Toronto Audiofest 2022 Show Report Part 4
Lower level rooms and ground floor in part 4.
Show Report By Rick Becker

  In the far left corner of Sutton B was another Focal floorstander driven this time by a system comprised of Musical Fidelity gear from the United Kingdom on Solid Tech stands along with an Audience Adept Response power conditioner on the floor.

 A few more Musical Fidelity components were off to the side along with an Audience poster proclaiming the Front Row series cables in the system. Unfortunately, I didn't get to hear most of these interesting rigs during my time here. The reason was the magnetic draw of the fifth system below.

The first presentation on the left when entering Sutton B was a home theater rig with a complete "in-wall" Dolby Atmos surround system by Focal with a 65" screen playing, shall we say "LOUD"? Well, movies are loud, aren't they? And this presentation was designed to show off the dynamic range and the spatial tricks you can do with surround sound. It drew people like bees to a summer barbeque. And they didn't want to leave. Aside from not getting to hear most of the other systems in the room, the home theater presentation was adjacent to the wall with Sutton C which I'll get to shortly.

I had a nice chat with the owner of EQ Audio, Ed O'Herlihy, from Barrie, Ontario, about an hour north of Toronto.

I took the photo above from the entrance to Sutton C to give you a sense of the size of the room. I paced it out at about 40' by 85' with a 20'-24' ceiling. Let's call that about 68k to 82k cubic feet or about 11 to 13.6 times the volume of my listening room. Though to be fair, my room opens up into the family room as well as through a doorway to the kitchen. Nevertheless, the relatively small Acora Acoustics 2.5-way speakers filled the room like a choir in a church.

In service here was a Hegel P30A "The Conductor" preamp ($11k) feeding their new H30A "The Orchestra" stereo power amp ($23k). The amp is a dual mono design that requires only one power cord, but the amp is touted as 1100 Watts @ 8 Ohms in monoblock configuration, so it is maybe 550 Wpc @ 8 Ohms in stereo as it was used here. It is also stable down to 1 Ohm and weighs 104.5 pounds. While not as heavy nor as large as the MOON monoblock I saw earlier, nor is it anywhere near as expensive, I'd say this amp still falls into the "Beast" category. It was sitting on a granite Acora amp stand. And it never seemed to break a sweat driving the Acora speakers in this large room. The Acora here is listed as 4 Ohm with a recommended 10w to 250w amplifier for its 92.5dB/W/m sensitivity. It seems conservatively rated for an optimum room size of 250-2000 square feet.

Saturday night after the industry dinner I broke away for a short audition where some orchestral music was played so I got to hear this rig without the home theater playing next door. It was like being in the concert hall. The front end was a Transrotor Massimo turntable ($22,600) matched to an Audio Research Ref 3 SE Phono stage ($24,600). These are seen on an Acora low audio stand ($10K) made of granite. A Shunyata Everest 8000 power conditioner ($14k) was to the left and Innuos Phoenix USB ($4,899) and Phoenix Net ($4,899) was to the right.

Other digital gear included a CAD 1543 MkII ($9k, est.), Innuos Statement standard PSU, 1TB SSD ($21,700), and a Roon Nucleus+ ($3,800). While $148k CDN seems like a lot of money for this rig with just the analog front end, (which was all I heard), or $192k with the digital gear and the stand, this was world-class sound that didn't sound any different than the roughly $500k USD rig Valerio Cora presented at Axpona earlier this year, save for the small difference in the room.

---> Next Page.