After finishing
up on the 1300 hallway, Mark cut out for the train station for some health
food while I sat down with a Clif bar and some Mt. Dew to take in some live
opera singing with accompanying piano at the top of the escalator. The event
was sponsored by Simaudio (Moon)
to mark their 35th anniversary. I'm not a big opera fan, but the
young diva was lovely and the music was mesmerizing.
In the large Le
Portage room throughout the weekend was a series of live recording
sessions where visitors could watch the recording and mixing of songs
performed by various artists. It was kind of a lecture/demonstration
opportunity with seating set up with a suite of Focal Scala Utopia speakers
and subwoofers. Over the railing, seen in the photo, were a couple dozen
wireless headphones for participants to wear, but at the moment people were
listening to an explanation of the mixing process (presumably) in French.
Back in the
hallway surrounding the restaurant I browsed at the Nordost
table where they were selling cables and footers. A blue bottle of their
anti-static spray caught my attention. They said a treatment of your cables
with the spray should last several months.
Stealth
Acoustics had their waterproof, wireless speaker suspended
in front of a waterfall to emphasize its outdoor capabilities. He was using a
tiny Mass Fidelity rig and streaming with Bluetooth. Perfect for the deck of
your yacht, perhaps, but not exactly high fidelity.
The
2300 Hallway
When Mark
returned from lunch we resumed the hunt in the 2300 hallway and immediately
found ourselves in one of my perennial favorite rooms, Goerner Audio. Perhaps this is because Reinhard prefers to show
with analog front ends, namely Acoustic
Signature turntables as well as more affordable Funk
Firm. He is also a distributor for Trigon
and Grandinote amplifiers, and Audio
Physic speakers. The speaker here was the Avantera+ model, and
wiring was with Nordost Valhalla
2. While these are not the biggest names in the industry on this side of
the Atlantic, they are all heavy hitters and his rooms are always
exceptionally well set up. Again this year, the very clean, neutral sound of
this room rates a Best Rooms
nomination. New this show was the 12" TA1000 Acoustic Signature tonearm
($2300) being demonstrated with a London cantilever-less cartridge. London
picked up the cartridges from Decca when Decca exited the cartridge business.
There is also a 9" ($1600) and 10" (~$2000) version of the tonearm. The
shaft and headshell of the Audio Signature look very similar to the FXR
tonearm of Funk Firm, though the bearings of the latter is a hot-rodded
re-build of the Rega design. Reinhard was kind enough to lift the platter off
the white Funk Firm table on display to reveal the multiple pulley/one motor
design they developed to re-distribute the torque on the sub-platter. Note
that the tension is adjustable by the pulley mounted in a slot on a carbon
fiber arm. Very nice design.
In the Skogrand
Cables suite was yet another of the Best
Rooms, though the rig here offered considerably more bloom and
liquidity to the music than the previous room. It was also a much more
expensive rig. Raidho D3 speakers
($85,000) were powered by VAC Master
preamp
and Statement 450 stereo power amp, both tube designs. A Bergmann
turntable with a linear air-bearing tonearm, one of the most beautiful
turntables in production, was at the front end featuring a Triangle
Art Apollo cartridge ($12,000). This rig put Bob Dylan right in the
room with an LP offered up by a visitor. Like Dylan himself, the presentation
here was spellbinding. Cabling for the rig was from Skogrand Cables from
Norway who sponsored the room. Their Tchaikovsky series of interconnects and
speaker cables starts out at $6950US/pr (1m) and reaches $9350US/pr (3m).
Their Wagner series power cables in use here start at $2100US (1m) and reach
$2900US (3m). Using Ultra-Pure Ohno Continuous Cast copper wire in an air
dielectric, these cables achieve specs that Skogrand is proud to post on their
website. Unfortunately the room was too dark to photograph the beautiful
brocade silk sleeves that dress their cables. While the Tchaikovsky series is
stratospherically expensive, their top line Beethoven series escapes the earth's
gravitational pull. Fortunately, for the merely wealthy, there are four series
below what I heard here.
Getting back to
the real world, in the Audiophonie
room Rogers LS5/9 speakers
($4800) were perched upon cleanly designed, but rather low mass stands. At the
other end of the chain was an Audio Space
T88A vacuum tube CD player ($1840). Powering the rig was a handsome Dared
Audio Saturn Signature integrated amp ($3995) with a single KT150
tube per channel delivering 25 watts, Class A in SET configuration. (The
standard Saturn model goes for $3459.) As well as line inputs, there is a USB
input for the built-in DAC spec'd at 32 Bit/ 384kHz. A ¼" headphone jack is
on the faceplate. This was a really fresh looking design from Hong
Kong and the fit and finish was quite good. The analog front end I heard in
this room was the Hanss Acoustics
T-20 turntable featuring three belts and a separate power supply for $4880.
The cartridge was the new Ortofon Quintet Bronze low output moving coil
($839US) which sounded very good at this price level. The phono stage was
another tubed unit from Dared, the LP-100 ($2403) with adjustable mm
capacitance and mc impedance as well as overall gain allowing it to feed a
power amp directly in a dedicated LP rig. Overall, this was a very good
sounding room.
On a side table
were a couple of very interesting items from Dared. The diminutive Mars ($795)
integrated amp uses a tube in the preamp section and puts out 25 wpc in Class
A from solid state components that will drive speakers down to 2 Ohms
according to Charles Kirmuss of Dared Audio. It has 2.4GHz Wireless Audio
Input, USB DAC and RCA line inputs, as well as a preamp out for greater
flexibility. Additionally, it serves as a headphone amp with a 1/4" jack.
Next to it was a similarly sized phono stage with a single tube and a
substantial separate power supply at the same price. The large knob on the
front is for variable mc cartridge loading. The proof of value will be
in the listening, but this sure looks interesting.
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High-Performance Audio Reviews
