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HE 2005 Show Reports Thread

OK, I'll start it and you all can chime in with your impressions:

Here's the best rooms that I heard and some other impressions and goodies:

Big Rooms
Singer had one of the big rooms with 2 sets of VTL electronics, DCS digital and Peak speakers. The big rig (3 piece DCS and $70,000 speakers) had a buzz in the left channel and sounded a bit hi-fi to me. The smaller rig, with the new DCS one piece unit, wins my best of show vote. Definitely listen to this if you can. But I bet they'll be trying to demo the big rig mostly.

The JM Labs - Pathos room also sounds nice. I really like the sound of these medium sized JM Labs speakers with tubes driving them.

9th and 10th floor Small Rooms

ARS Aures Audio had some very fine sounding speakers poweres by a low powered SET amp. These speakers souond good, but look like a cross between Darth Vader and Alien.

MBL sounded very fine, as usual, with smaller speakers in a small room. Some boom was evident though.

Brinkman w/ Martin speakers gets my second vote. EMM digital was prevalent at the show, but the difference between the EMM and the Brinkman vinyl (recent Stereophile review by Fremer) was minimal. Very good sound.

Sonic Spirits (of NY Audio Rave fame here at the circle) sounded fine, both demoing during the show and in the after hours system for the club meeting. Good job Phil.

Von Schweikert VR4-SR and VAC electronicvs were good, as expected.

Kharma Ceramique also was well worth a visit. Funny, I didn't like these too much at the last show 2 years ago, but they were good this time round.

Butler Audio was showing off a new 100W 300B hybrid amp that they claim is very SET like. SET with 100W of power, with almost no heat thrown off and only 1 tube. Patents on this one. Nice for the techies but it didn't sound SET like to these ears. Perhaps the speakers were to blame? Who knows.

Those are the one's I liked.

ENjoy,
Bob
ptmconsulting

Showing 1 response by trelja

trelja
3,223 posts
 
Maybe my opinions will not match those of most, but I felt the MBL room was one of the poorest in terms of interface/match between the room and the system.

Don't get me wrong, I respect MBL a great deal, but there was just too much system (amp and speakers) for the small room they were in. I've always felt the achilles heel of the speaker was the underdamped low frequencies. Siting close to the wall, let alone near the corners, only exaccerbates the situation. The lows excited a lot of resonances, and the sound was boomy. Though some will say you can never have too much clean power, I think I heard otherwise.

MBL makes smaller equipment, and though they aren't the most prestigious components in the lineup, probably would have better served the event to my ears.

Apart from that, my friend attended the Friday night event at Rhapsody, featuring the Radialstrahlers, and was most impressed. And, believe me, he does NOT impress easily. Sounds like Rhapsody did an excellent job in setup there.
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