Stereophile Show -- Home Entertainment 2007 Hi-Fi and Home Theater Event

Report By Rick Becker
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Saturday Night

  

Unlike my gourmet dinner with Linda at Le Piment Rouge in Montreal, Saturday night at the New York show was the Boys Night Out. I reconnoitered with three friends I've known from previous shows: Loren Frumker, a dentist from Columbus, Ohio, Mark Katz, a psychiatrist and writer for Positive Feedback Online, and my long time buddy, fellow bicyclist, computer wizard @ Unisys, and also a writer for Positive Feedback Online, Art Shapiro. Joining us was Art's sister, Judy, who lives in New York, and purchased a lovely little pair of Epos loudspeakers at the show. My fantasy venue for dining was the Dinosaur Bar-b-que, a genuine honky tonk rib joint up on 131^st Street in Harlem. It is the third in a chain started in Syracuse, NY, by a bunch of bikers who know how to cook. The second is in a converted train station in downtown Rochester and features live blues acts several nights a week. The curbs in front are typically lined with Harley's; the ribs are world class, and the joint rocks. Alas, it is a major expedition to get to Harlem from Grand Central Station, so we opted for a small, non-famous Italian restaurant a couple of blocks away, hoping maybe Billy Joel would drop in. After a moment of silence in gratitude for being together again, we broke bread and had a great meal. After dinner, Art retreated to his sister's place for the night and the rest of us headed back towards the hotel. As we reached the corner by the Grand Hyatt four police cars converged on the scene and eight officers bolted into the hotel. Loren and I decided to take a walk instead of catching a bullet in the hotel. I bought a Lotto ticket at one of those sidewalk newsstands that always seems to be the source of a winning ticket. Nobody in Rochester ever wins. With luck, I thought, I might be able to afford one of the nicer audio rigs at the show... after taxes.

 

Sunday, May 13, 2007

From the discussion at dinner on Saturday I decided to hit the large rooms on the Conference Level first. Several of them were said to be among the best at the show. Unfortunately, three of them were sponsored by Sound by Singer and access was controlled so listeners would sequence through them one after another. I never hit the starting gate on time at the first room. The third room with dCS, VTL and Escalante Designs, I heard early on Saturday, since Matt Waldron invited me in. When I doubled back near the end of the day, they had closed up early and the doors were locked. I'm sure these rooms were covered by other reviewers as they were filled with many prominent lines such as JM Labs, Pathos, Zanden, Brinkman, HRS Systems and more.

 

mbl came to the Grand Hyatt dressed in black, naturally, but on rare occasions I've seen it in silver, which is also very handsome, if a little less formal. In the Uris conference room the rig was sized just about right and the sound, again, was similar to what I recalled from Montreal, which is to say, excellent. The DXD CD of the Mozart violin concertos was open, spacious and transparent. Moving around the room did not cause the image to collapse to the nearest loudspeaker. Of the two CD players in the system, one was a new model, shown here for $22.3K. The large monoblocks looked to be a four-man lift, weighing in very high on the masculinity scale as well. In this price league, you kind of assume a dedicated listening room in an elite neighborhood. Fortunately, the sound quality matches the visual formality and the price league.

Next door in the Julliard room, Krell was dressed up in silver. The loudspeakers were a black prototype two-box design due out in July with grille-strings covering the drivers much like Sonus Faber uses on their premium models. To be priced around $35K, the aluminum Modulari Duo is a bookshelf loudspeaker on top of a woofer section that allows for a variety of stereo and surround applications. On either side of the room were long tables with other Krell products, two of the least expensive being the most interesting to me.  One was their modest KAV-400xi integrated amplifier (200 wpc, $2500), and the other was the new Krell Kid iPod player. Unlike some more daring designs I saw at Montreal, the Kid takes the straight, unmodified signal right out of the iPod and proceeds with excellence thereafter. As with all Krell gear, it is built like an elegant tank. Dan D'Agostino was milling about and I wanted so say hello to him, knowing that he originally came from the Buffalo, NY, area, but when I finished my tour of the room, he had disappeared.

As I sat listening to the big rig in the Krell room, another show-goer bumped me on the shoulder and asked me what I thought of the system. Without looking at him in I nodded in affirmation that it was pretty good, but I wasn't sure about the bass. As I stood up to leave, I was surprised to recognize my friend Dale Bingaman, owner of The Stereo Shoppe on a quaint street in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, where he has some of the nicest in-store home theater rooms I've seen. I apologized for not stopping in to see him the past year or more, but the shift in furniture show dates in North Carolina has me driving by his Shoppe on Sundays on the way south and late at night on the return trip.

