The
Incident
There is always an incident on my trips to
the Salon Son & Image report of the Montreal high-end audiophile show. Those who have read my
Salon Son & Image show reports over the past decade or so years know
that I am a magnet for incidents. This year, as I approached Montreal on route
20 Est and thought I was going to be right on time to meet up with my
Rochester audiophile buddy, Tom Lathrop. Until traffic stopped. A tall
temporary gate blocked the entire road where a bridge was apparently missing.
Of course all the signs warning of this obstruction were in French, so I was
blindsided and forced to circle through town and backtrack to Route 40 which
traversed the north side of Montreal. Fortunately, understood the word "detour" plus the fact that I was one
of a long line of victims of this late night construction project was of
little consolation.
Fired up my mental global positioning system,
refined over the course of 55K miles of hitchhiking back in the '60s and '70s, and honed in on the Hilton Bonaventure. After many miles on this
industrial corridor, with only an occasional star to show me which end was up,
I hung a right onto Route 13 south. A wide open flatland populated with blue
lights was too large to be the Montreal Centre du Bocce & Curling. Sure
enough, it was the airport. Soon, I was back on track and reconnoitered with
Tom in the lobby just before midnight.
Warnings
And Disclaimers
As usual I chose not to nominate a first,
second or third best room at the show. There are too many variables such as
room size, the music playing at the time of my visit, and the ambient cackle
of hosts and visitors. Rather, I’ve chosen the designation Best
Rooms to identify those rooms that exemplify the greatness of our
microcosm. They appear throughout this report and several appear near the very
end of my story. If you were there, I hope you had as much fun as I did, and
if you were not, I hope I’m able to stir up some enthusiasm for you. Aside
from the somewhat confusing trail of rooms through the hotel, it was a great
show. Next time I will bring my compass. And please don’t take my words here
as gospel, but rather stir them in the pot with other show reports and see
what might taste good for you.
In the morning, after a delicious buffet breakfast in the
hotel, I enlisted Tom to help me transfer some amplifiers I was returning to a
manufacturer. I picked up my Press badge at registration and as you can see in
the photo, blue is the national color of Quebec. Not everyone in Quebec
has blue hair; just an elite corps. These lovely ladies and other guides were
helpful to visitors throughout the show.
My first stop was the Son
Ideal room where I spotted this new Rogue
Athena tube preamplifier with separate power supply ($5K US). The power supply
was connected with three separate balanced cables and the preamp featured both
balanced and dual single ended outputs as well as a Tape Loop, Processor Loop
and a Unity Gain input.
What was actually playing in this room was a modest rig
comprised of a Rega Apollo CD player, Rega P3 turntable and Rogue
Cronus integrated tube amplifier ($2800) driving Harbeth
HL Compact 7ES-3 speakers ($3600). It had a classic warm tubey sound that was
inviting, if not accurate, and should be pleasurable for hours on end. The rig
totaled about $10K.
Shown here is a La Platine JC
Verdier turntable with a Furutech
Silver Arrows pure silver phono cable leading to a Rossner
& Sohn Canofer phono stage. What were playing were an Ensemble
CD player and integrated amplifier. The Ensemble speaker ($20K) featured a top
of layers of aluminum with wood sandwiched between. The entire speaker was "floating" on its own suspension system. Because it is aluminum, the
speaker had its own separate ground wire entwined with the speaker cable. The
entire Ensemble line, I was told, was designed by one man, even down to the
input connectors and power cords.
Shown here is the new Furutech
Power Flux filter, a foot-long section of thick cable used on digital
components inserted between the component and its power cord to nail the
grunge at its source. In another room that was fronted
by my friends from AuDIYo.com was
a Furutech ST40 USB DAC with a
headphone output with volume control and source selector. This cute little
component was about 6" wide for desktop use. Inside I heard the Rossner
& Sohn turntable again. The speakers here
were the Klaro Summus ($3300
regular finish, $4K in piano black) that were much more impressive than the
Klaro model I heard last year. Among other interesting features it had unique
round aluminum vibration absorbing footers. In this rig they were driven by a Rowland
Continuum 250, an ICE powered integrated amp which doubles down to 500 watts
per channel into 4 ohms. A CEC CD
player was used as a transport for a Vector DAC.
This was a very good sounding room, close to the best at the show.
I was hoping to meet Larry Denham of TT
Weights at the AuDIYO.com
room again this year, but he was back at his "shop" putting together the
first run of his Black Onyx turntable ($10K). Shown here is their turntable
weight in brass with a built-in level, surrounded by cable from Audio
Sensibility who makes some reasonably priced power cables with
interesting technology that I intend to pursue as soon as Steven
Huang (seen below) catches up with the back-orders he amassed at
the show. I’m shown here on the left with Steven.
A pair of gorgeous McAlister
OTL 195 monoblocks ($8500) was driving a pair of King
Sound Prince II full range electrostatic speakers ($6500) to very
good effect. The amps are stable down to 2 Ohms, which allows them to work
with these speakers. I paid particular attention to outstanding transparency
of these speakers to see how they compared to my open baffle Tekton Design
reference speaker at home. The Kings sounded very good to me at a moderately
loud level, but my friend Tom reported that at a very high level the previous
day they were not as tolerable. The photo does not do justice to the beautiful
tiger maple chassis of these monoblocks, although they could use additional
fine sanding on the woodwork. The light natural finish of the amplifiers
matched nicely with the wood frames of the King speakers.
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