Capital AudioFest Chronicles 2022
Beautiful sounds on the 5th Floor Part B.
Show Report By Rick Becker

Suite 551, Fidelity Imports (Soul Note, Perlisten, Michell)
Fidelity Imports owned the last hallway on the 5th Floor, taking all six rooms. The suite at the end featured The Perlisten S7T speaker which earned one of the Best Rooms awards in a much larger room last year.

That excellence was audible to a lesser degree in this much more confined space where the strong bass was bloated. Maybe that was the consequence of having to stand behind the prime seats on the sofa which were occupied by revelers who had a head start on happy hour. Liquor was flowing in the back room of the suite but I kept on my mission.

The electronics were a brand that was new to me, Soul Note, from Japan. It looked first class. The M3 monoblocks appeared to be in the monster class, yet the website specs it at 160 Watts @ 4 Ohms. The website also specs their components at 230V, 50Hz, which is the standard in Japan, so this may well have been their US debut.

The E2 phono equalizer here offered full control for MM, MC, and DS phono cartridges through technical collaboration with DigitalStream. This allows the user to easily use a full spectrum of phono cartridges with what appears to be four easily selectable inputs. There is also a built-in degaussing, a mono switch, and pre-RIAA curves available. While there appears to be the glow of vacuum tubes from within in my photo, the unit is solid state. At the top of the rack on the left was the P-3 preamp and below it was the S-3 Reference Super Audio CD Player. The turntable appeared to be a Michell Orbe SE with a DS cartridge mounted, but it was not playing at the time. The bottom shelf of each rack seemed to hold external power supplies.

This rig would have sounded much better in a more spacious environment. There was no literature and the people here were self-absorbed, so I took my photos and moved on. It is not a wild guess that Soul Note will become the next big name in the high-end in the United States.

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