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Okay, so the system in the big room from Montreal dealer Coup de Foudre was <I>very</I> expensive, and the room's acoustics I knew from the 2008 Show were excellent, but the sound was both my best at show and the best I heard in that room. Not only did Peter McGrath's high-resolution recordings, played back from his Sound Devices recorder feeding the very promising Playback Designs' D/A processor, reproduce with extraordinary dynamics and a superbly transparent window into the soundstage, my own recordings sounded the best I have experienced, with the audiophile attributes supporting/reinforcing rather than getting in the way of the music. And that was from CD!

Wilson Audio Specialties' Peter McGrath (second from left) is embraced by the crew of Coup de Foudre (l&#150;r): Jennifer ("Just Jennifer. No surname. You may have heard of me."), Graeme Humfrey, and Erik Fortier.

I first heard the prototypes of the almost-all-glass Arabesque from Dutch wire manufacturer Crystal Cable at the <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2009/see-through_transparency/">2009 CES</A>, where they produced sound in the Audio Basics room that belied my negative expectations. Demmed at SSI with Simaudio 5.3 series CD player and amplification, the Arabesques, now in full production, again produced a promising sound. With my my recording of "The Mooche," from <I>Editor's Choice</I>, the Arabesques put me squarely in the church acoustic of Chad Kassem's Blue Heaven Studio in Kansas, where the recording was made.

Asked to name the top three drawbacks of electrostatic loudspeakers, the knowledgeable audiophile will list&#151;not necessarily in this order&#151;restricted 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 &#150;3dB point is 56Hz), the speaker's design has gone a major way toward addressing the other two criticisms.

Ren&#233; Laflamme's recordings on the Fidelio label have always been favorites of mine, though his choice of repertoire&#151;like the new "It's a Small World" project&#151;sometimes cause my eyebrows to raise. SSI was my first chance to hear high-resolution versions of some Fidelio recordings, played back from Ren&#233;'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 <I>Stereophile</I> in April. Cabling was all-Shunyata. Ren&#233; 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 <I>The Planets</I> 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 <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/fsi2008/040608lafleur/">last year's Montreal Show</A> 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&#151;Andromeda CD player and i-7 integrated amplifier&#151;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.

Do you think going from physical recordings with liner notes and cover-art to metadata on a PC's hard drive, we've lost the desire to immerse ourselves in the music that goes with it? Do you think that the demise of the physical medium, bringing us music, correlates with the demise of serious listening?