Capital AudioFest 2011

"Where's the tweeter?" I asked after a listen to the 97dB-sensitive Soundfield speakers, shown at Capital AudioFest in prototype form. It turned out the top drive-unit is a 12" coaxial unit, with the HF unit mounted where the dust-cap would be. "So the big-ass 18" dipole unit is the subwoofer?" No, it was explained, the18" unit in the speaker's center, behind the grille, is the woofer, covering the range from 50–200Hz. The bottom 12" unit, mounted in a sealed enclosure is the subwoofer, handling frequencies below 50Hz. With the coaxial and 18" drivers operating as dipoles and the bottom12" unit omnidirectional, by varying the crossover between the low-frequency drivers, the speaker's radiation pattern can be made cardioid in the region where room acoustics might benefit. I had seen a cardioid subwoofer designed by Ken Kantor many years ago at a CES, and had wondered why no-one else had experimented along these lines.

Although I had seen the 4-way, floorstanding Polk LSiM 707 ($4000/pair) at the Montreal Show in April, they weren't being demmed in an optimal room. But driven at Capital AudioFest by an Audio Research stack—CD8 CD player, Ref3 preamplifier, and VS110 power amplifier—and hooked up with MIT cable, they gave great sound on Keb Mo's version of "It Hurts Me Too" from his The Door CD, with extended low frequencies and impressive dynamics.

Ken Swauger runs a Baltimore-based company called TapePath (www.tapepath.com) that specializes in restoring classic open-reel tape recorders, especially ReVox A77s. Ken is shown here in the vestibule to the Polk room, holding a baggie with all the parts from an A77 that he replaces and upgrades. I still have an A77 in storage—perhaps I'll send it to Ken to have it brought back from the dead!

Driving a pair of Living Voice OBXRW speakers (from $11,000/pair depending on finish), this cute 20Wpc tube amp, from an American company run by an English ex-pat, produced a very appealing sound on a classic Louis Armstrong cut.The S20 comes with two mono power supplies, these using tube rectifiers and choke filters, and uses 300B tubes in push-pull. Price is quoted as being "from $12,750."

It was déjà vu all over again all over again (and again).Capital AudioFest was the fourth Show I have attended this season, only to encounter MBL North America's Jeremy Bryan demming the same system he had at SSI in Montreal, at Axpona in Atlanta, and at Axpona in New York: 101E Mk.2 speakers driven by 9011 monoblock amplifiers, a 6010D preamp, a 1621A CD transport, and a 1611F D/A converter. But this time, not only was the hotel carpet different (and uglier), the room was large enough to allow the omnidirectional speakers to sing as they should. Again I listened to "The Boy in the Bubble" from Peter Gabriel's Scratch My Back CD, and the hi-rez solo piano recording made by MBL's Jürgen Reis, "Walchensee, Mondnacht," performed by Martin Vatter, from the album Klangbilder, played back from a server, and the highs were smooth and mellow without being rolled-off, just as they should be and are in real life, the imaging stable and accurately defined.

As you can see from my photo, it was pretty dark in the room hosted by Command Performance A/V, so I couldn't see who was discussing the state of high-end audio in the US. It turned out to be Joseph Audio's Jeff Joseph, Manley Labs' Eveanna Manley, and The Signal Collection's Chris Sommovigo. I write about the migration of audio manufacturing overseas in my forthcoming "As We See it" in the September issue, and both Joseph and Manley are proud that they still manufacture their products in the US—"We're based on Chino, not China," said Eveanna, though she admits that this does add a premium to the retail price that is an unwelcome downside given, as I wrote about in the April issue's "As We See It," the reduced spending power of the middle class these days.

But if the premium is accompanied by performance, it can be justified, and the system in the darkened room was providing much music, courtesy of Pure Music running on Jeff's MacBook Pro. As it had two weeks ago at the NYC Axpona, the laptop was sending USB data to a Bel Canto LightLink converter, which in turn fed the audio data via a low-jitter ST optical link to the Bel Canto DAC3.5VB. This was connected to a Manley Jumbo Shrimp tubed line stage and a pair of Manley Snapper 100W tube monoblocks ($7250/pair) via Cardas Clear interconnects and speaker cables. Speakers were the Joseph Perspective ($11,800/pair), which marries two magnesium-cone woofers to a Sonatex-dome tweeter. AC power was provided by Shunyata's new Talos ($3500, and also made in the US), which replaces the company's well-regarded V-Ray unit.