It was an interesting room with an unusual headphone stand,
in-ceiling speaker and another petite Under
$5000 rig with Totem
Rainmaker speakers on a unique precisely adjustable tabletop stand from Ardan
that I have mentioned in a previous year. Beneath the headphone was an
attractive Perreaux 80i
integrated amplifier for $2995. I had not seen this brand in quite a while.
The Radio St-Hubert
room had music files in a MacBook Pro with an AudioQuest Dragonfly
DAC running into an NAD
integrated amplifier running into Monitor
Audio RX-6 speakers. The host ran a demonstration playing the same
cut both with and without the Dragonfly in the laptop and the difference was
very convincing — unlike last year (or was it the Toronto show?) where I was
less amazed using a headphone to audition the Dragonfly. At some point in the
show Linda had a chance to compare the Dragonfly with a decent set of
headphones and declared “I want one!” Like a lot of other people, she
watches movies in bed with earbuds plugged into her tablet. I better put this
on the Christmas list. But I digress. The system here was under
$3000, not including cables or the computer, and a very nice way to
get into the high end. Sorry, I forgot to take a photo here, but surely
you've seen a dragonfly before.
Another cool Under $5000
rig was comprised of a laptop (which you already own, right?) feeding into the
Naim DAC-V1 ($2300) with 32-bit/384kHz resolution and a very
good headphone amp and a volume control in the digital domain. That drove the
small NAP 100 power amp ($1200) with 50 wpc into 8 Ohms, 100 wpc into 4 Ohms,
which drove a pair of attractive new Focal 807W
stand mounted monitors.
The big rig in the Naim
Audio room featured the Ovator S800 loudspeaker (about $60,000) that featured
an almost full range driver on top that features some high-tech pistonic
motion and does some kind of wave bending to reach higher frequencies above 2
kHz. I noticed it was coupled to the rear of the speaker cabinet. It is called
Balanced Mode Radiator and there is an entire white paper about it on the Naim
website if you're into technical reading. Suffice it to say, this is their
top model. A couple of additional large woofers fill out the bass range. With
89dB/W/m sensitivity and a 4 Ohm resistance you are probably going to want
powerful solid state amps with these large speakers to fill out your large
listening room, no doubt.
Starting in the groove, an expensive Van
den Hul Colibri cartridge (about $8000) with gold coils was mounted
on the new Funk FXR-II 12”
tonearm ($3400) that seemed very thin relative to most tonearms today. This is
Van den Hul's finest cartridge and it sports a 0.50mv output. The arm was
mounted on an Acoustic Signature
Storm turntable ($7500) and the analog signal was sent to a Grandinote
Celio phonostage ($8750). The digital front end was the Chronolog
CD player from Trigon. Both were
fed to the Grandinote Domino preamp ($16,600). The Grandinote Demone
monoblocks ($49,000/pair) use special VHD output transformers wound with pure
silver and use zero feedback throughout the amp. It is all direct coupled
without any capacitors in the signal path. 60 Watts, pure Class A resulted in
a very tube-like sound. Very unusual to have an output transformer on a solid
state amp as Grandinote has done, but the result was exceptional. The Audio
Physic Virgo 25+ incorporates some new technology and borrows some
technology from the Avantera and fills the gap between the Virgo 25, which
remains in the line, and the higher Avantera model. The 25+ sells for $18,000
to $20,000 depending on finish. The goal here was not only to fill the large
price gap between the two models, but to offer a speaker with higher
performance in the same size package as the standard model 25. I noticed the
speaker cable was the Nordost ribbon stuff, and wondered if that might have
been the reason this rig sounded a little harder than what I heard at Toronto
when it used the Onda silver cables. The Calibri phono cartridge is lightning
fast and superb, but maybe it was too much truth for this system. I absolutely
heard and understood every word Jackson Browne sang on a cut they played from
my LP. All in all, it was certainly one of the Best
Rooms at the show. As an aside at the end of my visit I was told of
the new Grandinote Essenza, an upgraded version of their 37 wpc Shinai
integrated amplifier with the same technology as the separates, but in a dual
mono single chassis unit for about $16,000 from this Italian firm. That makes
for a cool $49,000 savings.
Having finished up the rooms on the first and second level,
I still had a little time before meeting Tom and Linda for dinner so I headed
to some of the larger rooms for casual exploration and to plan the attack for
Sunday. In the Liberty Trading room which is always filled with lots of LPs
and accessories as well as an assortment of systems in a shared open space, I
chanced upon some footers that utilized frothed aluminum as a dispersion
medium for vibration control. I had seen sheets of this material large enough
to make shelves, but couldn't track down a source. The hunt is on again. At
the top of the elevators the SSI ladies, sporting blue streaks in their hair
this year were still on duty. I stepped into the Pavillion du Canada exhibit
and immediately spotted three tube amps from Triode
Labs from the Toronto area. I have a new 6 wpc model from them just
waiting for a new high-efficiency speaker to break in for final listening with
their amp. It's a honey. Review forthcoming. Their red power amp shown here
is indicative of their no-frills/put the money into the sound approach.
Around the corner I stumbled into the Personal Audio Zone
— headphone nirvana. Immediately I recognized that it would take an entire
day to cover just this one room, so I plunged in for the twenty or so minutes
I had left. Groups of headphones seemed to be plugged into the same source,
but that source would change every ten feet or so. Headphones could also be
plugged into your phone, too, if that's where you had some of your music —
depending upon the size jack at the end of the cord. Eventually I ended up at
the farthest corner where the good stuff seemed to be. I particularly liked
the Woo Audio WA 7 Fireflies tube amp in both black and silver (tough choice)
for $999. Also a bunch of Grado headphones in a wide price range sounded very
good, as they have in the past. There were product sheets with code squares
you could zap with your smartphone to obtain more product info on the net —
a nice idea, but my phone is so dumb it doesn't work in Canada. Oh, well. I
had a pleasant chat with Robert Deutsch whom I see at almost every Canadian
show and then headed back to the room where Tom had already opened a beer and
Linda was sipping wine.
We hit the streets running and headed for the St. Hubert
chicken restaurant at the train station. Founded in 1951, it is a far cry
better than Col. Sanders. Outside we felt like celebrities as locals jumped
into the photo op like groupies. Turns out the Montreal Canadiens (I still
don't know why they are not called the Montreal Fur Traders) were about to
host the Buffalo Sabres. We didn't mention that we lived 60 miles from
Buffalo. After dinner I roamed through the restaurant admiring old photos and
architectural drawings that adorned the walls of this vintage building. Back
at the hotel a few people frolicked in the pool in spite of the snow that
surrounded the deck. Linda dozed off while I had to keep changing channels to
stay with the close basketball game between Butler and Marquette. Back at the
hockey game, Buffalo beat Montreal, 2-1 that night. In the morning I would
tackle the lower level.
---> Part 4 of our
Salon Son & Image Report 2013 -- Montreal High-End Audio Show page.
High-Performance Audio Reviews
