FSI 2008

Dynaudio's 30th-anniversary Sapphire speakers had impressed the heck out of the magazine's scribes at other Shows, so I made a point of taking a listen in the room the Danish manufacturer was sharing at FSI with home-team electronics manufacturer Simaudio. The system included Simaudio's Moon SuperNova CD player, Moon P-7 preamplifier, and Moon W-7 power amplifier, all wired with Siltech cable. The speakers are not that large, visually, and use a pair of 8" woofers per side, but they appear to have excellent bass performance, to judge by the ease they reproduced some subterranean stirring on a performance of Miles Davis' "So What" from a Flanger CD called Midnight Sounds. Then I noticed that there wasn't a CD playing!

"What gives?" I asked Sim's Lionel Goodfield.

He pointed to a PC monitor at the side of the room. He was playing uncompressed files with iTunes running on a tablet PC, and sending an S/PDIF digital stream to the SuperNova's data input.

Got an external optical drive?" I asked

"Sure, but why?"

"So I can load the hi-rez masters of some of my Stereophile recordings on to your PC's hard drive."

I had burned some 24-bit, 88.2kHz WAV files on a DVD-R the morning I left for the Show, and had been wondering if I would find some rooms in which I could play them. The drum intro from "Blizzard Limbs," from Attention Screen's Live at Merkin Hall album was reproduced on the Simaudio/Dynaudio with stunningly accurate soundstaging and image depth. I'm definitely going to get me a pair of them Dynaudio Sapphires for review.