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New York HiFi Show: Tubes and Turntables

I was at the New York HiFi Show today.  It was hard to find many CD players, despite one with a price tag $40,000.  Virtually every room featured turntables and tubes. Sonically, it was a definite improvement over shows in the past.  Not too much sizzle and boom, although a lot of systems demonstrated big bass. Natural sounding components were the rule.
There were hardly any systems affordable by the average audiophile.  $100,000 rigs were not unusual. It seems demonstrators were prone to showing their best.
 With all the myriad of exotic stuff, I’m sorry I can’t remember too many names, but the re-introduction of sophisticated treble and bass controls and room-conditioning processors were impressive.
Of course, streaming was featured in many displays.
It wasn’t a large show, so it was comfortably do-able in one day.
rvpiano

Showing 1 response by mgolpoor

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mgolpoor
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One of the worst and most boring shows I have ever been to. I agree with the above comments about what was being shown but there lies the problem with the industry as the whole, they are not catering for the ordinary people with a reasonable budget. All these companies have forgotten that it is easy to design and produce a CD player that costs $40,000 which sounds good. Its not so easy to design one that sounds good and costs $2,000.
That is why that the room which impressed me most was Technics with ’Real world’ prices for Turntables and a pair of stand mount speaker that could really sing for $1,700 !
Unfortunately manufacturers prefer to sell 5 items at $100,000 each instead of 500 items at $1,000 each. But that business model does not serve someone who has a budget of $15-20K for a complete system who should really be able to put together a very decent system.
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