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random thoughts on THE Show

Went to the show today. Registration did a fine job, dont show up at opening, show up at 9 or 11, just sayin. Some highlights:

- Sunny Audio showing Audio Research amplification, MSB digital, Wilson speakers...Sunil is a real gentleman and knows how to set up a room. Extraordinary!
- The Vandersteen speakers (Treo's and Seven's) also running off of Audio Research were excellent.
- The Usher speakers in the Katli Audio room were terrific driven by Pass Labs and Accuphase. Fred is also another great dealer.
- Trenner & Friedl speakers are interesting but priced pretty high.
- The Tocaro speaker were crazy good with beautiful woodwork but $14k is pretty steep.
- The Venice Audio and Peter Selsenick room running Naim gear and Harbeth speakers was jsut right, as always.
- Evolution Acoustic and Dartzeel was pretty special and the Avantgarde Zero 1 speakers were stunning.
- Went in to a bunch of rooms and the volume sometimes ran me out of the room.
- Alot of rooms using Aurilic streamers.
- Not many horrible sounding rooms to my ears so the extra day of setup combined with a great deal of pretty good equipment.
- The surprise of my day involved Elac speakers and Andrew Jones. Andrew was very gracious and demoed his new 2- way small bookshelf/standmount for his new company. It was the best $1,000 speaker you will hear at the show but it will carry a MSRP $229 pair when it is released. Very nice.
ghasley

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bdp24
9,510 posts
 
Sorry for the late post---somehow I missed this one. Having recently rejoined the Hi-Fi consumer club, I am pleasantly surprised by the newer companies offering such high-value products. While the older companies somehow continue to sell their to-me often over-priced products (the pricing structure of a product line seems to increase steadily as the company becomes older, until), newer ones are there for anyone seeking a more cost-effective alternative.

Comments on some already mentioned topics:

- The staff at the hotel were great.
- Some rooms DID play their system too loudly, but those were mostly Home Theater type companies.
- No truly bad sound (maybe I missed those rooms), as I have heard even at CES.
- Retailors were generally good at figuring ways to get good sound in not good rooms, very thoughtful and creative.

I heard some really good sound, but was truly impressed with my first hearing of the Sanders ESL's. What a great loudspeaker---I can't get them out of my head!
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