About a year after settling into my new house, I decided to buy a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 10 floorstanding loudspeakers, which I had reviewed in 2014 for our sister publication Sound & Vision. I wound up buying three of them, with the intention of cannibalizing the drivers and crossover from one to make my own three-way center-channel speaker. But that project was long delayed, and I never got around to doing anything with the third Silver 10: It now sits in a closet as a spare.

"Let's get real, real gone for a change."—Elvis

I.
As Plato mentioned in The Sophist and thousands of art historians have noted in the years since, Greek sculptors distorted the human figure by enlarging the head and shoulders. They did it on purpose. If they didn't, when viewed from below, it would look wrong. Poets—real ones, I mean—distort smaller truths in order to create larger ones.

I'll say this, unequivocally: The Toronto Westin Airport Hotel is a fantastic venue for an audio event, better than the Montreal show's near-fabled Bonaventure Hotel, where it counts most: in the exhibitors' rooms. For whatever reason, and this was the consensus among those I spoke with, the rooms at the Westin seem to have acoustic properties that made most systems being demoed sound better than expected by anyone who's ever been at an audio show. It's worth the trip to Toronto just to hear what that's like.

Another room where the sound warmed the cockles of my heart was hosted by Gershman Acoustics, Krell, and VPI. There, I re-met Gershman Acoustics' Ofrah and Eli Gershman (in the photo above), whom I see regularly at the Montreal Audio Fest—is there a harder working husband-and-wife team working the audio show circuit?—and had the pleasure to meet for the first time Krell's congenial COO Walter Schofield. The gang (minus VPI's Mat Weisfeld, who's often in the picture but wasn't this time) was demoing a system that was another of my show highlights.

Imagine an audiophile system assembled by the UN and you might end up with something that looks a lot like what I discovered in the Wynn Audio room. Among the countries being represented there were: France, with the Metronome AQWO CD/SACD player ($CAD22,000), with tubed output stage and USB input; Switzerland, with the 215Wpc Goldmund Telos 590 NextGen integrated amp ($CAD33,800); Germany, with the Vimberg Mino speakers ($CAD41,900/pair), built in the same factory as its sister company Tidal Audio (not to be confused with the streaming service); Sweden, with the Entreq Olympus Infinity ground boxes ($CAD5800 each); the Netherlands, with Crystal Cable cabling and rack; and the US, with Critical Mass Systems footers.

As noted in the spec sheet being handed out in Executive Stereo's room, each Kii Three loudspeaker ($CAD23,000/pair), which stands all of a foot high (the bottom portion of the speaker in the photo is a subwoofer, which was not being used during my visit), is stuffed with six drivers, six amps that generate a total of 3000W, and six DACs.

Gobsmacked is a word I never use, but I will in this report. That's because I'm at a loss to find a better term to convey how I felt when I heard the system MBL had set up in their room—which, by MBL standards, was small (other qualities that came to mind about the system's look were tidy, clean, and really, really white). The all-MBL system consisted of a total of three components: The three-way omnidirectional Radialstrahler 120 speakers with integral stands ($CAD30,150/pair), the 300Wpc C51 integrated amp ($CAD14,600), and the C31 DAC-CD player ($12,000), with Wireworld cabling throughout.

Earlier this year at the Montreal Audiofest, the organization that presents that show presented a lifetime achievement award to longtime Stereophile editor John Atkinson. Yesterday, the same organizers, who also present the Toronto Audiofest—gave the same award to another Stereophile contributor: Mr. Robert Deutsch.