"How often do you hear no limiting, no compression, no mixing, and no equalization? Recorded in DSD and played back the same way today" announced the blurb for Ray Kimber's IsoMike dem at RMAF. Inrigued, I entered the ginormous Ballroom F to be confronted by a system costing no less than $507,288! The six pairs of humongous Sound Lab ProStat 922 electrostats were joined by two pairs of a prototype speaker from Sony in Japan, all driven by no fewer than 8 Pass Labs X350.5 monoblocks. Source was Ray's latest four-channel DSD master files stored on a Genex hard-disk recorder and decoded by EMM Labs DACs. Kable was all-Kimber, of course.

Whether it was Robert Silverman performing a Mozart piano sonata or Denver's Blue Knights marching band performing Shostakovich outdoors, the sound was stunning in its realism. But my favorite was a new recording of the Fry Street Quartet performing a Beethoven String Quartet, on which the Sony speakers outperformed the SoundLabs in some ways. At the recording's end, Ray (left, in front of the right-front Sony) brought out the Fry Street Quartet, whom he has sponsored performing a live concert each evening of the Show.