Home Entertainment Show in Los Angeles

I too just returned. It's my first audiophile show and the experience was like seeing my bookmarks come to life. Great to see and hear so much stuff I only read about. For instance handling the Oyaide and Acrolink stuff... The carbon fibre wall plug is awesome.

Spread across four floors, it's a fun "little" show. (I am used to much, much bigger.) Today everyone was relaxed and low key, I suspect that things will get a bit more hectic over the weekend. What amazed me was that there was enough power in the hotel to run all this stuff!

Highlights for me included:

The Channel Island Audio room with the D200s running Von Schweikert 4jrs and the new 5s. Albert, Dusty and Jim Wang from Harmonic Tech were all on hand. I thought the room sounded tremendous and it was a crappy little room...

The Van Gaylord (ex Legend) room was nothing short of amazing with a $55K liquid cooled tube amp (literally immersed in oil) and their Legend Speakers. Really wondrous to hear.

Sonics by Joachim Gerhard debuted a new design that looked and sounded amazing.

The Chord Room had some of the slickest industrial design I have seen in this market - and the Neat speakers they were running with their 480w monoblocks were fabulous - as was their music selection.

Kudos to Rethm Speakers with an amazing 102db efficient set of speakers with amazing bass horn extensions that are built in India.

The Berning/Stillpoints room Tvad mentioned above was very interesting because it had been extensively treated by 8th Nerve Acoustics. It had the widest soundstage I have ever heard.

Finally - with a decidely more mid-market approach Aperion provided a stunning vision of HT of the future with a 7.2 system that came at you from every direction. Amazing cluck for the buck.

Surprises to me as a show newbie included seeing people shopping for records, the almost complete absence of subwoofers, the barrage of cable the size of hawsers and finished like jewelry... and the absence of computer source - IMHO Nagra won that hands down. Hot new trend is painting your speakers with high end automotive colors - Watt, Zu and Usher are all racing ahead with that sure to please approach.

Like a number of the posters, I went home feeling really good about what I had. And good about the people I met. Definitely a pleasant 4-5 hours though it mayy take you longer on the weekend.

Meanwhile I will be checking out the VTV Expo. Not sure who hijacked who (I can guess) but its an interesting example of splitting a small audience... I'll try post on that one tomorrow.

Saturday I spent the day at the VTV Expo. My impression was that traffic was very poor and certainly below Charlie's expectations. Hope he and the other exhibitors do better today. There was a bit of cross-traffic from the Sheraton.

There was a ballroom on the first floor that had the look and feel of a swap meet with tables full of NOS tubes and boxes. One popular theory was that this was pretty tangible evidence of the impact of ebay and the Internet - why go see tubes when you can let your fingers do the walking around the world online...

There were a few surprises upstairs, high profile companies who by virtue of reputation and pricing I would have expected to see at the Sheraton - starting with DeHavilland. But the one that really blew me away was Audionote which was comfortably esconced in two suites.

I knew something was up when I walked in the room and the speakers were literally touching the walls on both sides of the room. The gaggle of electronica (some of it hors d combat courtesy of a overly diligent shipping company) was boggling. And then there was the sound. The gentlemen spinning the discs (Peter?) had a fondness for old LPs and one got the slightly eerie feeling that Satchmo was indeed back in town - though why he would stay at this hotel was beyond me.

On the new end of things, the American Electronic Project was there with their new line of three Cheer Amps and a tube CD player built of course in China. We listened to the EL34 and the 300B units and for the price they were pretty nice. IMHO the key to their success was a stunning pair of speakers ($800 including lovely wood stands) Not an inch of fancy cable anywhere - let's talk zip.

Given my interest in all things computer based, for me the most interesting room was Bauls Audio, showing the 100db efficient Bastanis open baffle Prometheus speakers with the Gemini tweeters that put a prodigious sound stage with tremendous detail.

As it turned out, the reason for this was that they were running a just modded Empirical Audio I2S (as opposed to SPDIF) P3 DAC. It was my first chance to hear Steve Nugent's work up close and personal and folks, it rocks. No skips, no pops, just lots of music.

Bill Allen reported that the speakers sounded excellent with Vinnie's battery powered 6w Clari-T amps, though they were being demoed with 300B monoblocs. Bill is on a mission to figure out how to bring the best of the new technology into simple low cost systems that make music. I think its fabulous that someone is bringing together this kind of talent.