The Chester Group's New York Audio Show 2013 -- Friday

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  Welcome my friends to the fabulous Chester Group’s New York Audio Show! I’ll be your retro-futuristic Steampunk host as we travel though the sights ‘n’ sounds of the show. So sit back, grab a tasty beverage (Samuel L. Jackson beer) and hang on tight cuz this could be a bumpy ride.

Starting with the Headzone, here is Sennheiser with a wide variety of, what else, headphones.

 

Here is a sneak peek at Sennheiser’s production unit, yet not released, model HDVD 800 balanced and unbalanced headphone amplifier with DAC. It easily handles AES/EBU, S/PDIF and USB 2.0 and retails at $1995. Looks like the headphone addicts have been waiting over a year for this unit to come to fruition, and it is coming... soon, only not yet.

 

PMC Speakers had their model MB2 speakers were producing live guitar music. And yes it sounded really, really good. Hmmm, perhaps at some point we can do away for SACD, DVD-Audio, wav, aiff, etc and just hire live musicians to play through our high-end audio system. Answer me this, what is the costs to have Jim Morrison perform and how much fire insurance should I have for a 'Jimi Hendrix experience’?

 

CH Precision had all their new gear including the A1 amplifier monoblock ($37,475 each) that has a very unique feature of adjustable global feedback and gain. Not a simple dumb two or three position switch mind you, but a feedback with adjustability from 0 to 100 while the gain has 10 steps. The unit’s amplification stage operates in Class A. In this room all wiring was with Van den Hul. My listening notes say "Smooth sound and need to stop back as the system burns in".

 

Simon York turntable making its NYC appearing here at the Chester Group’s New York Audio Show ($19,950).

 

Venture had a variety of speakers setup so attendees could hear the difference between their models. My notes say "Immense deep soundstage" referring to their smaller (front-most) speakers. These are Venture’s Vici 2.2 with AW500 subs ($48,000). Writing this part at the day’s end and decided after hearing many systems, this system gets my award for Best Sound At The Show for today.

 

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, I now present to you the Classic Album Sundays founder Colleen 'Cosmo' Murphy (and the crowd goes wild).

 

And yes they sell quite a few of these $36,000 cables a year, Transparent were in the Classic Album Sunday room with their Opus speaker cables.

 

In the LessLoss room was their Laminar Streamer (no price) that is a very interesting SD player as it uses a custom operating system (OS) for playback of PCM audio in the form of wav or aiff. What makes Direct Drive OS unique is that the high performance audio clock runs the core OS as well as streams the audio, thus no clocking intricacies arise, for better jitter performance. It can handle sampling rates up to 192kHz/24-bit. Speakers in the room are the Kawero! Classic (starting at $56,000 depending on finish, as seen here is $68,000) made with a vibration control system called Panzerholz. Mated to it is a high density glass fibre/rubber layer. this cabinet is specially made in Germany. The tweeter is a custom made RAAL 70-20 XR ribbon for those curious. Amps were by Pass Labs and wiring is by LessLoss.

 

The Sound by Singer room featured the exciting new Raidho D-2 speakers and VAC Statement 450S amplifier ($43,500 and $44,000 respectively). Also in the room was the VAC Signature MKII preamp, Audience aR6T-TS power conditioner and cabling was by Nordost.

 

A nice selection of products within the Headzone room.

 

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