AXPONA 2011

I wasn't surprised to see that Channel D was featuring Joseph Audio Pulsar two-way stand-mount speakers ($7000/pair) in their room. My experience of the Pulsar at Shows is that it offers more bass than you'd expect from its size, with an uncolored, naturally balanced midrange. But I was surprised that it was Jeff Joseph himself, seen here seated at the computer, who was demonstrating Channel D's Pure Music program. (Channel D's Rob Robinson, who was doing the dems of the Pure Vinyl LP-"ripping" program, can be seen standing second from the left.)

The rest of the system in this room included an Artemis SA-1 turntable with an Artemis TA-1 tonearm and a Zu Audio Grade 2 Prime "Tweaked" Denon DL-103—Michael Fremer exclaimed while in the room "that's a good cartridge!"—a Channel D Seta Model L for vinyl playback (via a Lynx ADC/DAC), and a Hegel H20 200Wpc power amplifier. Hidden away was as 11 terabyte, 5-drive, fault-tolerant NAS array for storage. "This is really the hot setup in computer audio," explained Rob, "after one gets tired of shuffling all the different 'pocket' hard drives around."

I wasn't in the Channel D room at the same time as Mikey Fremer but he later described to me what happened when the standard USB cable was replaced with a premium AudioQuest USB cable. "It sounded better and everyone in the room agreed on how the sound had improved," he told me. Ulp. I hate it when things like that happen!