I was there Friday and saturday. It was interesting to me how much things changed from Friday to Saturday. On friday, I found two rooms that I thought were pretty good--Von Sweikert (sp) and Magico. On saturday the magico room was playing techno dance music so loud in such short snippets that it was not interesting at all.
Other rooms that had been horrible on friday got better saturday--perhaps some morning adjustments. One notable improvement was the Primaluna/Tannoy room that went from worse-in-show on Friday to just mediocre on Saturday.
The Songer speakers driven by a 300b should have been better but the 300b was operating at full volume to try to keep up with the show and SETs don't sound that good at full volume.
Many of the rooms were playing so loud that they just sounded like commercial systems--totally saturated. Of course they were competing with noise from other rooms. Very bad situation.
I went home and confirmed that none of the systems sounded better than my own. however, with $300K average equipment in each room, I’m pretty sure some of them could have sounded better given optimal conditions.
More interesting were the people I met and the decisions behind the show: who was there, who wasn’t there, and what was on display.
Jerry