Level 2
Dropping down to Level 2, in Salon 4 sponsored by Le
Son Ideal I found Martin Logan
CLX electrostatic speakers being driven by Bryston
electronics. Their CD player was being used as a transport to feed
their new separate BDA-1 DAC. The muscular 28B SST2 (squared) monoblocks, which I had seen topless at CES, were
driving the Martin Logans. The system produced a big spacious sound, but I
really am not into opera so I moved on.
Level A (below ground level)
Simaudio Moon
CD.5 CD player ($1200) once again combined with their I.5 integrated amplifier
($1200), this time with a new Dynaudio
X12 stand mounted monitor (also $1200) to produce very nice music at a
relatively affordable level. The drivers of this two-way monitor were mounted
on a baffle of material different than the wood speaker cabinet. It was rear
ported and allowed for single wiring only — in keeping with its cost. I
specifically asked the host to switch over to this rig since no one was
listening to the larger floorstanders being played. Within a couple of minutes
a substantial crowd had gathered, listening very intently. In a large room,
mounted on the long wall the X12 was very impressive at a moderate volume.
I'd call it a winner.
Vince Bruzzese
played up the red theme of the new Totem
Acoustic Wind floorstander ($12,500 US) introduced at CES,
contrasting it with white walls and white shag carpet. A horizontally mounted
Tribe III provided center channel, also in red. An in-wall surround was
mounted in the white side walls and red Tribes were used on the red back wall
to provide a complete surround system, along with a couple of Storm subwoofers
($1050 US, each) sitting directly on the carpet without spikes. The side and
rear surround pairs were mounted in phase, parallel. The Wind is a very
reasonably sized loudspeaker, weighing only 75 pounds, but they put out a very
large sound both here and at CES. The skid plate across the back edge of the
loudspeaker is a machined piece of metal designed to drain resonances out of
the cabinet. They pushed some serious emotional buttons in this room with a
few of my favorite oldies by the Beatles and Pink Floyd. While Totem is
perennially a very good room at
Montreal
, this year's presentation deserves recognition as one of the Best
Rooms, unusual for a surround system.
Once again I came upon the Arabesque
glass loudspeaker from Crystal Cable
and found my friend Ernie Fisher of
The Inner Ear with Gabi
van der Kley, the CEO and driving force behind this unique
loudspeaker. It sounded much better here at
Montreal
than it did at CES, I'm happy to say, but my ear is probably not as critical
as Ernie's. This time I noted a carefully disguised port in the narrow end
of this somewhat paisley shaped design and paid more attention to the inner
wiring which is plainly visible as you see here. Electronics included a Moon
CD player and integrated amplifier and a Sota
turntable.
Audioville,
a
Montreal
retailer, had a table with a trio of integrated amplifiers that included the Music
Hall 25.2 ($800), Roth
MC4 ($550) and the cute Fatman
I-tube ($399, all CDN). Both the Roth and the Fatman are made by Mr. Roth, who
remains a mystery to me. It seems the price of the I-tube has come down quite
a bit over the last year. Both are great for office desktop rigs. I stuck my
finger on the volume control to give you an idea of the size of these little
gems. Both offer docking for iPods and the MC4 offers four additional inputs
making it a little more functional. Although the wattage is small (13 wpc for
the Roth), both units are capable of driving small monitors to civilized
listening levels in an office, or while your spouse sleeps down the hall. It
was a pleasure to meet Steve Nicola
again who kept a watchful eye on me to be sure one of these little devils
didn't inadvertently fall into my briefcase and become a review sample.
Outside the AuDIYo.com
room I listened in on a fascinating demonstration of copper turntable platters
and mats as well as copper outer rings to flatten warped LPs. All of these
come in different sizes and weights for different styles and different models
of turntables. Larry Denham is
the president of LJT Manufacturing,
a company practiced in the art of ultra precision CNC machining for the
aerospace industry. Fortunately for us, Larry has an interest in analog
playback, metallurgy and vibration damping. The result is TTWeights
Audio and a host of the prettiest turntable accessories I've ever
seen. They were not set up with a playback rig, but Larry's demonstration
convinced me that he knows of what he speaks. Rapping on the copper mat showed
it to be far deader than the platter on which it was placed. And their
Plexiglas centering tool made positioning of the TT outer ring a snap. Eight
different record clamps are offered and they are all gorgeous. Lest you think
these jewels are meant for ultra-High End turntables, Larry suggests they will
take even mid-fi turntables into the High End. You can certainly believe I'd
love to find that out for myself.
Just as fascinating as the TTWeights turntable accessories
were a photo of a couple of LP grooves magnified 500X. It blew away my vision
of a grove being a steep-walled "V" rather than the flat-bottom canyon we
see here. It would be really cool to see a 500x magnified video of a cartridge
tip in the groove of a spinning LP. Maybe next time?
