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Because my train from Albany, NY arrived ahead of schedule, there was just enough daylight for me to photograph Montreal's Bonaventure Hotel—formerly the Hilton Bonaventure—which, from Friday March 18 through Sunday March 20, is the site of the brand new Montreal Salon Audio. As some of you will recall (see our recent story), Montreal's heretofore long-running Salon Son et Image was "deferred" by its organizers, on account of too few manufacturers and dealers willing to sign up as exhibitors at the once-iconic show. But then the show's previous organizers, Michel Plante and Sarah Tremblay,…
Universities were well represented at the SXSW 2016 interactive trade show and Virginia Tech University had this impressive beast, named Seymour, a super computer made up of many smaller computers, that was a collaboration between a sculptor and a computer scientist. It was also described to me as an “art piece.” If my wife would let me have one, I’d probably give it a whirl. Something about all that lime green plexiglass. Now if it only had a turntable!
And what Film-Interactive-Music conference would be complete without a robot, this one promoting the value of patents and the people who need them? He was later spotted digging through crates in the $1 record room at Friends of Sound record shop on South Congress Avenue.
As the SXSW Zombies everywhere prepare to leave their lairs and sally forth in search of music, booze and in some hardcore cases, actual food, rather than bad street pizza, Quickee Mart crackers or anything free and edible, a gorgeous Texas sunset breaks over downtown Austin.
Friday dawned snowy and bright, and by the time I got around to exploring the corridors of the Bonaventure Hotel, music was already coming from a few scattered rooms. Overnight, more signage and posters had appeared, and an admissions station had been set up in a portion of the hotel's entryway that was relatively clear of construction work: admission is free, of course, but volunteers were busy greeting arrivals and handing out a two-sided map giving the exhibitors' locations. (Since Michel Plante and Sarah Tremblay took over the show, there simply wasn't enough time to create a full-blown…
It will come as no surprise that audio journalists find their greatest professional pleasure in writing about things—playback gear, recordings, what-have-you—with which they are wildly impressed, and that their second-favorite topics are things that are genuinely and comically awful. But the fact of the matter is, at audio shows, most systems don't fall into either of those categories: most systems at shows range between "listenable" and "pretty darn good"—and there's nothing wrong with that. So here's one of the pretty darn good systems: a combination, found in the room of Quebec dealer…
The room sponsored by Montreal dealer Audiophonie was like a treasure trove of interesting things/pair—tubes! horns! turntables with tall platters!—and when I first arrived, it was filled with nearly a dozen men speaking French in such animated tones that I felt as though I had stumbled upon a meeting of an especially enthusiastic audio society. I did not feel left out for long: the room's host, audio designer Robert Gaboury, made me feel welcome, and explained that his very good sounding Arteluthe Cadenza loudspeakers ($CDN24,000/pair) were a two-way design with a specified sensitivity of…
I walked into the larger of Joseph Audio's two demonstration rooms—the one shared with Nagra and Kronos—just in time to hear Neil Young's "There's a World" and "Bad Fog of Loneliness," from the Live at Massey Hall LP. The performances—and Young's very funny between-song patter—were thoroughly convincing, and even in this large space, there was a sense of the Joseph Audio Pearl 3 floorstanders ($US31,500/pair) pressurizing the room to realistic good effect. I loved the Pearl 3s—and so, apparently, did Nagra's Classic Amp ($US16,000), a 100Wpc stereo amp that runs in class-A for its first 10…
One oft-heard comment is that South By Southwest, has grown too expensive for attendees. The hotel rooms, all controlled by the South By Southwest Housing Bureau, are ridiculously, exorbitantly overpriced. And keep in mind that Austin, during the rest of the year, is not an especially expensive place to live. More evidence of absurd SXSW inflation could be found in the convention center where this piece of cold, half-baked-to-start-with muck that looks like what folks in the rest of the United States sometimes call "pizza," could be had for a mere $8.25. People have been hung, drawn and…
One of the great joys about visiting Austin, at least for those attached to collecting physical media, is Waterloo Records, which even now, still maintains a small but fairly vital classical music section.