John Atkinson was speechless. Not merely speechless, but incoherent as well as inarticulate.
"You have to go by the Ayre room," He gushed. "It was . . . it was . . . I mean . . . Ohhhhhh! You just have to go."
So we took his, um, word for it.
It was . . . it was . . . you really should have been there."
What did us in was the combination of Ayre's spanking new reference loudspeakers, the incredible JBL K2 S9800se ($30,000/pair) and Ayre's new 300W MX-R mono power amplifiers (price TBA). Small the MX-Rs may be, but light they ain't—the chassis is milled out of a solid billet of aluminum and, as Steve Silberman put it, "the whole darn thing acts as a heat sink." The amp sports three paralleled transformers and operates in A/B—and it doubles its output into 4 ohms.
I had them insert the Marvin Sewell Group's
The Worker's Dance into the Ayre C-5xe player and that's when the words escaped me. I'll try anyway: The sound was open and driving and rhythmic and dynamic—
very dynamic. It was . . . it was . . . you had to be there. I'm sure glad I was.
We shall speak of this no more.