This reminded me that earlier in the show I had met Mike
Latvis of Harmonic Resolution
Systems in the hallway. I had reviewed his Analog Disc some years
ago and have watched his superb equipment stands proliferate at shows ever
since. Mike told me that HRS is now collaborating with acoustic room designers
in this country and abroad to solve (or preferably avoid) problems when people
spend big bucks on high end audio equipment and achieve only mediocre results.
The story goes a lot deeper than this, but if you're in such a situation,
now you know who you can contact.
At AuDIYo.com
the Gang of Four from
Richmond Hill
, just north of
Toronto
, seems to have been downsized again this year. From left to right, Rick, Ed
Jong, Simon Au, Ray
Li, and Linda. They dragged me up to the "loft" part of their
room and insisted I listen closely to the Rossner
& Sohn rig from
Germany
. There I met Lawrence Lin of Excel
Stereo, a firm that offers equipment repair and modification
services, and now imports the Rossner & Sohn line. Norah Jones Live
from Austin, TX was spinning on the KLM-15 turntable ($8500 CDN for
the table & arm) outfitted with the new Sussurro moving iron cartridge
from Soundsmith ($4500). The tonearm mount was especially
interesting in its simplicity and beauty. A stand-alone DC motor drives the
platter with a fish line belt. The R&S Canofer phono preamp ($7200 US) is
totally adjustable with 300 possible settings for mm cartridges and 1836
settings for MC.
However, my photo indicates that a Soundsmith MCP2
phonostage sitting below the tonearm may have been in use. The Canofer V
integrated amplifier ($8500 CDN) was a beauty, putting out 125 watts into 8
Ohms, and doubling down to 4 Ohms, and again to 2 Ohms. There were no
traditional knobs on the integrated amplifier and I didn't take the short
course on operating it. There was also a remote control for listening chair
potatoes that should make it easy. Perhaps Steve Rochlin will see this line in
Munich
and have some additional insight and opinion. I thought it was superb sounding
with the Gemme Audio Katana,
ranking as another Best Room in
spite of the high ambient noise in the multi-level space. A while later I had
an opportunity to hear the Klaro Audio Primara
Monitors ($1800) with 91dB/W/m efficiency at 8 Ohms that sounded very
competent with the Rossner & Sohn rig. On another front, Ray Li told me
the Blueberry Hill Cables are designed and made in
Toronto
by Mr. MarlenMogilever using
silver and OCC copper conductors with Furutech connectors for the most part.
Most uniquely, he produces a combination step-up transformer/phono cable that
puts the step-up transformer closer to the tonearm for superior sound. This
should be something to hear.
Verity Audio toned
down their presentation in their usual space this year, substituting a
Parsifal Monitor on an adjustable stand ($12,000 w/stands) for one of their
larger models. A Nagra PSA
pyramid solid state stereo amplifier was used instead of often used tube
monoblocks from various manufacturers. The digital front end was by dCS
and the preamp was also a Nagra. While the speaker/stand combo was
an intriguing design, it drew more visual attention to itself than their
stately floorstanders and required an equally large footprint. The addition of
their large powered subwoofer ($10,000) in the corner brought the price up,
undermining some of the price advantage. The lesson here is that you can have
outstanding sound without large, imposing loudspeakers — just as I learned
with the Gemme Audio Green Gem at the start of the show. But if that is your
goal, you might want to evaluate Verity's new, more affordable Finn
mentioned earlier. Fortunately, attendees had the opportunity to hear larger
Verity loudspeakers elsewhere at the show. Nonetheless, this ranked as one of
the Best Rooms again this year
with excellent transparency, dynamics, soundstaging and focus.
As I near the bottom of my pile of literature and scan
through my unused photos, I stumble across the missing link that allows me to
identify the Mystery Speaker near
the start of Part 1. The loudspeaker was the Coherent
8 Phy Si and the flaming golden birch veneer comes from old growth
trees that sank to the bottom of the lake before they could make it to the
mill. This $14,500 two-way loudspeaker comprises an air motion driver with a
conventional woofer. With its 97 dB sensitivity and 15 Ohm impedance you would
expect it to be driven very nicely by a SET tube amplifier, but instead it was
powered by a SAR 150 Mosfet
amplifier. SAR goes back 30 years according to the literature, but it was news
to me. The faceplate was stunning and so highly polished that I couldn't
avoid the reflection of the carpet beneath it. The source was the Nova
Physics Memory Player from Mark
Porzilli, which was the pioneering effort in playing CDs not from
the disk, but from a near perfect copy created in a flash drive from multiple
reads of the CD. It goes for about $14,000, but the bit stream must still be
fed to an outboard DAC, hence the Audioaero
unit below it on the rack.
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High-Performance Audio Reviews
