It may not be Munich, but Capital Audio Fest is big enough to require more than one day to audition more than a small sample of exhibitors. This is the fourth year I've gone on Sunday, arriving around opening time and finding they're starting to pack up equipment while I'm barely halfway through my list of "must audition" rooms. My main interest is speakers, and I am invariably amazed at two things: how many totally different designs there are and how so many of the similar-looking designs (i.e., cones and domes in a box) sound vastly different from one another.
Top highlights for me this year included Joseph Audio and Magico, both of which always manage to sound musical even under difficult show conditions. I heard enough boomy, one-note bass at the show to last me till next year, but the latter's sounded balanced, with bass that was extended, tuneful, and visceral when the program material called for it but never overblown. The Magico S3s sounded especially compelling with the C.A.T. electronics in the Truman Room, with that same punchy, clean bass plus a midrange clarity that I thought rivaled the several pairs of Josephs I heard, all of which sounded fundamentally right in a way that few speakers ever do. This was especially evident with piano music.
Several flights up (or after an interminable wait for the elevator—pick your poison), there were sweet sounds to be heard in the Vandersteen suite. The Quatros were organic-sounding with a top end that was detailed but not exaggerated. I also was rather taken with the Elac room. That company may be best known for their budget models, and indeed they were demonstrating a pair of tiny, powered Elacs, the Debut ConneX, which has a plethora of connectivity options and are currently selling for a pittance, but I was more intrigued by the much larger speakers flanking them. The Elac Vela FS-409s, 3.5-way floor-standers in flawless lacquered walnut enclosures, had superb soundstaging and an impressively smooth octave-to-octave balance. The presentation was slightly more forward than that of the Quatros down the hall. Nevertheless, like those Vandersteens, they got the treble right. These seem to have flown under the radar; has any major publication done a full review?
I also heard some impressive sounds in the GoldenEar room, which surprised me because I had expected them to be bright. Unfortunately, the room was crowded and I had more territory to cover, so I didn't have time for a proper audition. Next year, I'll try to audition them earlier.
Then there are the Larsens, which are designed to be placed as close to the front wall as possible. As someone with a difficult room layout, and as a fan of Roy Allison's speakers back in the day, I really want to like these speakers. I don't remember what they were demonstrating last year, but this year, it was the top-of-the-line model 9s in gorgeous ebony. And again, this year, the sound was just so-so. I think the room itself may be the problem. Both this year and last, it was a narrow, deep space, with the speakers against one long wall and the listening chairs practically touching the opposite wall. Maybe a more square-ish room would work better. If the back of one's head is almost brushing the wall, the room modes may be impossible to overcome.
Back downstairs, I wandered for the second time into the MBL space, hoping for a more positive reaction than I'd had several hours before. This time, I sat in a different location and stood in several other places, but it didn't help. The soundstage was not only wonderfully spacious but impressively stable as I moved around, and the speakers also sustained their remarkable sense of transparency regardless of listening position. Sadly, the bass was heavy to the point of nearly overpowering the rest of the spectrum.
Among the less conventional (i.e, non-box) speakers being shown this year, I think I was most impressed by the Magnepans. That company has made some of my favorite speakers over the years, but they don't always sound so good at audio shows. This time, they got it right.
By far the most intriguing speaker design I encountered was made by a company called Endow Audio and featured something called "Point Array", in which a series of dome midranges describe a vertically-oriented circle (actually a polygon, but I didn't count the number of sides) around the outside of a tweeter horn. So the tweeter and woofer point toward the listener, while the midranges point up, down, left, right, and at various diagonal angles in between. I can't think how this would lead to the sort of spatial presentation that could possibly be described as coherent, but surprisingly it did. Unfortunately, the speakers sounded far from neutral tonally, with a degree of classic "cupped hands" coloration that I hadn't heard from a horn-loaded tweeter in a long time.
In the Spendor room, they were demoing the Classic 100, which must be the antidote to "hi-fi-sounding" speakers. They're old-school by design, soft-dome tweeters and big boxes sitting up on stands, with enclosures wider than they are deep. And they sound simply wonderful, capable of uncompressed ear-splitting levels that, unlike so many others, won't actually hurt your ears. They're a little recessed, a little mellow, it's true, but this seems way preferable to the razor-sharp assaults that are so commonplace nowadays in the name of "detail."
Last but not least, a shout-out to the welcoming folks in the Gershman room, who took the time and trouble to seek out my music request. Their Grand Avant Garde speakers sounded lovely: balanced and uncongested, with nearly holographic imaging that seemed to open a window directly to the venue where the music was recorded. I wish I'd been able to spend longer with the Gershmans.