TAVES 2013 (Toronto Audio Video Entertainment Show) Repor
Part 4 By Rick Becker

With the mission nearly accomplished, I dropped down to the lobby of the King Edward and took note of the Kool2watch display where a couple of their watches had been submerged for the duration of the show. All of their watches required rewiring of your analog and even digital time references with unusual displays that were at the least, challenging. Not expensive, they guaranteed admission to the newest generation of hominoids: Humanus nerdus.

 

Outside the hotel, my editor had arranged for a nice blue Aston Martin for me to drive home, but alas, there was insufficient room for the large tube monoblocks and tube headphone amp I was taking home for review. There are good reasons I love my Tracker. I'll save my James Bond fantasies for my vintage Suzuki motorcycle, thank you.

 

Best Rooms At The Show? Or Rooms You Should Have Visited?
As frequently happens at shows someone in an elevator asked what rooms I liked and I can't really answer on the spot like that. I file away impressions on video and still photos and move on to the next room with a clean slate. Only on the drive home and during the process of writing the show report do I look back and identify the highlights. This time, instead of naming Best Rooms per se, I thought I'd list a bunch of rooms that I would recommend to a person who is relatively new to high end audio to visit over the course of a few hours on a one-day pass. Starting from Part 1and proceeding chronologically through Part 4:

Room 845: Visit the Gershman's and revel in the sound of their flagship Black Swan speakers with Pass electronics or appreciate the high value of their entry level rig. Either way, this is a solid room.

847: Adsum Audio had some very cool lifestyle/entry level speakers that sound good and will make it easy to get started in the high fidelity audio.

851: Reference 3A featured their newest speaker, but their entire line has a family sound that allows you to buy by the label according to your room size and musical preferences.

841: Stop in The Inner Ear room to hear a good $10,000 rig and lend an ear to Ernie Fisher for no more than five minutes. He's as much a classic as any brand in the show.

864: If you were lucky enough to hear the awesome Tech Das turntable before it was sold and delivered, it was a treat with Zesto tube electronics and Joseph Audio Perspective speakers. Joseph Audio is another speaker line you can buy by the label.

870: This was a good room to visit for a variety of headphones from Cardas, Audeze and headphone amps from Woo to get a taste of the Headphone Revolution. This is another good point of entry to the high end.

878A: Devialet's almost all-in-one player teamed up with a Focal Aria 926 speaker for people who want the quality sound without the addiction to the gear. New wave approach to the high-end audio.

881: Wynn Audio presented the perfectionist Harmonix gear and tweaks with the visually extraordinary SW speaker that you just had to see to believe.

887: The Coherent Audio room was a great example of fine tube sound with un-restrained dynamics and excellent transparency with high rez digital files from the extraordinary Baetis server.

891: The Muraudio room premiered an extraordinary 360 degree point source electrostatic speaker driven by Moon electronics that was transparent, dynamic and visually stunning.

888: The Nordost cable demonstration is worth experiencing if you are skeptical of the value and importance of high end cables. If you were already a believer, you could skip this room.

911: The ANKits (Audio Note Kits) room was worth a short visit to expose you to the possibility that you could build your own gear for some considerable savings.

910: The McIntosh room was worth a visit not only because it is a vintage, cult brand, but because it sounded great with either the Magnepan 1.7 speaker or the seldom heard McIntosh XR-50 speaker ($4400).

919: The Audiophile Experts room combined Linar electronics with both floor standing and stand mounted monitors from Focal, another brand you can safely buy by the label.

912: The Focus Audio room was notable for the very high resolution of its speaker and amplifier. Not for everybody, perhaps, but certainly a high achievement.

Kensington: Bryston put forth a very nice sounding room in a large space, achieving an acoustic experience not available in the smaller rooms.

Vanity A and the Booths in the hallway: There was a lot to see and learn by browsing among the tables in Vanity A and the booths in the hallways. It also provided opportunity to talk with the vendors and have a more "hands-on" experience like they have at the Munich show in Germany.

This is not a list of the best sounding rooms at the show, as you can readily tell, but certainly a pathway through the maze that would expose a visitor to the financial breadth and acoustic depth of the high end audio scene. If you didn't have fun here, well, perhaps you should have been at the national quilt show in Texas that weekend with my buddy Tom and his wife. If I missed your room or your favorite product, I'm terribly sorry. Perhaps I'll catch it next year in Montreal or Toronto.

Happy holidays and safe journey and as always, enjoy the music!

 

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