Salon Son & Image Report 2014 -- Montreal High-End Audio Show
Part 3
Show Report By Rick Becker

 

Gershman Acoustic showed their Avant Garde R1 model in red lacquer ($10,000, or $8,000 in wood finish) with an Audia Flight CD One M CD player at the front end and Flight Two integrated amplifier. Everything except the speakers was on the newly re-designed magnetic footers and cable risers from Gershman. The amp stand ($550) shown here with Ofra Gershman includes three footers designed to hold a 40 pound component along one side and 3 footers designed to hold a 100 pound component along the other side to compensate for the heavy toroidal transformers found in power amplifiers. Sets of four footers are available for $345 (heavy) and $335 (light). The music here was very good, as usual and the room was packed with people.

 

Upstairs in the Filtronique room of this two-level suite (2414/2416)—one that many might have missed—was a deceptively simple looking rig. A Vienna Acoustics Beethoven Baby Grand floor stander ($5500) was playing music from a VPI Traveler turntable with a Sumiko Blackbird cartridge and Naim Uniti 2 ($5395) all-in-one player supplemented with a Naim StageLine phono stage. A Nordost QB8 power strip and small Isotek power conditioner cleaned up the act. With cables this rig surely topped $15,000. I've always had good things to say about Vienna Acoustic speakers and this room was no exception. It was a fine sounding rig that certainly wasn't intimidating.

 

For many the intimidation came from the main room in the suite where one of those "Rigs to Die 4" was to be found. The digital side of the four tier rack was occupied by a dCS Vivaldi set lacking only the transport since files came from a server accessed with the keyboard and monitor on top. This column would easily be listed among the very few state of the art digital ensembles and priced close to $70,000. But I'm a fool for vinyl and tube gear so it was the Audio Research column on the left that entranced me with their own state of the art Ref. 10 line stage with separate power supply ($30,000) and separate phono stage. A large Audio Research Ref 250 monoblock (250 watts, KT120 tubes, $12,995 each) sat on an amp stand to either side of the main rack powering the Sonus Faber Olympica III speakers in an understated graphite lacquer ($13,500) rather than the more eye-catching walnut finish. The analog source was once again the Kronos Sparta turntable ($21,000) mentioned in Part 1 in the GTT Audio room, but here an original Kronos table (still in production) was on silent display off to the side. With different price points, different aesthetic and a slightly different sound, Louis Desjardins does not see them competing with each other. Also shown here is the André Thériault carbon fiber unipivot tonearm ($6500) with a Koetsu Rosewood cartridge. (The one in the GTT room had an Airtight PC1 cartridge.) In a candid moment I caught Louis explaining to Peter McGrath (r.) of Wilson Audio how the unipivot point of the tonearm is right at the level of the LP surface and the center of mass of the tonearm counterweight is below that surface adding stability to the arm.

This room is a bit of an anomaly since the sponsor, Fidelio Technologies, is not really an importer or retailer, but rather a recording, remastering and distribution venture of Andre Perry who is one of the brightest stars of the Canadian music industry, being a producer, musician, composer and recording engineer, and Rene Laflamme. I've known Rene for many years as a superb recording engineer and producer and he has now developed his proprietary 2xHD system for upgrading and remastering both analog and digital files to the highest level possible. Together they offer distribution and management of these files through their growing hi-rez download network that is approaching global proportions. The music here was superb, from either side of the rack, as it has always been in the Fidelio rooms of yesteryear.

 

Last year, (or was it only back in October in Toronto?) Resonessence showed with large and expensive Westlake Audio speakers and while it was a rare opportunity to hear the Westlake, people wondered whether it was the Resonessence DAC or the Westlake that made the music sound so good. This year they played music through a pair of 20-year-old B&W DM640i speakers and the music was still impressive. Question answered. Their Mirus and Invicta DACS are essentially the same and priced alike at $4995 US, but the Invicta has a pair of headphone jacks with independent volume controls, while the Mirus hold a couple of more ESS chips (8 per channel) and will resolve 352.8 and 364 kHz signals while the Invicta will only do 176.4 and 192 kHz. Both accept music on SD cards and both have digital volume controls as well an assortment of usual digital inputs. Music signal was fed directly to what looked like a large Resonessence amp on the floor, but apparently this is not something they market. I readily engage with blues music so I was easily drawn in by this digital, solid state system. Willie Nelson singing "Georgia" sounded pretty good, too, with lots of depth in the soundstage. Half of the staff engineers come from ESS, so they really know their way around these chips.

 

In the Audio D'Occasion room a no-name server fed an Atoll DAC200, which fed their preamp and stereo power amp, driving a pair of Dynaudio C1 stand mounted monitors. On silent display was an ST100 streamer with complete set of digital inputs that can also act as a preamp for about $2000. Also shown was a series of entry level product including their HD100 ($900) which is basically a headphone amp with preamp functions as well as a remote control.

 

In the Audiophile Experts room I found a rack full of Burson gear along with a Roksan Kandy CD player, all playing a pair of floorstanding Quad dynamic speakers. Unfortunately I couldn't see behind the rack to determine what the chain of events was, nor were prices listed. And since this was a wide open ballroom, it was difficult to evaluate the music. Elsewhere in the room I spotted a sharp looking Penaudio speaker in black and red.

 

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