Vinyl Sound: MoFi Electronics, Mastersound, Solidsteel, HiFi Rose, IsoTek, Cardas Audio - Toronto Audiofest 2024

All prices in CA$.

Another great-sounding room was the one hosted by retailer Vinyl Sound, a name that, as proprietor of the store, you have to live up to—you have to sell turntables!

And they do, of course, having brought to the show a particularly sweet-sounding one—the MoFi MasterDeck turntable with an Ultra Gold MC cartridge ($9995 for both / $8495 w/o cartridge). The 'table was feeding a MoFi MasterPhono ($8495), a class-A, 30Wpc Mastersound Compact 845 tube integrated amplifier ($12,995), and the brand new MoFi SourcePoint 888 speakers ($7250/pair). Cabling, AC products, and shelving were by Cardas Audio, IsoTek, and Solidsteel, respectively.

And as the name Vinyl Sound implies, the store was also demoing... a HiFi Rose RS150B Reference HiFi network streamer ($6995). What's the link with analog, you may ask? I'm not sure, but one theory I have is that digital sound of the sort exemplified by the HiFi Rose sounds so analog now that it may as well be labeled as such. People may say that the best digital playback still doesn't sound like analog playback, but I do think the sound of both formats has converged to a point where it's not always obvious, in a blind comparison, to know which format is playing.

I listened to both analog and digital setups and both sounded fantastic and more similar to each other than different, delivering bold, fully-blossomed notes, tonal purity, and what occurred to me as well-controlled sound—in the sense of musical ease, soundstage layout, focused imaging, and what sounded like a perfectly attuned symbiosis of the speaker-amplifier relationship.

Along with its store in Toronto, Ontario, Vinyl Sound has a second location in Buffalo, New York. Who said the audio brick-and-mortar industry is dead?

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