Capital Audiofest 2023 Show Report / Chronicles Part 8
The 3rd Floor Large Rooms Part A
Show Report By Rick Becker

Roosevelt Room  Classic Audio Loudspeakers
After the Matterhorn room, the Roosevelt Room was a severe case of the "Same Old, Same Old". But you know what? After a few minutes, it sounded pretty good to me. The extreme sensitivity of these Classic Audio horn speakers had transparency and dynamics that, combined with the rich tonal colors of the Atmosphere tube amps, was very inviting and relaxing whether it was a melodic jazz piano piece or something with an electric guitar. Sure, a cabinet made from wood will sound different than a cabinet made of X or V material, or Krion, but my room is more likely to have a significant sonic signature than the differences between these two rooms.

The inner pair seen here looked to be the T-1.5 Reference with a field coil driver and a pair of 12" woofers, one of which was downward firing to reach 20Hz lows. There was also a super-tweeter to reach out to 45kHz which gives these speakers a sense of air that the previous room couldn't deliver. Being a modern interpretation of 'old school' I couldn't help but wonder how they might sound with vibration-absorbing footers rather than the classic spikes.

The seats were populated with die-hard fans, none of whom left while I was visiting this room. I recognized Joe in the grey sweater next to the guy in red from this very room at last year's show. Joe is a retired postal worker from Brooklyn who is also a master machinist. A YouTube of his system, shop, and the speakers he has built has not quite gone viral, yet.

And speaking of 'old school', the tops of these speakers are wonderful surfaces to display your collection of... well, whatever!

Here's a look at the power supply for the field-coil drivers with gauges for voltage and amperage of both the midrange and woofer. $8k/pr. — so yes, you only need one of them if you're really 'old school' and have a monaural system.

Speaking of collectibles, here's Nipper with an RCA 45 record holder, holding an RCA Victor pressing of Ballerina with Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra.

And here is one of Classic Audio's field coil drivers, Model TL-1801-8-FC. While the machine screws may look stripped out in the photo, I can assure you that they are precision-made Allen head screws.

The front ends were this Studer reel-to-reel tape recorder and what looks like a home-brew record player equipped with a Tri-Planar tonearm. There was a tube pre-amp or phono stage below the turntable that you can barely make out in the photo. The cables were by Purist Audio Design, which must have been costly, given the distance from the source to the amplifiers and the spread of the speakers.

Madison Room  Mytek Audio And Consonus Speakers
Walking into the Mytek room and seeing the Consonus speakers for the first time, my reaction was "Who stole the rig"! On top of the rig was a Mytek component and on the bottom of the rack was a small Audioquest Niagara power conditioner. Cables ran mysteriously behind the black curtain. "It's a trick!" I thought.

The Consonus Tide system is an open baffle speaker affixed to a subwoofer. The 4-way speaker contains a four-channel amplifier with a quality DSP engine and proprietary speaker cables. It looks something like a cross between an Alon and a Vivid Giya speaker but the DSP control of the drivers seems to be a consistently growing wave of things to come. The TIDE sells for $77k to $80k with the amps and cables — expensive, but not outrageous. You can also disengage the relevant DSP and amplification if you wish to add the optional Tide XO external passive crossover and your own favorite amplification.

I met Eugene Gribov, one of the principals at Consonus who pointed out the complexity of this design. He also mentioned that next year they will have a second speaker with a different form factor that will be roughly half the price of the Tide.

It looks like they went to great effort to make this open baffle design as clean looking as possible, while also paying close attention to vibration control. It is a bold move for a young company to start with a statement piece like this and then trickle down to more affordable designs. I certainly look forward to hearing their new model in the coming year.

Mytek, on the other hand, started as an affordable-to-mid-priced brand and is now trickling upward. The unit here was their new Empire flagship streamer/DAC. It is priced at $24,995 with a $12,498 deposit at the time of ordering and the balance due at the time of shipping. It is back 5 weeks at this point. There is a monoblock amplifier in the Empire series and it, too, is backordered. That might explain why there was nobody there from Mytek to talk to. Anyhow, it is a very nice design that is in keeping with their previous styling but it is a jump up in price from my previous expectation.

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