Toronto Audiofest 2024

I saw a real live dragon at the Audiofest! It was tall and awe-inspiring and finished in Santos Rosewood. And instead of breathing fire, it breathed music! Okay, so it wasn’t an actual dragon, but Coherent Loudspeakers’ Modular 15 Dragon speakers ($58,000/pair, as configured in the photo), which I spotted in one of Corby’s Audio’s two exhibit rooms, was still impressive to behold.

Each speaker was composed of five individual cube-shaped enclosures stacked together in a column, with the enclosure in the middle housing a 3″ beryllium compression driver—I call that one the “eye of the dragon”—while each of the other enclosures housed a 15″ coaxial driver. The four 15″ drivers operated simultaneously, as one channel, thanks to the speaker’s “tandem-parallel” crossover design.

The components in the rest of this system may have looked small compared to the Dragons, but they didn’t play small. They included a constellation of Saturn Audio products—the 115Wpc, class-A/B 601 power amplifier ($5,500), a 501 solid state preamplifier ($4500), a 201 DAC ($4800), and a 103C MKII powerline filter ($2800)—and a source consisting of a 2TB Baetis Audio Prodigy X4 streamer/server/Roon Core with the optional outboard HD-Plex power supply ($7860 for both). Cabling and audio stands were by Nordost and Tough Nut Audio, respectively.

Also being exhibited, but on silent display when I was there, was a Rega Naiad turntable with RB Titanium tonearm and an Aphelion 2 MC cartridge ($60,000 total) and a Rega Aura phono stage ($9000).

The overall sound of this system was, in a word, grand—unsurprising, I think, considering the size of the speakers and the room they were playing in. The soundstage was big, images were big—this was music-making on a cinematic scale. The sound was substantial, room-filling, but also intelligibly well-sorted, harmonically expansive, sweet-toned, and up-close explicit.