Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2004

Sunday

  Madisound had a vast amount of raw drivers at the show including the Fountek JP3.0 ($81) 3-inch ribbon tweeter. Wish 95dB sensitivity and extending to 40kHz, it looked quite tasty.

Now in its Third Edition, Robert Harley's The Complete Guide To High-End Audio and original Home Theater For Everyone. Both are great reads and highly recommended.

It's super big, it be super bad, we be talkin' 'bout Boulder and the 2010 Isolated Preamplifier ($39,000) and 2020 Advanced D/A Converter ($37,000). Just be the mac daddy with a briefcase filled with Benjamins, you dig baby?

Are you feeling randy baby, maybe a bit horny? Yeah baby yeah! The Cogent model Chiaroscuro two-way unit (no price set) employs the Cogent DS-1428 midrange/tweeter and DS-1448 lower frequency driver. This is the said to be the first all field coil compression driver system. The lower unit is a folded 60Hz exponential design.

Here at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest was a DSD multi-channel demonstration with Avalon monitors, Rowland's 501 (500 watt monoblocks) power amplifiers for front and 201 (200 watt) for rear amplification. This system was wired throughout with Cardas. Source tapes were played back using a Genex GX9048 48-channel PCM/DSD recorder. Meitner Design DAC8 Mk IV for digital to analog conversion.

Rocket had their RS1000 ($2,700) large floorstanding loudspeakers, said to be their 'next generation' for both stereo and multi-channel systems. A Vifa XT-Series ruing radiator tweeter is mated with 5.25-inch midrange drivers and a side-firing 8-inch mass-loaded woofer. The woofer is within its own internal enclosure, includes a massive 350 watt amplifier, and special computer software calle R-DES (Rocket Digital Equalization System) for optimizing the subwoofer to the room's acoustics.

Concert Fidelity's 6B64 monoblock tube amplifier ($28,000) naturally uses four 6B46 in parallel push-pull for output tube (producing 60 watts) and 6SN7 for driver and gain stage. The hand-wound transformers are optimized and simplified for short signal path. In fact the entire signal path is kept short and capacitors are fully specified as well.

In the Symposium/Immotive/Eben room they were using direct master tapes softy copies from Steve Hoffman.

The Symposium's new Isis rack ($3,500 as seen here) incorporates redesigned shelves, patented Rollerblock technology and their critically acclaimed Svelte Shelf technology. It is available is many configurations.

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