This is the
age of headphones, Bluetooth and wireless speakers. And at $90 in the headband
of your choice you get two out of three with these headphones from Skech
that are a short step away from the high end. The third mantra is
sung by the Focal Easya speaker
which was seen, but not heard. It's all Lifestyle, but remember earlier on
we were all amoebas.
There was a lot of analog in the rooms this
year and this $7500 rig featured a Clearaudio
Concept table and cartridge from Germany along with a Unico
Primo hybrid integrated amplifier with 12AX7 input tubes driving a nice
leather-faced floorstanding Opera
Grand Mezzo speaker (~$3200). The equipment rack shown here was seen in a fair
number of different rooms throughout the show. Solid wood shelves separated by
heavy metal bars. This was one of several Coup
de Foudre sponsored rooms.
It was nice to hear some Manley
tube gear again in the Canadian dealer Acoustique Technologies room. A pair of 250 monoblocks ($12,500), switchable from 125 watts
triode to 250 watts tetrode were driving a pair of Marten
Getz 2 speakers ($23,000), one model up from the ones my friend Tom had just
purchased. A Manley Neo-Classic 300B remote controlled preamp was the heart of
the rig. This is one of the very few preamps that utilize the 300B tube which
is more commonly seen in power amps as a power tube putting out about 8 watts,
or as a driver tube for a larger power tube such as an 845. I listened to Paul
Simon singing "Tubes on the Souls of Her Shoes" ...err, make that "Diamonds..." which is a song on my compilation CD. It was nice to hear it
here from the LP being played on a Dr.
Feickert Woodpecker turntable with a Manley Chinook tubed phono
stage. I really bopped along in this room, in spite of the conversations.
Next door the music was just as good with
another Manley Neo-Classic 300B
RC preamp driving a pair of Manley Snapper monoblocks with EL34 tubes that put
out a hundred watts which were quite sufficient for driving the Nola
floorstanding speakers with an open baffle for the midrange, seen here from
the very tidy back side. A Meitner
ma1dac handled the bits with the big rig here. I also noted a Peachtree
DAC.iTx which probably factored in with the $5000 system featuring the stand
mounted Nola Boxer ($1650). Others may have heard the handsome Acoustic
Signature turntable which appeared to be one of their more
affordable models with a Grado cartridge.
Things aren't always what they seem in these
rooms and many presenters could do themselves a lot of good by placing "Now
Playing" cards on the gear that is active. The VMAX
Services room was a case in point. At Toronto the importer mounted
a silent display on a table in the bullpen. Here, they went active with a rig
powered by the new Hegel H80 integrated amp with remote control, built-in DAC and
five digital inputs. It puts out 75 watts per channel and is far better than
the previous H70 model. While the blue readout on the Hegel CD player
indicated a CD was playing, the music was actually sourced from the laptop
above it, feeding a small Hegel DAC behind it, which then fed into the H80.
Double DAC'ing? They assured me it sounded better this way. Most impressive
was the music coming not from the stand mounted Amphion
speaker, but the floorstanding full-range Essence
Electrostatic
speaker.
When I returned to the VMAX room on my final
sweep, I encountered Richard Kohlruss who insisted I listen to the new Davis
Acoustics three-way floorstander that will sell for $1000, retail. His
speaker wires were running with bare ends, so it was a hassle to swap the
speakers into the rig. I held the speaker at an angle to facilitate the trick
and it was certainly worth the effort. Davis manufactures drivers for other
speaker manufacturers in Europe and a couple in the USA (which shall remain
un-named). They also now make their own speakers and this little gem would
bring a $5k entry level system home for a good bit less than $5k. Adirondack
Audio & Video, a high-end newcomer with a very nice store just south of
Lake George, NY, has just picked up the Davis speaker and I look forward to
visiting them again on my summer vacation.
I had a listen to the Monitor
Audio Silver 10 (~$3000) driven by the handsome stack of Cyrus
components that were shown in very dim light at Toronto. Still, there are
those pesky cables to deal with. A $5k rig on silent display included a Cyrus
all-in-one component and a stand mounted Monitor two-way monitor ($900). There
were probably twice the number of $5000 systems on display this year, the
second time they have promoted the concept, but most of them were not playing
when I visited the rooms.
--->
Next Page.
High-Performance Audio Reviews
