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It was a treat to visit the Red Wine Audio room, which featured Harbeth Super HL5 monitors ($5690/pair) driven by Red Wine’s battery-powered Liliana Renaissance Edition monoblocks ($5995/pair) and Isabella Renaissance Edition 6H30 preamplifier ($3995), and hear Grammy-winning engineer David Reitzas mixing songs from Madonna and Barbra Streisand from his MacBook Pro running Pro Tools.

Orange County, CA-based Precision Transducer Technology had loaned me a pair of active monitors for my lead-off seminar on hearing and how recordings are made. As I had only previously been aware of the phono preamplifier, my first visit on Day Two of the show was to the PTE room. PTE’s Phoenix SG powered speakers ($9500/pair) offer a more domestically acceptable veneer finish than the speaker I used for my dem. They combine a modified ScanSpeak tweeter with twin Peerless woofers, ad include class-AB amplification based on an LM386 chip with analog equalization.

The first Aaudio Imports room I visited featured the DEQX Room Correction Processor ($4500). I had been gob-smacked at the 2012 RMAF, when I heard how this processor turned a pair of RadioShack PA horns into acceptable hi-fi speakers. However, the correction being demmed at T.H.E. Show was more subtle, mainly involving a firming up of the stereo imaging, as the system was sounding good without correction. (Competing noise from the room across the corridor did make the improvement difficult to hear at first.)

I was unfamiliar with the Vapor Audio Nimbus speakers Empirical Audio’s Steve Nugent was using, which combine a 15” woofer with an MTM array based on a Raal ribbon tweeter, and cost $7895/pair. But with the speakers driven by 40W single-ended, class-A mono amps from Arte-Forma ($7495/pair), each using an 845 output tube, vocals, whether it was Frank Sinatra singing “What’s New?”, Julie London “Cry Me a River,” or Diana Krall “Girl in the Other Room,” sounded effortlessly real, with an ease to the presentation. (Note the corner traps and ATS Diffusors used to tame the room’s acoustics in the photo.) and RPG Diffusors used to tame the room’s acoustics in the photo.)

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.)

I was familiar with the unique concentric, point-source, multiway drive-unit from French manufacturer Cabasse, as Michael Fremer had reviewed the spherical Baltic II speaker that used it back in 2005. But the floorstanding Pacific 35A speaker ($19,900/pair), which complements the smaller spherical Riga(inboard, on stands) with a pair of powered 7" woofers was new to me. In a system featuring Esoteric’s A-02 monoblock amplifiers and K-03 disc player—Esoteric distributes Cabasse in the US—and WireWorld cables, the late Eva Cassidy’s voice on “Field of Gold” was reproduced with rock-solid stereo imaging and a natural tonality.

Bill Evans’ piano sounded palpably real in the room featuring Angel City Audio’s Trinity Monitor speakers ($3000/pair), driven by Melody Valve HiFi P2688 tube preamp ($6999) and MN845 tube amps ($13599), MG Audio Design interconnects and speaker cables, Triode Wire Labs power cables, and AC conditioning supplied by Spiritual Audio. The Trinity is a largish two-way standmount, combining a VIFA ring-radiator tweeter with two 7” woofers. Frequency response is specified as 40Hz–37kHz, ±3dB, with a 90dB sensitivity.