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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…
In that same Recommended Components feature, we listed a total of 41 turntables; four of them are suspended-subchassis designs, and two of those—the Linn LP12 and the Oracle Delphi—were first introduced in the 1970s. Of that I can only declare my belief that there exist good-sounding, musically satisfying examples of virtually every sort of turntable in existence, and that suspended-subchassis designs are no exception. Different examples of suspended-subchassis turntables can excel at very different aspects of musical playback. (The Linn, for example, remains a momentum-and-flow champion.)…
Art Dudley returned to the Air Tight ATM-300R in November 2019 (Vol.42 No.11):
Nine months ago, while I was busy reviewing Axiss Audio's Air Tight ATM-300R single-ended power amp ($16,995 with Electro-Harmonix output tubes), my new old house was still new to me, and I hadn't succeeded at getting my 1966 Altec Flamenco loudspeakers to sound consistently good in its 11' by 16' living room. So before I made my listening notes on the Air Tight, I banished my Altecs to the garage—temporarily, of course, until such time as I knew how to get them to sing in their new setting—and relied instead…
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. (The similar but smaller Silver 8 and its replacement, the new Silver 300, were both reviewed for…
The speakers were single-wired, and the spikes weren't used. (The speakers sat on a large rug but with hardware floors underneath.) The provided grilles remained in the shipping boxes. All the source material was from CD.
Listening
Pomp & Pipes, a 1994 Reference Recordings disc (CD, RR-58CD) recorded by Keith Johnson at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, combines that hall's powerful organ with the Dallas Wind Symphony conducted by the legendary Frederick Fennell. It includes a range of showpieces with astonishing dynamic range. They're not all gems, but the closing number,…