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

Harpist
Moving on, the lovely Isabeau Corriveau played her harp from time to time in this hallway during the show. She is a favorite at the Montreal show and I've also seen her at Toronto and Axpona.

Roosevelt (Medium Size Room) Classic Audio
I call the Roosevelt room 'medium' because it is smaller than the four big rooms, yet larger than most of the meeting rooms here on the 3rd Floor. Yet even this room was larger than it needed to be for optimum listening of the Classic Audio speakers ($29,500), as efficient as they may be. Roy Orbison singing through these horn speakers took me right back to high school.

It was indeed a 'classic' sound with the speakers driven by tube amps in the foreground or Atma-Sphere Class D monoblocks on the stands back at the front wall. The black amps next to the speakers had the Classic Audio logo emblem. No literature to help me here. Not sure if these were field coil drivers in the speakers.

They were playing tape here from this Crown 800 series deck.

I ran into Joseph Bulger, a retired NYC police officer who clued me into his YouTube "Meet Joe and his amazing DIY Horn Speakers." It is a documentary by Steve Guttenberg that I had seen before but didn't connect the dots in Joe's presence. Check it out, as well as the sequel, which is a tour of the shop in his basement. Very cool if you're a 'hands-on' kind of guy. Joe is many leagues above me, for sure.

Madison (Medium) Mytek
Mytek ran a system with the new Empire series flagship DAC/Streamer/Preamplifier with a Roon OS, fully balanced preamp, and a headphone amp. Those are the new Empire monoblocks below it. Not any info in this room either. Very cool styling from Mytek, which goes beyond their previous efforts. Style counts. And they claim top-shelf performance with the Empire series. It was so dark here that I couldn't make out the speakers.

Off to the side was a Mytek Brooklyn Bridge II headphone station, fully equipped with a lava lamp.

Jefferson Room Pure Audio Project And VPI
PureAudioProject speakers with five drivers each were playing here in a rig fronted with a VPI 40th Anniversary direct drive turntable. The electronics were all PS Audio Stellar series including a phono stage, preamp, and a pair of monoblocks. It looked like Nordost cabling in the background. The only piece of literature I found was a sheet with all their turntables with very decent sale prices for the month of November.

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