I love Tannoy loudspeakers—more than most other brands that have been around since the late Devonian, their contemporary products retain many of the qualities that made their forebears famous, not to mention great—but for whatever reason, every year in Montreal I tend to visit the room co-sponsored by Quebec Tannoy distributor Zidel Marketing fairly late in the show. This year they were first on my list, even before going record shopping.

I was thrilled to be back to cover the Montreal Audio Fest for Stereophile with my partner in crime Art Dudley, Eager to start roaming the hallowed halls of the Bonaventure Hotel, Art and I quickly drew up the lines of our respective coverage territories in the program's exhibitor floor plan and went our separate ways.

First room on my route belonged to Gershman Acoustics, who was showcasing their sizable new flagship speaker, the Posh (above left), which, as its name suggests, is poshly priced at (US)$129 000/pair...

Things change. Montreal's annual hi-fi show used to be called Salon Son et Image, but now it's called Salon Audio Montreal—or, for non-Quebecois, the Montreal Audio Fest. It takes place in a Hotel that used to be called the Hilton Bonaventure, but is now called the Bonaventure Hotel. It's a consumer-oriented show that used to charge admission, but is now open to the public, free of charge. You can bring the whole family for all three days of the show and still have money left over for smoked-meat sandwiches and poutine: think of it!

The Montreal Audio Fest runs from 11am to 8pm today, from 10am till 6pm on Saturday, and 10am to 4pm on Sunday.

Designers of hybrid amplifiers can use solid-state devices in an amp's input stage and tubes in its driver and output stages, as Music Reference's Roger Modjeski did in his RM-200 Mk.II—or they can use tubes in the input and transistors in the output, as Ypsilon Electronics' Demetris Baklavas prefers.

The advantage of solid-state at the input stage can be lower noise. In the RM-200 Mk.II's fully balanced design, carefully matched input devices result in high common-mode rejection and low-noise operation close to the levels achieved with the best input transformers. The RM-200 Mk.II's signal/noise ratio measured a healthy 95.4dB.