I hope this doesn’t gross you out or make you cancel your subscription or anything, but SEXY (in all caps) is the first word that came to my mind when I walked into the room hosted by Tone Imports, DeVore Fidelity, Well Tempered Labs, and the Box Furniture Co.

There was a lot of pretty stuff to look at and listen to in here.

In a third Audioarts room, the company’s Gideon Schwartz selected “Burning” from Wild Beasts’ Smother, one of my favorite albums of the year.

Audioarts also presented a system comprising BMC amplification (supported by a SolidSteel stand) and Zellaton loudspeakers ($24,950/pair). Every Zellaton driver is completely handmade and takes up to three weeks to produce. The speaker cabinet uses a semi-open construction meant to minimize cabinet resonances.

In my opinion, one of the coolest-looking systems of the show was pieced together by New York City’s Audioarts: Rethm Maarga loudspeakers ($8750/pair), Fi amplification, and a Lector CDP-6 CD player. The sound was just as good as the appearance: immediate and realistic, with a rich, detailed midrange.

A highlight of the 2011 RMAF was the first public demonstrations of James Guthrie's 40th-anniversary surround mix of Pink Floyd's classic Wish You Were Here, hosted by Acoustic Sounds' Chad Kassem (shown in my photo) and James Guthrie. With a system comprising five ATC professional active monitors fed by a Playback Designs SACD player, Showgoers were treated to a complete playback of the album from the SACD, to be released next month.

From the opening sound effects that tracked from the rear to the front, to the final fade on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part 9", listeners were immersed in the re-creation of one of the finest rock albums of all time. I felt Guthrie's surround mix was true to the band's original two-channel intentions while expanding the soundfield to take full advantage of the multichannel medium. "Magnificent!" I scrawled in my notebook. The Studio Six SPL meter on my iPhone indicated that the sound pressure reached 106dB—the experience was like being at the highest fidelity rock concert ever!

Here's the SACD in its multichannel glory, newly arrived at RMAF!

It was a pleasure to finally meet Nick and Jennifer Atocha, makers of the most beautiful record cabinets I’ve ever seen. In the imaginary future of my mind, I will live in an old brownstone with extremely high ceilings, wide plank floors, cool chandeliers, a spiral staircase, a grand fireplace, a secret library, sky lighting, and at least three or five (I don’t like even numbers) of Atocha’s record cabinets.

Jennifer very slyly warned me of the possibility&#151no, inevitability&#151of my dear Ikea Expedit shelves collapsing beneath the weight of all my precious vinyl. I frowned.

“Do you have children?” she asked.

A quarter century ago, it was de rigeur for show exhibitors to use a Linn Sondek LP12 as the source. The only Linn I have found at RMAF so far was in one of the Audio Alternative rooms, which was using the fully loaded LP12/Ekos SE/Radikal/Urika/Keel LP player/phono stage with a Lyra Kleos cartridge ($23,905). But with Wilson Sasha W/P speakers ($28,900/pair) hooked up to a Rega Osiris integrated amplifier ($8995) with AudioQuest cables, the sound of Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man" from the new APO 45rpm pressing of her classic Dusty in Memphis album was vividly real-sounding.

"Dimensional Purity" is the promoted benefit of Richard Vandersteen's approach to speaker design, and in one of the two rooms I went into at RMAF organized by Fort Collins retailer The Audio Alternative, the Vandersteen Tréos ($5990/pair) were living up to that promise. Driven by an Audio Research Vsi60 integrated amplifier ($4495) with the source the Bryston BDP-1 digital player and BDA-1 DAC, all hooked up with AudioQuest cable, Mark Isham's Blue Sun reproduced with excellent bass extension and clarity and a laidback but detailed midrange.

New from the Norwegian Hegel company at RMAF was the HD11 D/A processor ($1200), which features a 32-bit TI DAC but also a unique impedance-optimizing circuit on one of its coaxial S/PDIF inputs. Single-ended digital audio connections are specified to be 75 ohm transmission lines, explained Hegel's Anders Eitzeid, but not all all datalinks conform to that specification. (The RCA plug is a major source of the impedance mismatch even when the cable itself has a characteristic impedance of 75 ohms.) The impedance mismatch creates reflections that corrupt the integrity of the RF datastream, increasing jitter.