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
You are lucky to have gone to The Show. I live in New England and audio shows around here are very sparse.
I was hoping to spend 5 hours in my car this morning and drive down for two days of sonic bliss. Unfortunately, something came up and I will have to wait yet another year to attend the show.....

FrankC
I went to the show yesterday. Pretty much the same thing as last year. The only difference being it is in a new venue.
I think the car stuff is probably unnecesary, few Lambo candidates in the crowd that I saw. The new venue works better. The thing that got me chuckling is that when we regular folks are trying to see and get a listen, the occasional "reviewer" from "bumwhole stereo review" tries to occupy the vendors time. The arrogance of a few of the reviewers was really interesting to say the least....they probably dont get to act like that at their day job at the best buy geek squad, not that theres anything wrong with working on the geek squad.

This show gets better and larger every year. It really has grown to the point that it is a full day and then some to cover it. I am struck by how much equipment sounds really good, I mean really good, in less than excellent conditions ala a hotel room. Kudos to the LAOC Audio Society for a job well done.