In the hallway outside of the Julliard conference room a radio station had set up a live broadcast situation and was interviewing a woman and her early-teenage daughter, presumably about all things audio. What a great idea to promote the event and disseminate awareness of the hobby.

Hewlett-Packard wasted one of the largest conference rooms, the Broadway, with a line of flat screen TV's along one wall. They could have had better exposure had they presented in the hallway where the masses milled by. The most interesting item here was one of the smallest at the show, a prototype hard drive about the size of a small audio monitor capable of storing four terabytes of ones and zeroes. With remote assistance, it has the capability of being loaded from distant locations via the Internet. If all goes well, it should be out sometime in the fall. Now, if they could store that much info on a flash memory without any moving parts, they'd have the perfect companion for the Nova Physics Memory Player, and the yet to be invented DVD equivalent.

The Outlaw Audio gang created a lot of Internet buzz about their presence at the show, but again, we seemed to have another wasted conference room without an active playback system. Possibly all the action was in the room next door, but as I recall, it was locked. A new bookshelf loudspeaker was offered in black for $999 or cherry for $1100. With a very flat claimed frequency response from 54Hz to 22 kHz, they also offer a three position boundary compensation switch for wall or corner placement and a proprietary 3-position high frequency switch to compensate for live or damped listening environments. A similarly flexible new LCR home theater loudspeaker was also on display for $700, and a forthcoming subwoofer for $400 was very nicely styled. The new Model 7900 seven channel balanced amplifier (300 watts, each channel, balanced and unbalanced inputs) on display with its lid off looked pretty serious and mission specific with little of the $3500 spent on cosmetics. With all that power on hand, maybe it was a good thing it was on silent display.

  

The TACT presentation was one of the rooms that I had great interest in from the pre-show press release. And my interest goes back many years to earlier TACT presentations at New York shows. Unfortunately, I think their room was too intimidating for a lot of people. Time and again I saw people walk into the room, stare at the complexity and the strange arrangement of chairs, and walk out without ever experiencing the cutting edge technology being presented here. In the cartoon bubbles above their heads I could clearly make out the words: “Not in my living room!” Ralph Glasgal quickly sensed my above average curiosity and coaxed me to walk between the rows of stack chairs running down the middle of the room. When I approached the sweet spot the two-channel CD of the DAD Mozart Violin Concertos miraculously blossomed into surround sound with music all around me. It was not the subtle surround effect of the SACD Surround version I heard in the Lipinski Sound room on Saturday, but closer to the effect of being in the middle of the orchestra, which I found a bit disconcerting. With stereo movie sound tracks, I expect this might have been highly involving. The Ambiophonics technology creates not only the surround experience, but also supplies very significant room correction. It is currently supplied in all of the TACT RCS or TCS products. Discussion of this technology goes beyond the scope of a show report, but details are available at ambiophonics.org and tactaudio.com. The fact that it is backward compatible with stereophonic recordings should make it of interest to many audiophiles and cinephiles alike. The press release suggests that the effect is also achievable with much smaller and more home-friendly loudspeakers than the big Sound Lab electrostatics used here — something that they might consider displaying next time around to attract even more interest.

In the Wintergarden conference room I sat through another detailed lecture in order to experience the 7.2 surround loudspeaker system for $2500 by Aperion Audio powered by Outlaw Audio electronics. It was amazing to hear how much you can get for so little. You don't need to be an audiophile to realize the value of this system. Settling for a 5.1 system instead of 7.2 would raise the value even higher. Selling factory direct from Portland, Oregon also helps.

Jumping back up to tackle the 14^th floor, I had been warned about La Sphere, a giant eyeball perched upon a double helix. Powered by a rack full of Bel Canto electronics, this large, dramatic loudspeaker from the renowned French manufacturer Cabasse produced some of the finest music at the show, regardless of amplification type. This was one of the few solid-state rigs that could wean me away from tubes. For $150K you get a 22” four-way coaxial driver with an active crossover with variable slopes and time alignment of the four acoustic centers, plus a technician to set it all up and program it for you. Actually, for $150K you get two La Spheres, one crossover unit and one technician. La Sphere, however, visually dominates the landscape, and would perhaps be best suited for homes that resembled a small contemporary art museum. It cries out to be tamed by large paintings, either chaotic or minimalist, to put the large and intriguing design into proper visual perspective and not dominate the music itself. Either that, or listen in the dark. I could hardly keep my eyes off La Sphere, feeling anxiety that bordered on paranoia. Fortunately, it is the flagship of the line, which includes many other moderately sized concentric driver loudspeakers, all the way down to grapefruit-sized balls designed to mount on the ceiling or wall in home theater applications. If you are looking for high quality sound and outstanding contemporary design from a company with a long track record this line is among the very best available.

 

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