Part 7: Montreal Audiofest Chronicles 2024
Time to check out the Lower Level, Outremont, and St. Laurent rooms.
Montreal Audiofest 2024 Show Report By Rick Becker

O3  Audeze

Jerome Fragman was delighted to have me stop in and actually listen to some headphones rather than just shake hands. I had heard a vlogger rave about the basic Audeze headphones so I wanted to get a first-hand listen. I started with the MM-100 at $399 USD. He stepped me up to the LCD-X at $1199 USD, which I liked a lot. Finally, Jerome fitted me with the new flagship LCD-5, which I really loved, at $4500 USD. I might not know much about headphones, but the difference in sound quality was proportional to the prices and I can hear why people get so excited about this category. The good news is the price spread from entry-level to flagship is a lot less than for speakers.

O4  Yamaha

Yamaha grabbed this smaller room this year after being down in O1 for at least a few years where I thought they struggled to get good sound with their flagship speaker. Here, I was very favorably impressed with their less expensive floorstanding NS-2000 speaker ($10k) driven by their A-S3200 integrated amp ($10k) that put out 100 Wpc into 8 Ohms and double that into 4 Ohms.

Rather than having an all-Yamaha rig this year, the front ends included the very nice Wand 14-4 turntable with a Koetsu Black cartridge supplemented with a Luna Cables Orange step-up transformer ($2500). For streaming, a Wattson Audio Madison compact streamer/DAC ($4200) was used, seen on the bottom shelf of the very handsome Massif Audio Design triple-wide rack. The Massif rack seemed to have a finer satin finish on the solid walnut shelves than years ago when Trevor Doyle was doing more rustic styles.

Yamaha even provided a couple of its homegrown instruments in case anyone wanted to play along with the music.

O5  Simaudio

Simaudio put together a very fine-sounding rig with two components from their new North collection, the 891 network player / preamplifier and the 861 power amplifier. They drove the Estelon speakers from Estonia with aplomb.

The cabling was from Cardas Cables

The Moon 861 power amp ($22k USD) puts out 300 Wpc into 8 Ohms, twice that into 4 Ohms, and can be run as a monoblock with 800 Watts.

A poster on the wall in the hallway delineated the breadth of the North collection which was useful in discussing the line with their representative.

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