Though I felt the sound could have used an extra layer of harmonic meat on its bones, it was engagingly animated and dynamic, and capable…
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Entracte Audio's room displayed a nifty little system centered around a pair of active ATC SCM 40A speakers ($CAD13,800/pair) supplemented by two JL Audio E110 subwoofers ($CAD2300 each). Preamp duties were handled by Audio Valve's Eclipse preamp ($CAD6600), while the source consisted of a Melco music server ($CAD7300) being fed music files from an external hard drive, and the Italian Aqua Acoustic Quality La Voce S3 Discrete R2R ladder DAC ($CAD5500).
Featured in the MartinLogan room were the company's standmount Motion 35XTi speakers ($CAD1600/pair). The XT denotes the model's folded-diaphragm air-motion tweeter while the i stands for improved, the latter mainly as it relates to upgrades made to the speaker's woofer and crossover. The speakers were used in conjunction with MartinLogan's Dynamo 800x powered subwoofer ($CAD1000), which Larry Greenhill reviewed glowingly in the February 2019 issue of Stereophile. Completing the system were an Ultralinear/triode switchable (100Wpc and 60Wpc, respectively) Rogue Audio Cronus Magnum lll…
Saturday was a busy day at the Toronto Audiofest.
An image from the AudioTeens room, presented by hifipro.ca. Speakers are KANTO's YU2.
hORNS by Autotech Symphony, with electronics from a variety of European brands: Rockna, Inakustik, NAT, Lector.
Totem’s Vince Bruzzese, with the Totem Fire V2, $7000/pair CAD.
AER Excenter loudspeakers, 116dB (!)/W/m. Not sure about the price in U.S. or Canada, but the website lists them at 60,000 euro/pair. You can buy just the drivers for 3900 euro each.
Richard Kohlruss of…
I wasn't paying a lot of attention to Scottish audio in 2016, but here's what I know: The new owners of Scottish loudspeaker company Tannoy at first threatened to move production to China, but ended up opening a new factory in Scotland instead.
That would seem to be a positive outcome, but along the way, a group of employees separated from the company, including Paul Mills, Tannoy's longtime product development head, some other engineers, and key production staff. Those former Tannoy employees soon formed a new company: Fyne Audio.
Just 20 months later, Scotland's Fyne Audio…
Gobsmacked is a word I never use, but I will in this report. That's because I'm at a loss to find a better term to convey how I felt when I heard the system MBL had set up in their room—which, by MBL standards, was small (other qualities that came to mind about the system's look were tidy, clean, and really, really white). The all-MBL system consisted of a total of three components: The three-way omnidirectional Radialstrahler 120 speakers with integral stands ($CAD30,150/pair), the 300Wpc C51 integrated amp ($CAD14,600), and the C31 DAC-CD player ($CAD12,000), with Wireworld cabling…
As noted in the spec sheet being handed out in Executive Stereo's room, each Kii Three loudspeaker ($CAD23,000/pair), which stands all of a foot high (the bottom portion of the speaker in the photo is a subwoofer, which was not being used during my visit), is stuffed with six drivers, six amps that generate a total of 3000W, and six DACs.
When I read that, I admit: The purist in me balked. There's no way these speakers will sound pure, I thought smugly. I was wrong. In fact, the Kii Audio Threes, which use digital signal processing to control the relative phase and timing of its drivers,…
Imagine an audiophile system assembled by the UN and you might end up with something that looks a lot like what I discovered in the Wynn Audio room. Among the countries being represented there were: France, with the Metronome AQWO CD/SACD player ($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…
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. The players: VPI HW40 Anniversary turntable…
So: What did I think of the Toronto show? I thought it was great, comparable to the Montreal show in spirit and crowd buzz, though traffic did seem thin on Sunday compared to the previous two days. But that's not unusual for an audio show.
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…
"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. Every type of musical temperament is a means of distorting the relative sizes of sub-octave intervals—or, in fixed-pitch instruments, creating compromises—in order to create a pleasing result. Human…