This was on again over the weekend at the same location they use every year. Previous show reports:
2024,
2023.
I have to say that the standard of the show improves every year. Earlier shows suffered from overcrowding and general poor sound due to demonstrators bringing wrong speakers for the rooms (either too big or too small). There was also a lot of sound leakage from HT demonstrators. This year the show has expanded, occupied more floor space, and the HT guys were shoved into a corner of the show where their explosions couldn't bother the rest of us. So the overall organization of the show is much better - kudos to the guys behind the scenes. Excellent work!
Some negatives though: the food options were awful and expensive, the coffee was insipid. It's the hotel's fault and not the organizers. Also, this year there was a huge protest in the city with thousands of protestors and counter-protestors, and hundreds of police which stopped a lot of people from attending on Sunday. Good for us who managed to get there, not so good for those who were stuck when public transport was brought to a standstill.
Anyway, on with the show report. I had more time this year, and I chatted with other show goers and made sure to visit the rooms they rated highly.
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My highlight of the show was the
Alsyvox / Aries Cerat room. They were showing the baby Alsyvox speakers - the Tintorettos. These are 3 way planar ribbons. I have read a lot about Alsyvox on WBF, and those guys think it is amazing. I have to agree. They really do everything - throw a wide and stable image with a lot of depth, excellent separation of instruments, excellent reproduction of timbre. But what was really more impressive was the tactility of the sound - you can actually feel the sound in the way that you can feel a real instrument in the room. Complex and loud orchestral music is a good test - if you can still hear separate instruments with their timbres preserved and no smearing when the orchestra is going full tilt, it is doing very well. These things
did reproduce Shostakovich very well, but there was some smearing in the midbass. I could also tell that they must be quite directional because the tonality shifted quite a bit off-axis. They aren't laser focused like some other panels, but they were probably about 45deg. My guess.
I grabbed as many friends as I could and visited the room over and over. They were all impressed. One of my friends is the Australian distributor for Klippel and a speaker manufacturer - a hard nosed objectivist if you've ever met one. I told him what I thought of the sound, and I asked him what is producing that tactility (he heard it too). He thought that you might see it in the CSD. "Being planars, the CSD would be very impressive. There will be no box resonances and it should be very clean". But the tactility? He did not know. My theory is that these things probably radiate like line arrays which means that most of the time we are sitting in the acoustic nearfield where the sound does not decay according to the inverse square law. But in the end it's all speculation - until we see some measurements of this thing, we just don't know. The demonstrator wasn't very knowledgeable in that regard, he was more interested in telling me about amplifier and speaker cable pairings, but he did promise me he would obtain measurements from Alsyvox if I email him. I am not likely to email him because of the stupendous price of these speakers -
AUD$145k (USD$95k). But it might almost be worth it because I have
never heard a speaker that does tactility and timbre like these speakers do.
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Directly opposite the Alsyvox room was my other highlight - the
YG Acoustics room driven by
Vitus amplifiers. These were the Sonja 3.2 speakers and retail for AUD$179k (USD$117k). Another stupendously priced loudspeaker. I know from my own measurements of a cheaper YG model that those things had a flat frequency response
at listening position which means they likely had a rising frequency response at 1m. The owner of that system spent a lot of money on a professional acoustician who treated his room, so IMO his system sounded much better than this one (yes Sam, if you are reading this, that's you!). The construction of these Sonjas is impressive - all aluminium and the finish was impeccable. This system had a very sharp attack and the dynamics were very good. It has the same tactility as the Alsyvox but the tone was on the brighter side. The room supplied by the hotel was identical, but this room had more issues than the Alsyvox room - probably because the speaker excited the room differently. The sound wasn't bad, I could easily live with this system. Unfortunately, it costs more than the system next door and it was less convincing.
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This was the
Wilson-Benesch / Halcro room. WB was demonstrating the
Discovery 3zero speaker, and Halcro showed off their
Eclipse monoblocks capable of 300W RMS sustained and 2.1kW peak. This room was highly rated by subjectivists at the show for its clean sound, and I had to agree. Those shiny things you see at the bottom is a woofer. This thing is configured as a 2 way with isobaric woofers. It misses out on the bottom octave and it badly needed a subwoofer. There were no sonic flaws that I could detect. The demonstrators were smart enough not to load the room with listening chairs. 6 seats, one sweet spot, and that's it. Everyone else had to wait. If you managed to claim that sweet spot (as I did) you would be rewarded with sound almost as good as you would get at home. It sounded a little lean, but it was neutral and the imaging was quite good given the limitations of the room.
I asked the demonstrator a rather naughty question - "The predecessor of this amplifier was rated by Stereophile as the best amplifier in the world, with 1 part per billion of distortion. What improvements have been made from that? You can't hear distortion that low, why buy this amplifier (AUD$140k/USD$93k) when the superseded model is selling for such a heavy discount?". He went on about oscilloscopes tell you one thing, but you need to design amplifiers with your ears, and these sound better, etc. IOW he tried to feed me a bunch of marketing. That's ok, he didn't work for Halcro, he was the distributor. I would be disappointed if an engineer said that, but a distributor is a businessman, not an engineer.
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