Best sound at Stereophile show.


I got to rate the Dynaudio room as the best sounding Room. They used the Dynaudio C4 speakers which listed for 16,000. All I can say is, they sounded incredible. They sound very smooth with an amazing soundstage. Bass was really good.

I also liked the Gamut Room. Gamut used probably the largest Amp I'v ever seen. The Amp weighed 400 pounds. Speakers were the Pipedreams with the Gamut CD Player. The system sounded very 3 dimentional with a good bass response. I also got to thank Ole Lund Christensen. He's the designer of Gamut. He played by far the best music. He played upbeat classical, where you could judge the midrange and bass of the speakers. He also played brick in the wall by Pink Floyd. I felt to many rooms played to much Jazz and violin music, where you just couldn't judge the speakers. Also, Ole played what ever CD you gave him.

I also loved the Wilson Watt Puppies 7. What totally amazed me. Wilson played alot of the time, the Watt Puppies 7 with the massive Wilson Sub. I thought that Sub would totally boom up the bass on the Watt Puppies. But it was the exact opposite. The Wilson Sub blended in so perfectly with the Wilson Watt Puppy 7 speakers.

I also liked the Tact room. They had those new Tact speakers that must have been 7 feet tall. They sounded great.

Most amazing home theater performance had to be in the Audio Video Creations room. They used a Pioneer 50 inch Plasma TV. Krell multichannel Amps, Krell Preamp processor, Krell DVD Player, Piega speakers and Piega Sub. They played clips from Jurassic Park and Matrix. Holy Moley did this system sound unbelievable. It was so incredible sounding.

Another thing that really impressed me. In the NAD room, one of the people there downloaded a Jewel peformance from the Jay Leno show on High Definition TV. They downloaded the Jewel performance to a hard drive, then transferred it to a DVD recorder. This picture quality was amazing. It was so perfect the picture.

I also really liked this Antique Sound Headphone Amp with Senheiser headphones. It listed for 1200 dollars. You could also used this as a preamp. The Antique Headphone Amp used 2A3 Tubes. It sounded so perfect and could go very loud without breaking up. Plus it had that nice tube sound.

Also alot of the designers were really nice. I mentioned Ole. Al from Dynaudio, Mark O'brien from Rougue Audio, Dale Fontenot from Roman Audio speakers, Alan Yun from Silverline, Tash Goka from Divergent technologies and Gilbert Young from Blue Circle were really good guys.
twilo
The only complaint I have with Musical Fidelity is that when I went downstairs, they were playing CD's through their new budget DAC. But they couldn't switch it out. If your selling point is that the DAC makes CD's sound like SACD then you have to compare it in and out to hear what the thing does. Otherwise it is just a trust me thing. I have an old CD player and would have liked to hear it while I was at the show.
My friends and I thought the Thiel 1.6 were perhaps the best value but not the best sound. I had to wonder about using the Musical Fidelity equipment. The demonstrator made a deal of how these Thiels were so efficient (90) db compared to previous Thiels. Why use 250 watt mono's that loose power as they drop into lower impedances (3.5 OHMs and not all that much higher with these speakers)in a fairly small room?
Pipedreams/GamuT combo in a way too small room for the size of the soundfield that the system was able to produce.Very low distortion even at extremely loud levels - made some very difficult recordings sound easy to reproduce.Room size compromised the bass somewhat. Room was at least 1/5th the size of Dynaudio and Wilson rooms ( also good rooms)- probably 200 sq feet to 1000+ sq feet for the others. Best sound I have ever heard in what was a small hotel room.JM Lab/Lamm also very good sounding but demo way too controlled and did not play at any thing remotely resembling realistic SPL levels. Levels did not offer any idea of the systems punch, presence, or ability to present instruments to scale.