RMAF 2013

Wandering into the Blackbird Audio room, whom do I encounter but audiophile legend Dean Peer giving Trenner & Friedl’s Pharoah loudspeakers ($13,000/pair) a major run for the money. While learning that the speaker’s plywood cabinet is bottom-ported, and that it has a horn-loaded compression tweeter and 8" paper-cone woofer, Dean played various impossibly deep runs, leaps, and scales to discover that the speakers in fact react quite fast, and extend down to the subsonic level. Very very cool. I’m afraid I didn’t hear much else in the system—apologies to Heed Audio, Cardas Audio, Profundo, Colleen Cardas Imports, Unison Research, and Opera Callas loudspeakers, among others—but I sure had a great time.

John Atkinson adds: I missed Dean's concert but I did listen to the Opera Callas speakers, which are covered in a measurements “Follow-Up” in the November issue, because I didn’t have time to audition them in my own system. With their spaced tweeters above and below the woofer, they shouldn’t work but they do, in fact, offer great sound, which is what John Marks found in his August 2013 review. Driving the Callases was the Unico Nuova 95Wpc hybrid integrated amplifier and the Unico CDE CD player ($4495), both shown in my photo above.