RockyFest Award Alert!
Best Sound: Vincent Bélanger
Best-Sounding Component: Monsieur Bélanger's 200-year old cello
Best Choice of Music: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsdaTVKmjdY
Most Impressive Audio Demonstration: Audio Note UK
I made a wonderful passionate new friend today. He is an artist. I love him. He speaks French, lives in Montreal and plays the most beautiful musical instrument I have ever almost touched. He spoke (in English), he sat between the speakers and played strong notes that lasted infinitely long; everyone in the room felt the air move. His voice…
Andy Carr, Marketing Director of the UK's Cambridge Audio, introduced two of the company's systems: a CX series system that included Cambridge Audio Aeromax 2 bookshelf speakers ($649/pair), and an 851 series that used Aeromax 6 floorstanders ($1299/pair). Both speaker models incorporate Cambridge Audio's BMR (Balanced Mode Radiator) drivers and dedicated subwoofers.
Playing a FLAC file of Eric Bibb's "Rocking Chair" through, I believe, the CXN upsampling network music player ($999), the lower priced system ($2700 total + XLO cabling) produced really nice, smooth sound that felt just…
Jeffrey Catalano is from Buffalo and I am from Chicago. His father was a plumber and mine was a steamfitter. We are both world-class wrench twirlers. We both studied painting. We have both sawed a lot of boards and pounded too many nails. We're rust-belt dudes with a taste for art, blues and roots music with some high-a-fluten European Classical tucked in on the side. Oh yeah, and World Music. And strange electronica. And Memphis Soul. And John Cage, Schoenberg and (my beloved) Alban Maria Johannes Berg.
Me and Jeffrey been playing black discs together for almost four decades. When I met…
By the time I went to book a room for this year's RMAF there was no room at the Denver Marriott inn. Perhaps the same thing happened to Magico, as we both ended up one long suburban block away at the Hyatt Regency Denver Tech. Which was nice for me, in that it allowed me to get a breath of fresh air between listening bouts.
When I first took the elevator up to the Presidential Suite it was still early. I could hear Dire Straits doing "Money for Nothing" loud and clear down the hall. So loud and clear that when I knocked no one could hear me. I tried again an hour later and this time was…
Voxativ may be one of the only companies in the high-end whose equipment list is designed as a flow chart. The visual presentation seems entirely apt, given how beautifully music flowed through the eye-catching and soul-pleasing Voxativ 9.87 system loudspeakers with its AC-4d wideband driver and bass extension ($34,900/pair).
This truly superior system excelled in communicating the life and beating heart behind the notes. Listening to Agnes Obel via Tidal, I heard beautiful sonorities distinguished by open highs, a superb midrange, and deep bass. Nor did the voice of Cassandra Wilson on "…
When there are over 150 exhibits to cover at an audio show, as there were at RMAF, I usually have no choice but to skip entertainment. But when Joe Reynolds of Nordost told me that I "must" hear Irish songstress and songwriter Eleanor McEvoy, whose initial work as a symphonic violinist segued into work as a session musician for U2 and Sinead O’Connor before she concentrated on songwriting and performing, I vowed to briefly stick my head into the Aspen Amphitheatre, grab a photo, and stay for part of a song.
Then I heard McEvoy, the composer of the title track of A Woman's Heart, the six-…
There are rooms at hi-fi shows, and then there are rooms. Kubotek/Haniwa were hosting the "Harry Pearson Memorial Concert" in Room 1122 of the Denver Marriott. I had seen information in advance, but it took me a moment to realize that I had walked into a unique event. It was a bit like viewing hours at a funeral parlor, but instead of a casket, arranged around the room were a selection of the legendary Harry Pearson's actual 3000-LP collection, which he bequeathed complete to Dr. Tetsuo Kubo, designer and president/CEO of the Kubotek Corporation, based in Osaka, Japan. As if this weren't…
Ah yes. Through the audio jungle I thrashed, through sound both thrilling and threadbare, until, having totally exhausted the alliteration resources of my thoroughly thumbed thesaurus, I alighted upon the thoroughfare of Thrax. Once there, I threw all literary pretense aside, and thrillingly cried, "Thanks be to Thrax!"
And with this borderline hysterical paragraph behind me, I solemnly pledge to never again abandon critical impartiality in order to indulge in the mad plunge into holographic hyperbole!
Over it I may be. But what I'm not over is how good this room, assembled by…
VANA’s Kevin Wolf (right) with AudioStream.com's Michael Lavorgna in the hot seat
Kevin Wolf and VANA Ltd. represent a group of distinctive high-quality/high-value audio products that are mostly right up my aesthetic alley. I raved about their modestly priced ($1299) Blue Horizon Profono MM/MC phono stage in a recent "Gramophone Dreams" column in Stereophile. I have used their Dr. Feickert Analogue Protractor to align every one of the dozen or so cartridges I have written about. Every day, I treat the Dr.'s protractor like it was a rare artifact from the holy land. If there was a fire in…
Oh my, what a difference a few feet can make. I am talking, in this case, about the 6'7.8"-tall, 573.2-lb Focal Grande Utopia EM loudspeakers ($195,000/pair), each of which houses a 16" woofer, an 11" midbass driver, two 6.5" midrange drivers, and a 1" pure-beryllium, inverted-dome tweeter. This loudspeaker throws one of the largest and most realistically proportioned soundstages I have ever heard. When playing my SACD of Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra performing Mahler's Symphony 9 (Channel Classics), the Grand Utopia EMs were actually capable of suggesting the huge scale,…
