SSI 2009

Wilson Audio Specialties' Peter McGrath (second from left) is embraced by the crew of Coup de Foudre (l–r): Jennifer ("Just Jennifer. No surname. You may have heard of me."), Graeme Humfrey, and Erik Fortier.

"Air Motion" because the Adams—familiar to me from the German company's strong showing at pro-audio shows—feature modern versions of the Oskar Heil-designed "Air Motion Transformer" higher-frequency drive-units that a brief period of popularity in the 1970s. This uses a corrugated aluminum-foil diaphragm that moves somewhat like an accordian bellows, alternately squeezing and stretching the air between the folds. Adam, who is entering the North American high-end audio market, was proudly showing its top-model Tensor series at SSI, but I was also impressed by the active A5 shown in the photo, which crosses the AMT tweeter over to a moving-coil woofer at 2.2kHz and costs just $900/pair. With the $600 Sub 7 active woofer also shown in the photo, a pair of Adam A5s would make the basis for an affordable high-quality system.

René Laflamme's recordings on the Fidelio label have always been favorites of mine, though his choice of repertoire—like the new "It's a Small World" project—sometimes cause my eyebrows to raise. SSI was my first chance to hear high-resolution versions of some Fidelio recordings, played back from René's laptop feeding data via asynchronous USB to the dCS Scarlatti upsampler set to do nothing other than translate the USB datastream to AES/EBU at 96kHz to drive the dCS Elgar Plus D/A. As this has a volume control it was connected direcrtly to a pair of Nagra VPA tube monoblocks which in turn drove the Verity Sarastro 2 speakers that Fred Kaplan reviewed for Stereophile in April. Cabling was all-Shunyata. René uses all-tube microphones and records directly to a Pyramix digital audio workstation. The sound of a transcription for brass and organ of "Mars" from Holst's The Planets was to die for on this system, one of my "best of shows."

Lafleur's X-1 bookshelf ($14,000/pair) was one of the hits of last year's Montreal Show despite the poor acoustics of the room they were being shown in, so I was looking forward to taking a further listen this year in a better room. Driven by an all-Simaudio Evolution series rig—Andromeda CD player and i-7 integrated amplifier—the X1s did indeed produce a superby detailed, natural-sounding midrange and treble, but the low frequencies seemed a little shelved down in absolute terms, I thought.

The Sashas of Obad Imports suggested that I check out the Gemme Audio room, where a Neodio amplifier had been replaced by a prototype KingRex 50W Tripath amplifier. Gemme Audio's Robert Gaboury had his special Phenix Green Gem system ($37,000 CAN) on display, along with a Neodio CD player, and Blueberry Hill Audio cables.

Stereophile's star blogger Stephen Mejias hold forth at the debate on why he is in love with vinyl, while Robert Deutsch (center) and Art Dudley (right) wait to chime in with their opinions.