Montreal Audio Fest 2023

As usual, I found cellist and Audio Note UK music ambassador Vincent Bélanger hosting the Audio Note UK room, but this time, Vincent wasn't alone.

When I asked Totem's Vince Bruzzese, at last year's "static" launch of the new Bison series, what the impetus was to create the Bison range, he said it came down to wanting to create something special to mark the company's 35th birthday but also that of the Model 1, which came out in the year of the company's founding, 1987.

What did the Hearken and Art et Son rooms have in common? The Graham Audio LS8.1 speakers ($13,300), so it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that I heard a similarly, though not identically, engaging intimacy in both systems' presentations, the kind that made me just want to relax in my seat and listen through whole albums.

MartinLogan's Motion F200XT in the Planète Haute-Fidélité room wasn't the only speaker in town to employ a Heil Air Motion Transformer tweeter. So did Monitor Audio's 3-Way Platinum 300 3G (for 3rd generation) floorstander ($22,000).

Beautiful strains of music lured me into the Audiophile Experts room, where the song "Göttingen," written in 1964 by French chanteuse Barbara (real name Monique Andrée Serf) as an ode to the German city by the same name, was playing. As well as having become a hit in her native country, the song has been credited as having helped improve relations between France and Germany in the years following the Second World War. Barbara called the song "a hymn to Franco-German reconciliation".

When I think of MartinLogan, I immediately envision an electrostatic speaker. One of their tall ones equipped with the dynamic woofer. A second later, I'll be reminded that Martin Logan also makes good cabinet-style standmounts such as the one I saw at the 2019 Toronto Audiofest, the Motion 35XTi. What I won't naturally equate with an ML design is a box-design floorstander,