Place Bonaventure is located about halfway between St. Catherine street (which I think of as the center of downtown) and Old Montreal, near the river. As such, it's nearly in the shadow of St. Patrick's Basilica. I went for a walk Friday morning before the show started, but my walk was not as long as I had planned: the temperature had taken a big dive overnight, and so it was very...shall we say...bracing. But at least it didn't snow, as in previous SSIs.
In home theater, the latest thing is 3D TV, and while Stereophile doesn’t normally cover Home Theater, I just had to check out the Sony and Samsung 3D demos. With the high-end "shuttered” glasses, the 3D effect was quite startling. However, I thought I’d have a go at producing a 3D-like effect with a 2D image. So here's a photo of Stereophile's assistant editor and blogger Stephen Mejias coming right at you from Montrealand no shuttered glasses needed! Sony/Samsung, eat your heart out. (For the photographically inclined: this was shot with a Panasonic GF1, 7-14mm Panasonic lens set at 7mm. I love this lens!)
Shows like SSI are about the cutting edge in audio, with the latest and (purportedly) greatest on display and demonstration. Given this, I always get a kick out of spotting a piece of equipment that just does not seem to belong in such august company. This Sanyo JCX 2600K stereo receiver is from another eracirca 19781981 according to the ever-helpful Google search. Looks like it's in great shape. I spotted it on a shelf in an area of the show where they were setting up racks of LPs for sale. What was it doing there? I have no idea. Wonder how it compares sonically with the latest-and-greatest?
Faithful readers of these show report blogs may recall that last year I missed the TorontoMontreal train I was scheduled to take, and had to wait two hours for the next one. This year, I was determined that history was not going to repeat itself, and I ended up getting to the train station nearly an hour before the train's departure. Maybe next year I'll find a happy compromise. . .
"Are You a Sharpener or a Leveler?" was the title of my "As We See It" in the February 2009 issue. The terms sharpening and leveling come from work in the field of perception by the early Gestalt psychologists, sharpening referring to the exaggeration of perceived differences, leveling to the minimization of those differences.
One of my favorite Charles Rodrigues cartoons, originally published in Stereo Review and reprinted in the book Total Harmonic Distortion (Perfectbound Press, 1988), shows a customer in the soundroom of an audio dealer, auditioning a pair of speakers. This is no ordinary soundroom: the floor, walls, and ceiling are completely covered with irregularly shaped boxes, apparently an extreme form of acoustical treatment. The salesman is saying, "Of course, you realize that it won't sound exactly the same in your living room, sir..."
Tell the truth, now: When you're traveling on vacation, and supposedly engaged only in the normal tourist activities of seeing the sights, visiting museums, etc., aren't you also on the lookout for interesting audio stores?
A compact horn loudspeaker. Isn't that an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp, or military intelligence? From such venerable speakers as the half century-old Altec Voice of the Theater and the Klipschorn, as well as more modern examples like the Avantgarde Acoustic Trio, horns have always been big. The original Avantgarde Uno was the smallest speaker in Avantgarde's line, but it was still visually imposing, with a big horn midrange on top, a horn tweeter below that, and a powered sealed-box subwoofer at the bottom. (I reviewed the Uno 2.0 in Stereophile in August 2000, Vol.23 No.8, and the Uno 3.0 in August 2002, Vol.25 No.8.) The Uno and its siblings, the Duo and Trio, are perhaps the antithesis of the in-wall loudspeakers beloved by interior designers. These speakers do not fade into the backgroundnot visually or sonically.
It did not require great perspicacity to predict that SSI2009 would not be as well attended as last year's show. Things are tough all over. In any case, as I write this, on Saturday evening on a train en route to Torontoyes, I manage to catch the train this time!the show still has another day to go, and, as Michel Plante, with Sarah Tremblay the SSI's organizers, admitted, what often makes or breaks a show like this is the Sunday attendance.
Asked to name the top three drawbacks of electrostatic loudspeakers, the knowledgeable audiophile will listnot necessarily in this orderrestricted listening area, inability to play loud, and limited bass extension. Although the last criticism can still be applied to the new MartinLogan CLX (its claimed bass 3dB point is 56Hz), the speaker's design has gone a major way toward addressing the other two criticisms.