakers did not seem very forgiving at all of any failure to be in a sweet spot! (The sound changed dramatically when I just moved one seat to the left.) Although Madeline used a flash, the lighting in this room was very dark, so perhaps this is not a true picture of the way things actually looked. The woodworking of the hardwood horns was just beautiful.


Here's the AudioNote room - they were showing a turntable-based system costing about $16,000 (on the low-priced end of their offerings). They used the Lyrita recording (on vinyl of course) of the Moeran Cello Concerto as their source material when ivan303 and I were there yesterday. Today, when my wife and I visited they were playing the Grieg Piano Concerto, but I didn't find out whose recording it was. The SQ was good, but, geez, I'll never understand how vinylphiles can listen through all that surface noise! It drives me nuts!


This is the Pass Amplifier room with Tannoy drivers in a custom-built horn enclosure. (ivan303, please elaborate and/or correct as necessary!) The guy doing the demo was very friendly and knowledgeable and was using digital files on a computer as his source material (tracks from an audiophile favorite: the Reference Recording of "Exotic Dances from the Opera" - the album with the foot on the cover!). I've already seen some disparaging remarks on the General Asylum here about how dead the digital demos sounded compared to the analogue ones. I'm sorry, but I did not hear it that way AT ALL. For instance, this exhibit had great SQ. (BTW, those are Pass 60-watt monoblocks driving the speakers in the photo.)

So now, we're at the end of our photos, but I wanted to mention a couple of other things. We auditioned an interesting glass-enclosed speaker from LRE Audio - good sound, good clarity. I was unsure about the dynamics because of the small room being used, and it might be interesting to hear this reasonably priced speaker in less constraining surroundings.

I attended two seminars as well: New Directions in Computer Audio with John Mingo of Baetis Audio yesterday, and Nuts and Bolts of Digital Audio with Oliver Masciarotte today. The first of these had a bit of "infomercial" quality to it, but it was still interesting and made me want to hear more - the presentation will apparently become available on the Baetis Audio site tomorrow (Monday). The second seminar was more of a rap session - give and take with the attendees. What was very amusing was that, in the Saturday session, Mingo was very down on Macintosh computers, because of their "closed" approach to hardware (preventing him from improving the internal parts!), while in today's session, Masciarotte was down on Windows computers because of their "all things to all people" approach and often badly written drivers. (I'm a Mac guy myself, so I hope I've stated this objectively - LOL!)

Finally, I wanted to mention another photo that didn't turn out well: me and Mark Waldrep from AIX Records - I look so horrible in it, I'm nixing it. But I wanted to stop by and let Mark know how much I enjoy his daily blog on his HRA Planet site. That's really a daily grind and he does a great job with it!

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Kimber Kable

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