La Maison du Son
had a lot of gear on display on tables as well as a rig playing. There was a
table full of Marantz gear with
what looked like an NA6005 Network Player and a PM7006 integrated amplifier
driving a small stand mounted monitor. Focal headphones and affordable turntables from Project
and Marantz were on side tables. An Audioengine
sound bar was mounted near the ceiling at the entryway and Cambridge Audio
banners were prominent. This room was pretty full with lots of young people
examining the more affordable gear found here—a good sign.
The IsoAcoustics
room was demonstrating their vibration isolation stands by mounting identical
Focal monitors on stands, one with their isolation stand beneath the monitor
and the duplicate monitor adjusted to the same height with wood spacers. A
short piece of music was played repeatedly while the presenter switched
between monitors with a remote control. I found it difficult to identify which
speaker was playing at any given time but on occasion I would notice some
differences in certain parts of the music. They use their patented technology
for the aluminum matrix stands of various sizes for speakers, subwoofers,
guitar amps and even a stage for a drum kit. In their Canadian Manufacturers
display they had a small monitor on one of their units and I was able to
wiggle it about with my hand, but the naked units themselves seem very stiff,
so they apparently exhibit greater compliance when loaded with greater weight.
In the Soltanus Acoustics
room I heard a very nice presentation of Stevie Ray Vaughan coming from the
ESL Virtuoso loudspeakers being driven by a 1978 vintage Threshold
400A cascade/Class A power amplifier. This full range (40Hz to
20kHz) electrostatic speaker is unique in that there is no crossover in the
design, although there is some adjustment capability in the choice of speaker
binding posts on the back for amplifiers with damping factors above and below
25, and adjustment for damping factors below 25 via a knob to tweak it for use
with tube amplifiers. Additionally, there is an adjustment for tweeter bias,
though it is not clear to me how this differs from what we normally consider a
crossover. It certainly appears that it is designed to mate well with a
variety of amplifiers. One such amp would be the Maestro prototype seen on
silent display, and reported by North American distributor Jody Crane to work
very well with the ESL. Mr. Zoltan Mikovity from Serbia, the inventor and
partner in Soltanus Acoustics was present, but I didn't get to speak with
him. The current dumping amp will be slightly larger in its final form and
puts out 150 watts per channel, Class AB. It is claimed to be stable down to
one Ohm. Projected price on the amp is $6500 to $6800CDN, and the speakers are
$10,995CDN. The amp, in particular was exceptionally beautiful. At the back of
the room I ran into Joe Kubala, whose Kubala-Sosna
cables were used in this room, and a long-time friend Bill Parish of GTT Audio
in New Jersey. The room was packed with people, as well it should have been
judging from the seemingly high quality of the music here, but the
conversations made it too difficult to get a really good listen. Out in the
hall I commented to Mark that this is the kind of frenzy this show created
back in the late ‘90s, early 2000s. It was Saturday morning, for sure.
Vienna Acoustic
Beethoven Concert Grand speakers were sounding very good driven by an all-McIntosh
system including a C2500 tube preamp, D150 Digital Preamplifier, MCD1100
SACD/CD Player, and MC152 power amp with 150 wpc with auto-transformers that
allow you to choose from 2, 4 and 8 Ohm outputs on the backside. The amp alone
is about $5000 to $6000US. Their MT5 turntable on top of the stand plays 33, 45 and
78 records. The straight tonearm is their own and seems to have an
adjustable angle on the headshell—something I had never noticed before. Like
the warm feeling their green logos created in the darkened room, the music
here was warm with a firm foundation in the bass. On silent display was the
new MXA Integrated Audio System with a built-in DAC with both USB and Coaxial
inputs as well as a headphone amplifier. S/N ratio is said to be 105dB and
power is rated at 50 wpc. Price is about $4500US for this moderately
down-sized component. Unfortunately, obtaining review samples from McIntosh is
more difficult than robbing banks. One last visual treat in this room was the
McIntosh headphones that reminded me of Paul Simon's song, Boy
in a Bubble.
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High-Performance Audio Reviews
