RMAF 2006

At the suggestion of a fellow BAAS (Bay Area Audiophile Society) member, I abandoned futile attempts to cover every room on a given floor, and instead pinpointed systems that had turned my brothers on. In this case, it was the room shared by Flying Mole Digital and Green Mountain speakers.

Fed by an old Sony transport and a relatively inexpensive Birdland upsampling DAC, I heard designer Roy Johnson’s Green Mountain Continuum 3, a time-coherent three-way with 90dB sensitivity, and the Flying Mole DAB-M310 class-D monoblocks. The system sounded best on a track by Jennifer Warnes, and congested on “Jupiter” from Holst’s perennial The Planets.

Given that this was a show setting, where set-up must be hastily accomplished with little time for readjustment, who can be sure what was causing what. However, given my response to the one class-D amplifier that has so far come my way for review for another publication, my sense is that the Green Mountains are in another class altogether. I look forward to renewing the acquaintance in the future.

[Music note: If you’ve found yourself less than enamored of Holst's warhorse, check out the recently-released two-CD EMI recording by Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. The new asteroids by Kaija Saariaho, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Matthias Pintscher, and Brett Dean are wonderfully recorded and often otherworldly in atmosphere. Colin Matthews’ Pluto has since been demoted, but not in the musical realm].