Here is the last interesting booth from the Marketplace Area, before the dive into hi-end craziness: New and serious competition to my favorite Mapleshade Co. Prices as low as you can find at AudioAdvisor, but the looks and build quality is beyond any expectations. In 1998, when I bought my first hi-end setup, my Boss forced me to spend an extra $1k for pARTicular equipment rack. Nowadays $1k will buy you just one pARTicular shelf, way outside my sanity levels Hopefully these guys won't follow the same path. First Surprise: YG Acoustics speakers ($48k) playing Music, not Perfect Sounds, while being pushed by Luxman M-900u($15k) amp. For years Stereophile kept selling YG as The Best Speakers EVER and for years I kept questioning my hearing. Now I know that if you have $105k MSB Technologies DAC + $14.5k Innuos server + $10k GigaWatt conditioner, you can put these speakers onto your auditioning list Next room set by ALMA Music & Audio is for the Dudes with a serious collection of Swiss Watches: Dan D'Agostino had finally produced an affordable piece of jewelry: $22k integrated amp. Wilson's Sashas played some heavenly music (similar to Kitaro but acoustic) but when I asked what is being played, the guy in charge just dismissively said: the artist is there, its her demo CD. All I got was a business card from the producer of Ignited Now Studio with no further comments or info... It's all about music...??? Guess not Ayon ballroom with rows and rows of chairs, and one lonely me in the sweet spot: this is the beauty of the last day of any show: Dire Straights sounded as good as I could hope for, but at what price? I do not even care, unless you own a castle, why bother? Their $3,900 HA-3 headphone amp was in the darkest corner of the room as a static display: Made in Austria sticker should justify the price a Big Question: where do you put this power strip: How do you dust it? how often do you polish it? for the sake of Best sound quality, of course MST room, for $100 I could buy (should have bought, actually, but then forgot to get back to them) one small box and two tiny speakers which reproduce "ambience" (or Wide Sound) found in some boomboxes. But without acoustic hole in the middle. ACA Seraphim Prime ($25k) pushed by $50k+ of electronics: As in most other rooms, they were too lazy to spin vinyl, but huge speakers in a small room is not my thing anyway, so I did not even ask... Class D(!!!) LKV power amp, the room where some of my preconceptions got busted: I could have spent the rest of the day there. LKV designer was not too lazy to flip vinyl, and I agree that torturing yourself for three days in a row with digital is, well, torture! Next Stop - the most enigmatic room at the show, Odyssey Audio showroom #319: Behind the door is a pitch-dark room, only a few lights from silent electronics, and a bunch of Dudes talking about Audio... I quietly left...
Beautiful equipment, it's too bad the rooms look like they're from a Super 8, just not a great way to display this wonderful stuff. I love the looks of the P8 Turntable, very nice.
You'd think people with that much money would want their equipment to look good. That stuff has no style. Especially the speakers. Boring black. Give me some late 70's Pioneers, Akais, Diatones or Yamahas anyday.
Speakers have always had the same style issues (square) with a few ground-breaking exemptions but it is fun to check out the crazy stuff they did back then including the sonicly challanged kabuki speakers. I do get a little glassy-eyed looking over the repetitious rows of high-gloss piano-black versions. I'd love to see more innovative stuff like Andrew Bird brings out on stage. I'm sure for a lot of these guys the costs are just too extreme to move high-dollar equipment around so we don't see the inventive stuff.
Guys, you are not playing fair! But I totally agree with you, during discussion of THE Show at audiogon.com a fair point had been made that since The Room is the most important part of A System, playing ANYTHING in hotel rooms is counter-productive and even damaging to the idea, that all equipment should be on static display Good point, but personally I would have never wasted my time attending such a "show". I am not going to defend speaker designers simply because I do not care about the looks. But there are quite a few original and unexpected shapes and ideas: Martin-Logans, Maggies, MBLs, Bang & Olufsen... and for those who surf... THE Show had these:
Very nice! Someone put a lot of work into those speakers. I didn't want to bring up the rooms too much, I figure the accoutrements would match a lot of the homes the stereos are put into but they just don't look cool enough to match all this ultra-cool equipment. Too bad they can't grab one of the many Hollister Stores that closed up and put that up in the exhibition space, I never wore the clothes but the stores had a great homie layout.
