I made it for about 2.5 hours today. Haven’t made it in a few years but seems there isn’t much new in terms of loudspeaker vendors. Hotel rooms are tough. The speakers that I listened to that didn't sound wrong to me today were the Von Schweikerts, Vivid Giya 3s, little Cheskys, Harbeth bookshelves with cylindrical subwoofer stands. My favorite show speakers are still the Philarmonic BMR towers; they sound great to me. I heard the BMR HTs today (dual Purifis) but they just didn’t do it for me today. Think the regular BMR monitors sounded better than the HTs as well. There were a number I heard that I couldn’t tell much based on the music choices.
I also made it, heard a bunch, didn't get to a few others. I would agree that a bunch of speakers and vendors were disappointingly absent. Devore rarely attends, but this year Mofi also didn't attend and I wanted to hear the 888's. Here's a quick rundown fwiw:
-I did hear the new SVS's and boy are they bass monsters, jeez, but not speakers I would want to own for all music.
-I heard some smaller Vivid Giya's (the green ones that were either G3's or G4's). I thought they sounded both bright and harsh. Star Wars' opening theme should be joyous when cranked and even I, the requester, wanted to leave the room.
-I would agree the Harbeth's sounded good, but so did the Martin's and the Fisher&Fisher's that were similar in size and price but on a different floor I think.
-Since I have listened to Dennis's speakers extensively I only stopped in to say hi to him. Same for the Von Schweikert's. I've listened to their E-3 SE's extensively and I love them, but the new VE-30's I mostly skipped (out of my price range).
-I just had to stop and listen to the GIANT Sound Lab electrostatics despite their price. Holy crap they were huge, at least 9 feet tall and 3 feet wide, and had a big sound to match, but happily the sound was not smeared across the plane and had a surprisingly coherent, if not price-justifying, soundstage.
-I also had to stop and listen to the Stenheims for a bit ($73k iirc). They were very good.
-The Bacch room was cool- his demo with Pink Floyd's Time is great and really demonstrates what his technology does. Not sure it's the best way to listen to many types of music but want to hear it more. I screwed up and missed listening to the Linkwitz system again. Really need to hear them.
-I tried to give horn systems fair time but after 3 rooms of horribly narrow soundstages I gave up and skipped the rest.
-I wandered in and out of a bunch of rooms that either sounded lousy right away, or were obviously out of my price range, or had speaker topologies that were completely uninteresting to me such as the Acora standmounts and so on.
-wandering into the Matterhorn room with the Kroma Ateliers I was reminded of how "big" and room filling a speaker with larger drivers and plenty of dynamic range can sound in a large room. totally outside my budget.
-There was a new speaker company called Innovo with their first product- a 3 way fully powered tower at around $40k. I had sympathy for their inexperience and liked the tight fast bass from the eight side-firing woofers, but they were a little harsh and didn't image with the best.
-I heard some new huge high-efficiency Altec Lansing's. They are apparently very new because there is nothing on the Altec web page yet, they had no product literature, and I didn't get a model name. All I know is they were a positively huge box with a ~15" vented woofer, a dome mid, and a planar tweeter, and they had an efficiency of around 96 dB. They were being driven with a pair of 300B ~10 wpc tube monoblocks. I loaded up their VU meters with Immigrant Song and the tubes managed to power the speakers to quite high volumes with balanced bass. Not sure I like the dispersion pattern on the tweeter/mid combo- they are offset like on the Super Denton.
-I got to hear the Dan Clark $5,000 Expanse and Stealth headphones that Amir raved about and I have to say I'm checking under the couch cushions for spare change. Damn they sound good.
www.capitalaudiofest.com
