AXPONA 2012

At the same time that AIX Record's Mark Waldrep was in the Omni Ballroom B giving the first of two keynote seminars, "Realizing the Dream of Perfect Music Reproduction: Are we There Yet?", the large salon two doors down was presenting his new AIX Records Real HD-Audio sources Blu-ray discs using Dolby TrueHD Encoding. I confess that I find wearing 3D glasses awkward, and don't know if I'll ever become accustomed to the neck of a guitar beaming out at my gut like a foreign projectile while I'm listening to beautifully played classical music. Nonetheless, the quality of the picture could not be faulted, and the sound, especially when discomfort was erased with eyes closed, was very fine.

Equally fine, this time with less projectile dysfunction, was a performance of a Mozart String Quartet. In the two-minute clip I saw, the airplane-circling-the-landing-pad views of classical ensembles that I've found distracting on some AIX videos were replaced by natural, facing-forward, ground-level shots that, at least to my perhaps limited, backwards, and decidedly not with it old school sensibilities, made far more organic sense.

Associated equipment included an Oppo BDP-95 Blu-ray 3D player and server ($1000), Bryston SP-3 pre/pro ($9500), DH Labs Silver Sonic interconnects and speakers cables, 5B Bryston 7B-SST 600W monoblocks, B&W 802D loudspeakers (front left, right, and center), B&W 804D loudspeakers (surround left and right), JVC RS-65 3D 4K Projector ($12,500), and a Stewart screen.