RMAF was my first chance to hear the new McIntosh MT10 turntable ($9500) that had starred in our 2008 CES blog. But after I had listened to vinyl on the McIntosh system for a whileand very good it sounded, tooRon Cornelius drew my attention to the MCD500 SACD/CD player ($6500) at the top left of the stack shown in the photograph.
Costing $165,000/pair, Magico's new Q7shown here with AudioStream.com editor Michael Lavorgna for scaleembodies everything the Californian company knows about speaker design: a proprietary beryllium-dome tweeter, nano-fibersandwich-cone midrange unit and woofers, housed in a sealed all-aluminum enclosure weighing 750 lbs! With the prototype Audeeva music server, Pacific Microsonics DAC, a Spectral preamp, MIT cables, and unidentified amplifiers hidden behind a curtain, the Q7s threw an enormous soundstage on a 176.4kHz/24-bit file of a Reference Recordings orchestral recording, with bass-drum blows that pressurized the room without obscuring a low-level bassoon that was playing at the same timemacro and micro-dynamics.
It’s been a long time since I listened to a pair of Sound Lab electrostatic speakers, but the gigantic A-1Xes ($28,270/pair), powered by MSB M203 monoblocks in the room Sound Lab was sharing with San Diego dealer Blue Skies Audio, sounded as awesome as I remembered from when Dick Olsher reviewed the A-1 in the 1990s. (Review to be posted in Stereophile's free on-line archives in late June.)
The YG Anat III Professional Signature speakers ($119,000/pair) in the GTT room had an attractive titanium finish. I thought a 45rpm test pressing of the Doors' "Riders on the Storm" sounding astonishing, especially John Densmore's drums, which, although recorded in mono in the right channel, had a combination of weight, realistic highs, and authority that I hadn't heard before from this over-familiar track.
For the past few years, Colorado company YG Acoustics has been exhibiting in a large "air-wall" space in the Sands Convention Center. Their reason for doing so was that it was a great place for a new company to get foot traffic, but the downside was that it took heroic efforts to get sound quality that would indicate what YG speakers were capable of. For the 2012 Show, they had moved to a large suite in the Venetian Tower, and finally they were showing what their $119,000/pair flagship, the Anat III Signature, was capable of.
Distributed in the US by Colleen Cardas Imports, the new Moos Mini Aero speakers ($2499/pair) represent a serious attempt to get good sound from powered wireless speakers. Founder of the Australian company, Tom Celinski, shown in the photo and once with Linn, told me that the two drive-units are ScanSpeak Revelators and, in fact, the speakers are assembled by ScanSpeak. A USB2.0 interface guarantees bit-accurate transmission of digital audio at up to 24bit/96kHz. The wireless data are fed to a DSP-based digital crossover running on Analog Devices SHARC floating-point chips. Thee crossover in turn feeds the data for each drive-unit to a quad mono differential Wolfson DAC which drives a Hypex 200W class-D amplifier module. The sound was open and spacious. The speaker, which was honored with an International CES Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering Award, is scheduled to start shipping in April.
Since its founding just over ten years ago, Mission Electronics has grown to become one of the largest "real" hi-fi companies in the UK. Although their product line originally consisted of three relatively conventional loudspeakers, it rapidly grew to encompass high-end pre- and power amplifiers, cartridges, tonearms, and turntables, and, in the mid 1980s, a system concept based on CD replay and relatively inexpensive electronics: the Cyrus amplifiers and tuner.
The Mod Squad Line Drive System Control Center is a purely passive stereo switching unit with a volume and balance control, five line inputs, and additional facilities for two tape decks. It allows the audiophile to replace a preamp, with its active gain stagesand resulting colorationwith a device that introduces no distortion or coloration other than that in the wiring, switches, and controls.
Thomas Alva Edison may have had a fully equipped laboratory, with a team of assistants slaving every day over ideas to be adopted when ripe as those of the great inventor, but the image of American ingenuity which rings true to me is of the lone tinkerer, working alone and mixing a generous dose of good ol' Yankee know-how with the sweat of his browa lot of it. These days, with the faithful PC and a hardworking CAD program at his side to do the math, the lone tinkerer seems to be thicker on the ground than ever, to judge by the humongous numbers of small companies selling high-end hi-fi components as revealed in Stereophile's readership survey (see p.5). Whether these loners will ever rise above their origins depends, among many other things, on their ideas being truly worthwhile.
The 2019 Montreal Audio Fest has opened at the Hotel Bonaventure across the street from the city's main railway station and even at the opening time of 11am, there was a long queue at the registration desk. The show, which runs until 8pm tonight, 10am6pm Saturday, and 10am5pm Sunday, has a theme celebrating both the Woodstock Festival's 50th anniversary and the 50 years since John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's infamous bed-in in Montreal and the Fab Four's last live concert. I will be covering the show live for Stereophile, along with Robert Schryer and Art Dudley. Stay tuned for our reports.