Capital AudioFest Chronicles 2022
Musical mastery within the 3rd floor Meeting Rooms.
CAF 2022 Show Report By Rick Becker

  In this edition of the Chronicles, I cover the meeting rooms on the 3rd Floor, following along in a logical path starting in the lobby over by Olive's Restaurant. There were three basic room sizes here. The first few, including a dozen of the total, were what I call 'standard-size' meeting rooms. Most of these were very good-sounding rooms as they were put together by long-established companies with many of the best names in High-End. If I didn't identify the size of the room, assume it was a standard size meeting room.

Then, at the other end of the spectrum were what I call 'large' rooms. There were four of them and three of those four were problematic while the fourth was somewhat below their typical performance. They often had lots of seats, but they were never more than a quarter filled if that. My take is that bigger is not usually acoustically better. It was easier to enjoy a big rig in a smaller room than it was to enjoy a big rig that was dwarfed by the room.

And then there were three rooms on this floor that fell between the standard meeting rooms and the large ones. I labeled these 'medium'.

So, let's get going!

Twinbrook Room  United Home Audio And High End by Oz
While all the rooms on the 3rd Floor were visited on Saturday, I also stopped into the Twinbrook on Friday night when they were running a special listening session for anyone hanging around at that hour. The room was sponsored by High End by Oz in Norwalk, CT, and United Home Audio, the tape deck people, in Stafford, VA. I suspect they had the advantage of close to 120V power in the evening with most of the audio showrooms and a lot of businesses in the area closed at night. The music, sourced from tape, was excellent as many other writers have said. Greg Weaver included it in his Fab Five Best Of CAF 2022 in position Number Three.

More interesting was to learn from Oz Turan of High Fidelity by Oz that the plasma tweeters in the Lansche No. 7.2 speakers ($90k in Macassar ebony) are 364 degrees Celsius which destroys the Ozone that is produced by the plasma process, so owners need not feel guilty about environmental damage — at least from their tweeters. Not wanting to toast the photo sensor in my camera, I passed on the photo op.

All the tubes on the Thrax Spartacus 300B monoblocks ($97,500/pr) were 300B tubes, providing 50 Watts Class A in Triode mode. The back left side tube was the input tube, while the front left tube was a shunt regulator.

The Thrax Libra 300B tube preamp ($67,500) with the two large round knobs had a separate power supply just below it. Above the preamp was a Thrax Maximinus Silver DAC ($38,500) and on the top of the rack was a Kalista Dreamplay X Transport ($68,800). The Hifistay Mythology racks are priced at $6,350 per shelf. The Hemingway Cables z-Core and Creation S Series used in this system were priced from $3,400 to $39k.

The star of the show, here, was the United Home Audio Super Deck ($89,900) with its power supplies on the lower levels of the rack. The active meters were the large ones just below the deck. I noted the heavy aluminum custom frame holding the deck and meters.

The entire room cost was said to be $893,450.

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