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With our own Michael Fremer drafted to cut the ribbon, the first annual Florida Audio Expo got underway right on time on Friday morning. Alan Nastir, Board member of the local Suncoast Audiophile Society, began the short ceremony by welcoming everyone and thanking the show organizers. From left to right in the photo above: Alan Nastir; Bart Andeer, President of the Suncoast Audiophile Society and Resolution Acoustics; Ammar Jadusingh (aka AJ), owner of Soundfield Audio; Mike Bovaird, proprietor of Suncoast Audio; and John Chait, a longtime DIY audiophile who is a member of both the Suncoast…
As I soon discovered, I wasn't the only Florida Audio Expo attendee who decided to start at the top (Floor 8) and work their way down (Floor 2). My first room, sponsored by House of Stereo, showcased Bob Carver's attractive Crimson 350 monoblock amplifiers ($9500/pair), a Bel Canto Black EX preamplifier/DAC ($18,000), Wolf Audio Systems' Alpha 3 music server with Flux Capacitor Clock ($6750), the striking KEF Blade Two speakers ($25,000/pair), new Audience Front Row cabling, and Stillpoints Aperture room-treatment panels.
As I discovered soon after taking my photo, the sound was far…
Herb Reichert reviewed the Qutest in March 2019 (Vol.42 No.3):
I've met audiophiles who think all digital-to-analog converters sound the same. "If there's a difference," they declare, "it's in the filters or output stage." Some even believe that the whole "digital thing" was solved before we entered the 21st century. Not I.
By 2005, I'd begun to think the whole digital thing would never be solved. Worse yet, I'd stopped caring. "Mechanical Sound Forever" was the song I sang. Then an old friend gave me an inexpensive D/A converter, a Halide Design DAC HD ($495, discontinued). I…
Art Dudley reviewed the Mohican in March 2019 (Vol.42 No.3):
Having spent much of my life near Cooperstown, New York, I'm skilled at smiling placidly in response to outsiders who express enthusiasm for two things: the Baseball Hall of Fame and the collected works of James Fenimore Cooper. One of those is a dull, puffy monument to one of America's most trivial obsessions; the other is a building filled with sports memorabilia.
The Hall of Fame is okay. I spent a few lunch hours there as a teenager—I had a summer job at the A&P that used to be across the street and down the…
I spent the entire first day at the Florida Audio Expo trying to get a sense of the acoustics in the basic listening rooms of the Embassy Suites by Hilton at Tampa Airport. At times, just when I'd begun to think that the faults with one system had more to do with room acoustics than anything else, I'd walk into another, totally untreated suite and discover that the sound was superb.
So it was with more than a bit of lingering confusion that I continued my discoveries on the first morning and afternoon. Next up, on the 8th floor, was the room jointly sponsored by Merrill Audio and…
"48 pages of Audio Component Reviews" proudly proclaims the skyline on the cover of the March Stereophile, hitting newsstands, mailboxes, and tablets this week. DeVore Fidelity's Gibbon X graces the cover and is reviewed in depth inside by Jim Austin. DeVore's flagship speaker heads an impressive list of gear evaluated inside, from Shure, Spendor, Q Acoustics, KEF, Musical Fidelity, Rogue, Chord, Hegel, EMM Labs, Grandinote, Grado, Ortofon, Miyajima, Mutech, and Roon.
To kick things off, Jason Victor Serinus examines the state of audio shows in North America and Ken Micallef wraps the…
Without question, some of the best sound at Florida Audio Expo came from the Danish trio of Aavik, Ansuz, and Børresen. This combination of electronics, speakers and cabling, expertly set up by industry pro Lars Kristensen, managed to overcome room-related problems and deliver some of the most spacious sound heard over my three days in Tampa.
At first I thought the spaciousness I heard from recordings of Steely Dan—the most frequently played rock group at the show—and Diana Krall was a mite artificial, but when I listened to my CD of Sarah Vaughan singing "Send in the Clowns," I realized…
With this year's Consumer Electronics Show behind us, readers of our on-line show reports know the sad truth: that the largest industry-only technology show in North America attracted even fewer "high-performance" audio exhibits in 2019 than it did in 2018. The phrase "CES is dead" is now a mantra, and no one should be surprised if this year's poor showing proves to be the final nail in CES's coffin as far as high-end audio is concerned.
Last year also saw the number of exhibits decline at two regional audio events: the California Audio Show (to be held July 26–28, 2019, Oakland Airport…
In 2008, a pair of DeVore Fidelity's Gibbon Nine loudspeakers arrived at my home for a Follow-Up review. Within weeks, I wrote a check for them. That put me in good company: Several other reviewers who reviewed the Nines also bought their review pairs.
Ten years later, the Gibbon Nines are still my main speakers. That's the longest I've ever kept a pair of speakers in my main system, not counting the Polk Audio 7Bs I bought in 1980, when I was 16.
In 2012—four years after buying the Nines and 32 years after buying the 7Bs—I caught wind of an apparent successor, the Gibbon X (X as…
After extensive experimentation—aided by John DeVore, who visited twice to help me set them up—the Xes ended up 9' 7" apart, center to center, and 7–9' from the front wall (footnote 2). Firing directly down the length of the room, the left speaker had abundant space, but the right was only a couple of feet from a record shelf. I could hear that asymmetry in the soundstaging, but the soundstages of appropriately spacious recordings still manifested not just beyond the speakers but past the sidewall.
I tend to move my listening seat around—it's a lightweight IKEA chair—but did most of my…