T.H.E. Show 2019

In the second Scott Walker Audio room I visited—since I visited five of them, I know it's going to start sounding like "Five power cables, four balanced interconnects, three phono cartridges, two mighty monoblocks, and a speaker shaped like a pear tree," but it really did sound like Christmas in most of these rooms—the Constellation Argo integrated amp ($29,000), Magico A3 Speakers ($12,300/pair), and MSB Discrete DAC ($12,500) vied for pride of place with an Aurender ACS10 server ($6000) and Synergistic Research PowerCell 12 UEF SE Power Conditioner ($6,495), Atmosphere cabling ($18,500), and various room acoustics products ($3,500), plus a Solid Tech Rack ($2,600). My first thought, on hearing Dianne Reeves sing "Lullaby of Birdland," was that the system's midrange sounded excellent, true, and very appealing. Dynamic control was superb on a bit of Paavo Järvi's hi-rez recording of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, and a solo recording of viola da gamba struck me as extremely beautiful. It's rare that any system sounds 100% perfect on the first day of a show in an air-walled sound room, but this system and several others from Scott Walker remain in my memory as some of the best I heard during my first day and a half at T.H.E. Show.