Le Festival Son et Image de Montréal 2006 Show Report
The Home Entertainment and Electronics Show

Report By Phil Gold

  Audiopathic has three rooms this year. Angie Lisi was a bit worried about the jeans Matt Waldron of Escalante Design was sporting. They are standing next to the Escalante Pinyon speakers ($7,000 Cdn) and Uinta Subwoofer ($5500 Cdn), which my colleague Rick Becker has recently reviewed for Enjoy the Music.com^®.

In the next room Angie introduced me to Mr. Redpoint himself, Peter Clark, who demonstrated his line of turntables, which ranges from $10,000 up to $17,500. Most intriguing to me is the belt. On the bright red turntable, which is a special finish version of the base model, the belt is made of VHS tape. Peter promises free lifetime belt replacement! You move up the line by increasing the number of arm mounts and adding progressively more stages of damping to the turntable. Peter was making beautiful music in his room, Janos Starker playing the Bach Cellos Suites, unfortunately the victim of some overloud bass from the floor above.

Festival Son & Image is open to the public for a small price and attracts a large crowd, running over three full days. The downside is a certain amount of overcrowding, and in some rooms featuring tube amplification, sometimes an excess of heat. Where are the free water bottles? French and English are spoken in equal parts - my French being on the dark side of rusty, I stuck to English with the exception of a short spell in the NAIM room, since all the English speakers had retired to the restaurant. Rick Becker is also covering the festival for Enjoy The Music.com^®, but for the second year in a row, we managed to miss each other.

 

Readers may remember the fine performing Raysonic SP-100 amplifier as reviewed here. New from Raysonic this year are two single stereo ended amps, the 8 wpc SE-20 at $2980 Cdn, and the 18 wpc SE-30A at $2680 Cdn.

Also new is a matching top loading CD player, the CD128 at $1880 Cdn, featuring upsampling to 96k 24 bit and an output stage using four Russian 6922 tubes, pictured here with Cherith Tse of Harmonic Marketing and company owner Yan Wong Tse. Raysonic products are designed in Canada and built in China. I am looking forward to auditioning the SE-20, which looks delicious with its complement of two 300Bs, two 6SN7s, two 6SL7s and two 5Z4s.

 

 

In the Bryston room, James Tanner proudly displays the big Torus power conditioner, ($10,000 Cdn or $8,550 US) with its enormous power transformer, good for 100 amps of clean power for five components. Other models start at a more modest $2950 Cdn or $2450 US. Coming soon from Bryston is the range topping 28BSST monoblock amp, capable of putting out 1200 watts into 8 ohms or 2000 watts into 4 ohms, and guaranteed to keep doing so for the next twenty years of course.

 

 

Montreal based Revelation Audio are showing the $5000 Cdn S-5 / Sub-5 Mistral and the $7000 Cdn S-6 / Sub 6 Mistral speakers, both two box affairs, with a powered subwoofer in the lower box. Here you see owner / designer Alain Corteau with the new S-6 Mistral, whose subwoofers use a double isobaric design featuring four 6-inch long travel woofers and a 150 watt amp for a fast and extended bass response. Next time, Expo should give Alain an ID card with writing on the front! Poor planning – I saw quite a few such cards at the Festival. Revelation Audio speakers are available in Cherry, Red Cherry, Makore and Black Ash. Strong value on show here. Contributing to the good sound in this room – a NAIM CDX, a VAC Auricle Preamp and matching Auricle MusicBloc monoblocks.

 

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