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The Music First room was playing some tasty music with eye-popping gear, including the Hungarian-made Bayz Audio Courante loudspeakers ($60,000/pair US with carbon fibre construction), a unique, patented, omnidirectional design. The main, 2" x 8" cylindrical dynamic driver radiates 360° sound, for a sweet spot that encompassed all of the chairs placed in front of them in this listening room.

The rest of the system comprised the Netherlands-made Pink Faun 2.16 Ultra streamer ($30,000 US) (see our review of the Pink Faun 2.16x in the December 2020 issue of Stereophile, two MUTEC…

(All prices are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated.)

You want magic? I'll give you magic. It won't cost you your soul, but it may touch it.

But first, the location: Montreal retailer's Art et Son room, where I met Philip O'Hanlon of On A Higher Note, North American distributor of the BBC-inspired Graham Audio speaker line. Meeting Philip is always a magical experience, and this time was no different. He explained that Graham Audio took the "thin-wall" concept devised by the BBC for its speaker panels and made it better by adding a layer of bitumen-loaded felt…

(All prices are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated.)

Maybe the earth-toned, smoke-spewing phallus standing in the back of the room had something to do with it, but as I listened to the system in the Acora Acoustics/Audio Excellence room, I felt a deep connection to my species—more specifically, to ancient human tradition. No doubt a lot of that feeling had to do with the music I was listening to at the time—Gary Karr's Adagio d'Albinoni—but it also certainly had a lot to do with how the Acora system was able to preserve and convey to me the emotional core of this…

I never really got the sound of Klipsch speakers at past shows, but I did this time, in a big way, in the Capital Sound room, where the Klipsch La Scala III ($17,500) was making seductive, sophisticated music. So what was up? Synergy, undoubtedly, obtained with a brand I'd never heard of before but that apparently has been manufacturing audio products for other companies for 25 years. That company is Slovakia-based Canor, which is so new as a non-OEM brand that exact pricing for their products in North America hasn't been…

Holmes sent three made-in-China DYLP Audio cartridges: the MC Ruby-1, the MC100 Mk II, and the Mono. All are part of the…

Switching to The Electric Recording Company's reissue of Coltrane's My Favorite Things (ERC 060), from the original mono tape thought lost but recently found, the timbral picture shifted completely, from bright clarity to…

You want sound that's narcotically intimate? Seductively expressive? Molecularly textured? The kind of sound that, once your ears and brain have latched on to it, makes you struggle to let go, even if you have a show report to do, because the sound is so hard to resist?

I submit to you this room, a collaboration among Canadian distributor Tri-Cell and two dealerships—Montreal-based L'Atelier Audio and Hearken Audio of Kitchener, Ontario—which delivered all the qualities above and was one of my favorite rooms at the show. Plus, I had one of my long-held biases shattered. More…

At first, online sales were mainly for inexpensive and moderately priced items, but over time, people have grown comfortable buying higher-priced goods online: computers, cars, and yes, higher-end audio equipment. The pandemic has accelerated this trend.

Many hi-fi manufacturers and importers have remained true to the traditional sales model, and for many hi-fi products, especially the expensive…

(All prices are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated.)

Montreal retailer Studio du Son's room was a blast from the past, complete with peace-sign door beads, a 50s-style wood-framed Black & White TV—okay, technically it was a blast from at least two different pasts—vintage photos of old-school rock stars, and a fat-knobbed radio and record player console. Oh, and KLH speakers.

The KLH speaker I heard in this nostalgia-drenched room, the Model Three ($2700 w/ stands), was a brand-new baby, arriving just in time for its official Canadian launch at the…

(All prices are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated.)

I seem to hear and read less about electrostatic speakers than I used to. I know they've always been a niche within another niche—audiophile speakers—but I remember the days when a vocal segment of passionate electrostatic devotees swore by the technology and refused to settle for the boxy colorations of your typical boxy speaker. Somehow, along the way, electrostatic speakers have become less visible, in the press as well as at audio shows.

That's a shame. Because whenever I do come across a pair of well-…