In room 801, David Cope of Old Forge Audio, in conjunction with Phonographe Distribution, played a joyous-sounding system that included my and Herb Reichert's current favorite loudspeaker).
Presenting the new GoldenEar T66 floorstanding speakers ($6900/pair in Gloss Black, $7200/pair in Santa Barbara Red), Ken Forsythe (AudioQuest), aided and abetted by Chet Pelkowski and Chris Volk (both from GoldenEar), got down and dirty, and insisted I join in. I did!
Like candy to an audiophile baby, Capital Audiofest 2023 is officially in full blast mode, a phantasmagorical thrill ride for listeners of all ages, and this age. The venue as in 2022 is the Hilton Twinbrook Rockville, Maryland.
Help was on the way. Within six months of RH's review, Snell Acoustics introduced a smaller version, the B minor, at the 1992 Summer CES.
It has been a year since my piece "On The Road Again: A Jazz Festival Journal From A Summer Of Plague And War" appeared, in the November 2022 issue of this magazine. It described three European jazz festivals I attended in July 2022.
In July 2023, I returned to Europe to attend two festivals. The COVID-19 plague and its fallout had significantly subsided. The war in Ukraine was still raging, but this time I didn't get near it. In 2022, I went to a festival in Romania, which borders Ukraine. In 2023, I only went to Italy.
As I was soon to learn, though, there was a lot more to reviewing LōKēs than that. Why? Because a pair of LōKē subwoofers does more than reinforce the already deep bass extension of the Wilson Alexia V loudspeakers with which they are now paired in my system. Therein lies the tale.