Salon Son & Image 2009

Report By Rick Becker  Part 3

In the hall I came across these two little buckaroos being carefully tended by their mom. It's easy to tell there is a lot of Wife Acceptance Factor in this family.

 

As sometimes happens at shows, a vendor reaches out with a hook and pulls me in. I'm a pretty easy catch because I like discovering things. In this case the fisherman was Ben Webster of massfidelity.com who was promoting his cute Lil' Doosey monoblocks that were quite literally "little blocks" about 4 x 5 x 6 (inch) that could be held in one hand. They had heft that hinted at quality which was further suggested by the EMI filter on the mains input, a ground lift, a true balanced input as well as single ended RCA, 20 watts RMS into 8 Ohms (40 into 4 Ohms), class AB power with a linear power supply, all housed in a machined aluminum enclosure with a gloss red, white (or blue?) powdercoat finish. The price? A modest $399 — presumably Canadian, since the entire amplifier is made in Canada. The fact that Ben was demonstrating the amp with Ref 3A monitors, Monitor Audio speakers and Gemme Audio prototypes furthered his cause. The open space was so noisy I didn't ask for a listen, but hopefully my chance will come.

 

Ben then dragged me around the corner of his display to show me a very intriguing loudspeaker from Tekton Designs in Orem , Utah . It has a small full range Fostex driver on an open baffle front with an identical full range driver firing upward from a bass reflex enclosure mounted behind the lower part of the front baffle. As you can see in the photo, it is a stand mounted design and it goes for $1200/pr (CDN) as shown with an extra thick front baffle and the blue paint. It is also offered in black satin for only $550 US. Eric Alexander at Tekton offers a wide variety of painted finishes and custom veneers. Off hand, without hearing either, I'd say the Lil' Doosey and this speaker are just what the recession ordered.

 

CES had the full Blue Man Group performing at a dedicated theater in the Venetian. Here at Montreal , we had to settle for a group of blue heads sporting various models of Sennheiser headphones. I took a moment to listen to the new flagship HD 800 ($1400 US). I'm no headphone junkie, but these were easily the most comfortable serious headphones I've ever heard, and probably the best sounding, too. An Orpheus tube headphone amplifier was also on display, and that would probably make the ultimate match for the HD 800 if it were still in production.

 

   

It was 3 o'clock and we felt we had seen it all, or at least enough. Obviously the show was not as large as previous years, but we had had fun and discovered lots of new components and toys. We hit up the Sharp Aquos presentation for one more container of popcorn for the road and wandered back to the Coup de Foudre room for a parting glance at the Tivoli radios.

 

Outside the Sheraton Centre we spotted a line of mon installateur mini-vans waiting to pull off the ultimate High End heist. With plenty of daylight we headed south toward Plattsburgh planning to wind our way through our beloved Adirondack Mountains , unsuspecting of the adventure that awaited us at the border.

 

One of the things you notice about road signs in Quebec is they are in French.

So as we approached the border we didn't pay much attention to the word NEXUS, figuring it was French for something like "Border Inspection". As we approached the crossing there were about twelve inspection lanes, but everyone seemed to be lined up at two of them. Except for the one to the very far left. With my grocery store mentality, I headed for the short lane at the far left. The car ahead of us seemed to be having trouble getting permission to pass through. Eventually, they shuttled them across the eleven other lanes toward the inspection station. We were next. The guard tilted her head into the two-way radio microphone on her chest and said "We've got another one," after which she explained what the word NEXUS means. Obviously I don't run drugs, guns or money across the border with any kind of frequency. In fact, never, but we, too were invited over to the inspection station where we were told to park our car and go inside while they ran computer checks on our ID. As we sat there on the Group W bench with all the mother rapists, father stabbers and illegal aliens, I looked up an down the seat of the bench and all over the wall behind the bench, trying to find those sacred comforting words, carved with a knife or a ballpoint pen or maybe even scribbled with a magic marker: Arlo Guthrie was here.

 

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