Toronto Audiofest 2023 Show Report
Part 4... The Second Floor Booths And Rooms
Show Report By Rick Becker

Plaza A  DALI
Lenbrook owns NAD, PSB, and Bluesound, and they are the North American distributor of DALI speakers. They have presented the KORE flagship speaker of the DALI line driven by NAD electronics at three previous shows I've attended in the past year or so, and I have not been overwhelmed by any of those presentations. The Montreal show earlier this year was the best of the bunch. Here, in Toronto, they disappointed me once again with NAD driving the new Epikore 11, a smaller, more hospitable version of the KORE.

It's not that either of these brands or products is bad; I'm just not feeling the kind of synergy that produces great music like I expect the Epikore 11 to be capable of producing. It's a great-looking speaker with a high gloss dark walnut wood veneer that my photographs do not do justice. It's also available in gloss black and gloss maroon.

Carlton  ASONA Ltd And Innuos

The Cen.Grand DSDAC 1.0 starts at $3200 and goes up in stages to the 1.0 Deluxe version here which tops out at $7700. This Chinese DAC takes PMC and upsamples to DSD1024 with an r2r ladder DAC with their proprietary FPGA code.

The Fonica speaker looked well made, but minimal and lightweight, making it easy to move in and out of the optimal position if your room is multi-purpose.

Bristol A  Corby's Audio, Coherent Audio, And Baetis Audio
Don Corby runs Corby's Audio, located in Freelton, Ontario, a bit north of Hamilton. He carries numerous fine lines of electronics and speakers and in recent years he has teamed up with Frank Fazzalari of Coherent Loudspeakers and Baetis Audio servers at both the Montreal and Toronto shows. Frank's smaller thin-walled, high-efficiency speakers have been among my favorites with their warm musical sound and inviting air and bloom, particularly when driven by low-powered SET amps. In recent years they have teamed his larger coaxial speakers with Allnic electronics to produce a cooler, neutral sound that I find less inviting, but I expect it appeals to others or they wouldn't keep doing it.

This year, the mantra was "Go big, or go home." I told Frank these speakers were never going to fit in my shooting brake wagon. I should have brought a truck. The main actor here is a 3" Beryllium compression driver with a coaxial 12" woofer, seen here in the center module of these towers. The isolated modules are each ported. You can start with just the coaxial module and one 15" woofer module and scale it up to suit your room and music. Each tower was driven with an Allnic M2500 monoblock ($28k/pr.) producing 20 Watts from push-pull 300B tubes. The towers are 100dB/W/m sensitive, though you certainly don't want to listen from that distance and the price is a steal at $58.5k, or around $45k USD.

Below the turntable was an Allnic L6500 preamplifier ($12,640), a matching H5500 phono stage($8400), a Saturn Audio 201 DAD ($4800), and the Baetis Audio Revolution X4 with 2TB storage Streamer/Server/Roon Core ($8640, show special $7600).

The Allnic monoblocks were the M2500 ($28k/pr.) with push-pull configuration putting out 20 Watts each from a pair of 300B tubes.

The analog front end was a Kuzma Stabi R turntable ($14k) made from billet aluminum and weighing 100 lbs. with the Kuzma Safir tonearm ($34k, tonearm only). The gorgeous solid wood side plates were added to match the speakers. The platter is two slabs of aluminum with an acrylic layer between. A Corby's Audio carbon fiber mat ($695) was used on the turntable. The little blue handle peeking out from the left was a Swifter, listed as $Priceless!!!

The Kuzma Car-60 cartridge used here is $25k, and that's a Kuzma record weight.

The Model 15 Dragon speakers were incredibly dynamic and transparent. The music reached out into the room between the listener and the speakers with a "you are there" presentation that more than mimicked live music. That the veneer matched from top to bottom on the front baffles were décor icing on the cake.

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