I am relating these observations because this month I'm reviewing a digital converter from an off-the-paved-road audio manufacturer named Benjamin Zwickel. He operates a company called Mojo Audio, which is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Finally, it snowed during the weekend of the show, on Saturday, which was disappointing. It meant I wasn’t in an alternate 'verse of the multiverse after all and, consequently, I wasn’t the Alternate Rob with a half-million-dollar hi-fi waiting for him at home.

I was running out of time.

As usual, I found cellist and Audio Note UK music ambassador Vincent Bélanger hosting the Audio Note UK room, but this time, Vincent wasn't alone.

I have bumped into manufacturer Artist Cloner’s owner and designer, Sylvio Comtois, many times at audio shows. He strikes me as being a bit of a mad scientist. Not “crazy” mad but mad in the sense of being obsessed with a particular objective.

When I asked Totem's Vince Bruzzese, at last year's "static" launch of the new Bison series, what the impetus was to create the Bison range, he said it came down to wanting to create something special to mark the company's 35th birthday but also that of the Model 1, which came out in the year of the company's founding, 1987.

Talk about a dream triad of fabulous gear from Switzerland: darTZeel, Stenheim, Merging Technologies. The first thing I said to myself when I saw this simple, sharp-looking spread in Toronto-based retailer Sonic Artistry's room was, "Damn, this is an attractive group!".

What did the Hearken and Art et Son rooms have in common? The Graham Audio LS8.1 speakers ($13,300), so it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that I heard a similarly, though not identically, engaging intimacy in both systems' presentations, the kind that made me just want to relax in my seat and listen through whole albums.