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"White Winter Hymnal" by Tempo High Fidelity

A younger listener walked into the room and requested “White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes, a song I know well.

The system, built by Tempo High Fidelity: Verity Audio Amadis loudspeakers ($30,000/pair); Musical Fidelity M8700m 700W monoblock power amplifier ($12,500/pair) and M8PRE preamp ($5000); dCS Paganini stack with a Puccini clock; Vibex power conditioning; and a mix of Transparent and Basis cables.

I don’t know anything about the young listener or his experience with this song, but, judging from the system, I figured I’d better get the best reproduction of “White Winter…

Great Sound, No Coincidence

It was nearing the end of the day of the first day of the show, and I hadn't covered nearly enough exhibits to ensure blogs for every room on floors 4 and 5, plus a number of others that I had agreed to cover. That, I figured, was why I found myself increasingly breathless as I ran from room to room, listening to less and less music before jotting down a few notes and heading out the door.

Then I entered the Coincident Speaker Technology room, heard some gorgeous music, and realized the underlying reason for my near-frantic pace.

Sure, I was running behind, as in "So Many Rooms,…

OMG: Blue Light's Golden Sound

As familiar as I may be with the Playback Designs/Evolution Acoustics set-ups that Blue Light Audio's Jonathan Tinn brings to shows—one of these, with darTZeel electronics and much bigger Evolution Acoustics loudspeakers, received my Best of Show at T.H.E. Show Las Vegas a few years back—I constantly find myself amazed by the quality of the sound. This time, with Playback Design's MPS-3 DSD-capable high-resolution CD player with USB input ($8500); an Ampex ATR-102 open-reel recorder, restored by ATR Services, Inc of York, PA, playing 15ips master tapes sourced from ATR and Puget Sound Studios…

Denver Audio Designs defeats lame music

I walked into a highly compressed modern rock recording. Worse than that, the song itself was horrible, dreadful, unimaginative, bad. I mean, it really, really sucked.

I was tempted to blame it on the system: Monitor Audio GX200 Gold floorstanders ($4495/pair), Arcam A38 integrated amplifier ($2399), Arcam CD37 CD player, Arcam D33 Reference DAC, Tributaries powerline accessories and cables. But that would have been unfair. Here was a system, modest in appearance and relatively modest in price, that I would normally find very attractive. Yet it wasn’t doing the music (or me) any favors…

Merlin Music Systems

Merlin Music Systems’ Bobby Palkovic is having a better time than ever, and you could tell by the sound in his room, which was remarkably tuneful, engaging&#151neither too forward nor too laidback&#151and, most of all, fun.

“I like to take things to an end, and now I’ve gotten to a point where I’m beyond happy,” Palkovic said of his Master VSM loudspeaker ($13,600/pair), which are now wired with Cardas Clear cable.

Adding to Palkovic’s pleasure is his new relationship with digital music: He was sending signals from a MacBook Pro, running iTunes via Pure Music, to…

PranaFidelity: Non-Defensive Listening

I wanted to better understand what I was hearing in the PranaFidelity/Musical Concepts room, so I asked PranaFidelity’s Steven Norber to tell me about his design philosophy.

Norber said something very interesting: He thinks in terms of “friendliness.” He feels an urge to build “responsible” loudspeakers. To that end, he places an emphasis on those aspects of speaker design that influence impedance. He strives for a very flat 8 ohms, with the object of building a speaker that will present a very stable load for either a tube or solid-state amplifier.

Further, Norber believes in “…

Eficion & Plinius

Eficion’s distinctly shaped F250 loudspeaker ($9950/pair) combines an Air Motion Transformer tweeter with a 5” carbon-fiber midrange unit and a 10” woofer. The speaker has a high specified sensitivity of 90db and a frequency range of 30Hz–35kHz.

The speakers were partnered with Plinius (“The Heart of Music”) gear: the 125Wpc, Class-A SA-103 power amplifier ($10,125), M8 preamplifier ($5150), and Tiki 24/96-compatible networking DAC ($4775).

Listening to an unfamiliar piece of Brazilian music, with hand percussion, acoustic guitar, and lovely vocals, I noted a sound that was warm…

Wavelength & Vaughn

Wavelength Audio and Vaughn Loudspeakers teamed up for a sound that may have lacked the bass impact and scale of other systems I heard at RMAF, but that was coherent, relaxed, and very easy to enjoy.

A MacBook Pro sent signals to the USB input of the Wavelength Crimson HS DAC via AudioQuest’s Diamond USB cable; the DAC fed Wavelength’s Royal preamplifier via AudioQuest Niagara interconnects; from the Royal, the signal went to Wavelength’s Cardinal 300B monoblock, and then to Vaughn’s attractive Cabernet II 100dB loudspeakers ($9000/pair) via AudioQuest Redwood speaker cable.

High-End Audio: Regaining the High Ground?

Although I was only able to stay long enough to snap a few photos and hear moderator Ken Kessler’s (Hi-Fi News) downer of an introduction, Friday evening’s post-show panel included, from left to right, HiFi Plus editor Alan Sircom, recording engineer Peter McGrath of Wilson Audio Specialties, Kathy Gornick of Thiel Audio, Michael Fremer of Stereophile and AnalogPlanet.com, Roy Hall of Music Hall and "why don’t you join me for a shot," and Kessler himself. Dan D’Agostino of D’Agostino, Inc., founder of and former designer at Krell, turned up after I had shot my photo.

John Atkinson adds:…

On an AudioQuest

In the AudioQuest room, I was treated to a course on the Powers of Network Attached Storage. It wasn’t really a course and it wasn’t really called that, but it could have been. AudioQuest’s Steve Silberman is convincing. And I am now convinced that, when the time comes for me to dive into computer audio and other digital waters, I’ll seriously consider a NAS for my needs.

While Silberman has found success with several different NAS devices, on display in the AQ room was Synology’s powerful DS712+, which Silberman says is highly reliable, has a very friendly user interface, and never…