LATEST ADDITIONS

"That's a familiar sight—and a familiar sound." When I walked into On A Higher Note's large room on the Denver Tech Center Marriott's mezzanine floor, the speakers being demmed were the Vivid B1s that I review in the October issue. I loved the sound of the $14,990/pair B1s in my room and they were doing equally sterling duty at RMAF, driven by a Luxman M600A amplifier ($8500) and a modified Revox open-reel recorder. A 15ips tape of a cello, piano, and double bass playing what sounded like a tango by Astor Piazolla, recorded in LA's Disney Hall by Yarlung Records, had an ease to its sound that allowed the music to flow. The room had a touch too much bloom in the upper bass—perhaps the Synergistic "magic bowl" you can see on the post on the wall behind the speakers was fatigued after a long day adjusting the room acoustics.

“In nature, sound has three elements,” explained BSG Technologies’ Larry Kay: “Amplitude, frequency, and phase.”

At a hi-fi show, there are many different types of demos. In some, there is music played casually, seemingly without much thought, selected either by the host or by an attendee; in others, music is carefully selected and introduced by your host, each track used to display certain characteristics of the system at hand; in others still, music is certainly played, but only after attendees are offered a detailed explanation of the gear in the room&#151we learn about the technologies employed and the work that went into creating the product&#151and we might even learn something about the art and science of listening. These last rooms are like demo-lectures, and they’re my favorite rooms. I feel like I’m in a classroom again, with one of my favorite professors.

Similar to the system we enjoyed at the California Audio Show, here we heard the beautiful Sony SS-AR1 loudspeakers ($27,000/pair) with Pass Labs X600.5 power amplifiers and XP-20 preamplifier, Parasound Halo JC3 phono preamp, Clearaudio Concept turntable, and an EMM Labs XDS1 SACD player. Speaker cables were Kimber Kable's KS-3033, interconnects were Kimber's KS-1111, and AC cables were Kimber's PK-10 Gold.

The system sounded rhythmically nimble and certain with big, fleshy images, a rich midrange, and warm, full bass. Easy to listen to and easy to enjoy.

Here we see AudioStream’s Michael Lavorgna in serious listening mode. (We can’t seem to keep him away from vinyl.) The album is Edward Ka-Spel’s O Darkness! O Darkness!

1. This show is massive. I think John Atkinson and I are feeling a bit overwhelmed by the number of exhibitors. I’m not sure that we’ll be able to see and hear everything that is on display. A strategy: John will start in the Tower and I will start in the Atrium, and tomorrow, we’ll compare notes and examine what we have and have not achieved. Meanwhile, Michael Lavorgna will cover computer audio for AudioStream, and Tyll Hertsens will cover headphone gear for InnerFidelity.

Trends in turntable design shift back and forth over time, each "advance" turning out to be a mostly sideways move. Over its long history, VPI's founder and designer, Harry Weisfeld, has moved the analog goalposts back and forth as he's refined his thinking. His early turntables were mostly standard spring-suspension designs of normal size. By the time Weisfeld produced his fully tricked-out TNT model, which was originally designed to stably hold the heavy moving mass of Eminent Technology's ET2 air-bearing arm, he'd moved to a massive, oversized, sandwiched plinth with isolating feet at the corners. He first used springs and, later, air bladders originally designed to cushion a tractor-trailer's load, and which he'd found in a trucker's supply catalog. Via an O-ring, the TNT's outboard motor drove one of three pulleys that protruded from holes in the plinth, and attached to a T-shaped subchassis that, in turn, drove the other two pulleys via two additional O-rings.

In our December issue, I review Emotiva’s ERC-2 CD player and use Mark Hollis’s eponymous solo album as a reference. It’s a gorgeous disc, both sonically and musically&#151full of emotion, power, urgency, and lifelike detail. It was only earlier this year that I discovered Mark Hollis and his band, Talk Talk, through the kindness of Steve Cohen, salesman at In Living Stereo and friend of Other Music.

I had just met Steve.