Only one question followed me to the 14th floor of Hotel Irvine: Will floor 2's unprecedented number of good-sounding rooms be repeated on other floors during T.H.E. Show Newport?
On the first night of the show, a standing-room-only assemblage of friends, associates, and supporters gathered in a huge, tented outdoor pavilion to bid adieu to Richard Lawrence Beers (July 26, 1949January 26, 2016), co-founder of The Home Entertainment Show.
I've included the long view of this room to demonstrate the lengths to which Ocean Way Audio's Allen Sides, in partnership with Viola Labs, went to achieve reference quality sound at T.H.E. Show
My beat at T.H.E. Show 2016 was the ground floor. En route to the audio exhibits, I was stopped dead in my tracks by this beautiful black Bugatti. No information on this particular car was available, but I assumed it was part of the display of tasty automobiles in the Hotel Irvine's lobby and outdoors pavilion, put on by Reus Car Audio Design, Whitledge Design, Wyred 4 Sound, Magnum Automotive Design, and The Source Audio Video Design Group. Pride of place in the car exhibit was Sony's Hi-Res Audio demo vehicle, which had been shown off two days earlier at the Capitol Studios event in Hollywood.
There's more than one way to skin a cata profusion of ways to hook together audio components in the high-end world of todayand my hunch is that the number of dedicated cabling companies has increased within the past decade, and now exceeds that of any other audio-hardware category.
During the second part of my first day at T.H.E. Show, I paid a visit to the Hotel Irvine's Woodbridge Rooma poetic name that gelled with the quality of the gear on display
Stereophile Editor John Atkinson and I drove down from deepest Hollywood to arrive at T.H.E. Show Newport late on Thursday night, in time for the public opening the following morning
While some components in the Triangle Art system were less expensive than the Usher Audio Mini Dancer Two-D speakers being used ($5500/pair), mostincluding the Triangle Art Apollo phono cartridge ($8000)cost more.
T.H.E. Show Newport returns to its new venue at Hotel Irvine this FridaySunday, June 35, starting at 10am. By far the largest high-end consumer show on the West Coast of North America, T.H.E. Show promises 149 active exhibit rooms, with 19 of those big and even bigger than big rooms; 68 exhibit tables in the Marketplace and Marketplace foyer, including perhaps 16 headphone exhibitors in separate areas within the Marketplace. You can read the entire show guide here. . .