In another room hosted by Brosseau
was a very real world system with a Moon
.5 CD player, Moon .5 integrated amplifier and Paradigm
Studio 20 v5 monitors on stands. Richard
Gray's Power Company conditioners purified the electricity, here.
It was nice to have a chance to hear a Paradigm speaker in a dedicated system.
The corporate presentation often has every model they make crammed into a
single exhibition with less than optimal acoustic representation. Simaudio Moon
separates powered the top of the line CS3.7 Thiel
loudspeakers with aluminum cones but I wish I had stopped in when
the hosts had the Genesis G5.3
loudspeakers hooked up that were pushed to the sides of the room.
Mordaunt-Short showed
a loudspeaker made from all-epoxy cabinets and all aluminum drivers. The
tweeter has a cone on its backside that actually protrudes through the epoxy
cabinet.
Level 4
Moving down to Level 4 I found one of two pairs of Usher
D2 loudspeakers in
North America
was on display. The other pair is down in the States. A modified UX-1 Limited Esoteric CD player drove a pair of VTL monoblocks for the horn drivers and a pair of Nuforce
Class D stereo amplifiers drove the bass drivers — one channel driving
each bass driver. In a much larger room than last year, it sounded much
better, but it was far from optimal. This is a loudspeaker for a select few
situations given its size, sensitivity and price ($22,000 US). I would much
prefer an opportunity to hear the new Dancer Mini One or Mini Two.
Also noted in the Usher room was this secret 5-11 power
conditioner, seen here in prototype form.
Browsing around on the open space of Level 4 the Velodyne's
flagship Digital Drive 1812 Signature Edition subwoofer with 10 and 15 inch drivers with carbon fiber cones each powered by a1250 watt amplifier (3000
watts peak). The system also includes digital room analysis and equalization
with eight parametric bands. Fortunately, they were not playing this beast, as
I'm not sure the glass walls of the atrium could withstand the SPL.
Not far away was a series of paintings designed to enhance
your listening room with extra-thick sound dispersing brush strokes. I thought
this one with a line drawing of a piano would look particularly nice in my
friend Art Shapiro's listening room. Art is the only reviewer I know who
prefers to listen exclusively to piano music, having been a near master of the
instrument at an earlier age. There was no price tag on this one, indicating
that possibly it was already sold, but judging from the other paintings, this
one probably went for a couple of thousand dollars — a reasonable sum for an
original work of art. It was about 2.5 x 4 foot high, and unfortunately, I
could find no reference to the artist.
This gentleman, with some encouragement, graciously cranked
up a 78 rpm record for us — quite literally. The music... how do you say in
French "Blew my socks off!"
I may have stumbled on a critical evolutionary link here
that seems to combine the early predecessors of the Gemme Audio Green Gem and
the stand-alone phonograph player, as seen below.
In another part of the open booth section I found not an entrepreneur, but a true hobbyist, Sylvain Pichette <sylvain452@videotron.ca>
from Quebec, shown here in the white shirt talking to other show attendees. He explained that with his trade as a machinist he would never be able to buy a high end turntable, so over the course of several lunch hours he concocted his own. Actually, it took over 300 hours, he said, and valued it at
$8000. It looked as professional as anything else I saw at the show. Very impressive!
Saturday Night
At this point Linda and I decided to call it quits and head
back to the Europa. We had another agenda, but not what
you might think. You see, the early April date of the SSI now falls right on
the first night of the Final Four of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament.
Being a Syracuse fan, and by association a Big East fan, Connecticut
disappointed us by going cold in the first game and losing to Michigan State.
We went to the Baton Rouge
a few blocks away for dinner. Naturally, being in a hurry with only forty
minutes between games, service was dreadfully slow. I almost threw on an apron
and went to the kitchen myself. My effort to convey our urgency was lost in
translation by the waitress and my steak came out rare rather than medium
rare. Knowing what happens to food when it is returned to the kitchen, I ate
it as served. The food was good; we were hungry. Back at the room,
North Carolina
was beating up on Villanova, another Big East team that had also gone cold. At
least the Abita beer from
New Orleans
that we smuggled in from the States was a winner: a French American beer in a
French Canadian city.
More to come...
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