I heard that same unparalleled sense of musical…
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Demos hosted by Canadian manufacturer Acora Acoustics invariably sound good whenever I hear them at a show, probably because the company’s speakers invariably sound good. You could probably feed them music from a Fisher Price turntable and still be wowed by the transparency to the source. With cabinets made of extremely inert materials such as granite, quartz, or quartzite, Acora speakers project a sound that is so pure, effortless, vivid, and lifelike it makes other speakers seem like a lot of the sound is still stuck inside the cabinets.
Now that’s what I call truth in advertising, because bliss was served! What sound! What grandeur! What an exquisite example of the best that sound reproduction can offer. Retailer Bliss Acoustics’s room was presenting one of my favorite demoes at the show, proving to me, at least—and this despite the fact that I’m not immune to sometimes feeling resentful toward gear I can’t afford—that the really expensive stuff can be worth the money. It just sounds better. It sounds expensive, in the sense that you know there’s no way you can get this level of performance at a discount.
Nagra…
All prices listed in CA$.
Toronto retailer Star Electronics's room was offering some substantial sound, and by substantial, I mean thick toned, resoundingly harmonic, with solid, well-defined bass. Being demoed was gear by Yamaha, but this was not your daddy’s, or your youngers self’s, Yamaha, when the manufacturer’s audio products were entirely targeted to the mainstream market.
The system being demoed made music that belied its compact size. Consisting of a pair of ported, two-way, standmount Yamaha NS-800A loudspeakers ($5999/pair), a fully balanced, dual toroidal transformer-…
I’ve met Daniel Qvortrup, son of Audio Note founder Peter, a few times, and what I know of his music-listening side is that he’s a diehard music fan with very eclectic tastes in music. I’m not using the word “very” lightly here. He’s the type to listen to Tibetan monk throat-singing. So, I was not entirely surprised when the first thing he played for me in the Audio Note exhibit room was a 78 RPM recording made in 1931 of a woman yodeling.
Needless to say, this sort of thing makes Daniel stand out from the other exhibitors, who will usually play a recording, often of a small,…
Before the beards, before the fuzzy spinning guitars, before the "Legs" video, there was an electric blues trio, that little ol' band from Texas, ZZ Top. In five years in the 1970s, they made their finest albums and found their first success. They came, they conquered, and gargantuan blues riffs—not to mention the concept of the power trio—were never the same.
Anthologized and reissued many times since their release—Tres Hombres alone has been reissued on vinyl three times just since 2006—the band's first five albums have been reissued again in an impressive, limited-edition boxed set…
The Kennedy Hi-Fi room was showing another product at the show that was creating a buzz: the Audiovector Trapeze loudspeaker ($25,000/pair), another product from Denmark, a country rich in high-end manufacturing. A 3-way floorstanding design, the Trapeze features a proprietary 12" high-power mid/bass driver, a 5" high-speed midrange, and an AMT (Air Motion Transformer) tweeter.
Joining the Trapeze were a trio of Fezz Audio products: a Sagita Evolution preamplifier ($2900), a 45Wpc, KT-88-based Titania amplifier ($4000), and an Equinox DAC ($3000), said by the company to be "the…
All prices CA$
I saw a real live frilled lizard at the Audiofest. It was wide-spanning and awe-inspiring and finished in Santos Rosewood. And instead of spitting saliva, it projected music. Okay, so it wasn’t an actual frilled lizard, but Coherent Loudspeakers’ 18FC–31J speakers ($72,950/pair)—not a catchy name but there's designer reasoning behind it*—which I spotted in Corby's Audio's second exhibit room, was still impressive to behold.
The speaker's features and specs are impressive, too. About the horn part, designer Frank Fazzalari explained it this way: "The horn, which is 31…
All prices listed in CA$.
Some systems are sleepers in the unassuming sense. They don't come in big parts, or take up a lot of space, or use a dozen components to pass the signal through. So you sit down to listen to them, expecting something good but forgettable, and boom! They wallop you in the face with wave after wave of dense, weighty, colorful, harmonically saturated sound that forces you to catch your breath as you try to reconcile what you're hearing with what your assumptions were.
That's what happened to me in distributor Wynn Audio's room, although I should've known…
As I leisurely strolled through the lobby of Warsaw’s Radisson Blu Sobieski two mornings before the start of Audio Show 2024, it seemed impossible that, shortly after I awoke on October 24, truckloads of gear and audio show personnel would descend on the hotel. What now was a very quiet lobby and restaurant—I rarely rode the elevator with anyone else in it—would soon be packed with distributors, dealers, company heads, press, and visitors.
Did I say “packed?” The real fun will take place October 25–27, when hallways feel at least as busy as at Munich High End. This is, after all, Europe’s…
In a video on his YouTube channel Jazz Vinyl Audiophile (footnote 1), Stereophile contributing editor Ken Micallef asks Jeffrey Catalano of High Water Sound how he manages to be so consistent—how his rooms wrangle "top 2% sound" at every audio show. The first words out of Jeffrey's mouth are "I know how to listen."
"It's one of my greatest strengths. I know what music sounds like. I just go inside the music and let it tell me how it's supposed to be alive, how it's supposed to live in that space. I know that sounds simplistic and maybe somewhat esoteric, or pretentious even—but it's not…