I witnessed the server problems in the Scott Walker room as well. Ted Denney was doing the demo. Just when it came time to demo the changes made, the server went down. Bummer.
Did any of you hear the big Altecs? I took one of my CD compilations and asked them to play it. Best Altecs I’ve ever heard, and I’m not a big fan of horns. What they do is build their own cabinets. Then the horn is powder coated and bolted to the top of the speaker cabinets, instead of just laying on top of the cabinets in the usual fashion. The reduced vibrations of the horns really made these speakers sing.
I was disappointed that more local dealers weren’t there. Maybe next year will be better in that regards.
The E.A.R. room sounded really good as usual. Dan Meinwald, the distributor, played excellent music as usual. You can always count on an excellent listening session in Dan’s room.
The Legacy speaker people had a nice sounding room too. They demonstrated their large speakers that are above the Focus line. Excellent sound for big rooms at 20k per pair.
Tons of good records for sale at Bob Donnelly’s booth. He just acquired over 100,000 records from a collector. Lots of rare jazz and classical on really rare labels that are never seen on the resale market at $20 to $60 a pop. He also had a terrific collection of dead-mint original Contemporary label jazz records.
Overall, there were four rooms that my friend Robert and I had a hard time prying ourselves away from. All four were playing non-audiophile music instead of the usual audiophile recordings that everyone seems to play at these shows.
How many rooms would play Dean Martin’s very first recording, original pressing, in mono ... and have it sound like Dean Martin was in the room? The only one that I know of, and to my ears, the most entertaining room at the show. This is a music lovers room where those in the know bring their own records to play. The person running the room has stacks of records too. He had a turntable with two arms, one with a stereo cartridge and the other strictly for mono. The mono records played in that room, including the Dean Martin record, produced some of the best sounds at the show. But then, I’m partial to that stuff. :-)
Frank
