LATEST ADDITIONS

My audiophile doppelganger, Music Hall’s Leland Leard, brought props to RMAF&#151a pair of bright, red glasses and a stuffed kitty cat doll&#151and asked attendees to smile for the camera.

I can’t help wonder whether one’s truest self is revealed when donning the bright, red glasses. Or, I suppose, while petting the kitty.

Hawaii-based Emerald Physics—a company I hadn't heard of until RMAF 2012—demonstrated their own US-built loudspeakers and electronics with a Peachtree Audio novaPre preamp–D/A converter playing music files from a laptop computer. Emerald's CS2P open-baffle loudspeaker ($2990/pair) works as a dipole below 1000 Hz, with a 15" woofer and a horn-loaded 1" tweeter. The retail price of the system I heard, including the Peachtree unit; the Emerald Physics CS2P loudspeakers; Emerald's DSP2.4 active outboard crossover/EQ unit ($850); and the company's EPI100.2 100Wpc digital amplifier ($1600) was under $7000, not including computer and playback software. While far from perfect—the bass wasn't especially taut, and there was little in the way of the sorts of texture and tone I crave—the performance was clean, spacious, and satisfying.

Squeezed into a small hotel room were the towering G’bell Epoque loudspeakers ($70,000/pair), driven by Artemis MK II monoblock amplifiers ($120,000), Stahl-Tek’s Opus DAC ($40,000) and Opus CDT ($37,000), with connections courtesy of Purist Audio Design 25th Anniversary cabling. How all this would have played out in a larger room, I do not know, but here, both period instrument and modern violins sounded edgy on different recordings, and bass was out of control on a third recording of a Mahler symphony.