But the reason I visited this room, which was on Jason Serinus' beat, was to return a Transparent USB cable Philip had left…
search
When I walked into the On A Higher Note room at RMAF, Philip O'Hanlon was playing Doug McLeod's There's a Time LP, our May 2013 "Recording of the Month," and very good it sounded too. Turntable was a Brinkmann Bardo fitted with a TriPlanar 12" tonearm and a Brinkmann Pi cartridge, with a Luxman L590X integrated amplifier ($9500) driving the superb Vivid B-1 loudspeakers ($14,990/pair) that I reviewed in October 2011. Cables and power conditioning was by Shunyata.
The very first room I visited at the 2013 RMAF was Sony's, where they were demonstrating the HAP-Z1ES hi-rez file player (top, $1999) that I reported on in September. This neat device features a 1TB internal drive, Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, and can be controlled by an app running on a tablet or phone. It will upsample any format to double-DSD as well as handling native single-DSD and double-DSD files. It comes preloaded with 20 hi-rez albums from Sony, Warner, and Universal and the goal was to make file playback as easy and as fast as playing a disc. It doesn't, therefore, allow…
I’ve grown quite fond of Nola Metro Grand Reference Gold loudspeakers ($33,000/pair). Mated once again with ultra-transparent, full-range Nordost Odin cabling and several Nordost Quantums ($2200/each), the system brought out the true nature of Audio Research’s CD-8 CD player ($9000), Reference 75 amplifier ($9000), and Reference 10 preamplifier ($30,000). On a recent Mercury Living Presence CD reissue of music by Chabrier, that made for an easy-on-the-ears, slightly damped top and the dominant ARC midrange that so many people love. JA tells me that he also was impressed by the sound in this…
Did that title get your attention? Andrew Jones’ TAD Evolution 1 loudspeakers ($29,500/pair) usually do by themselves. But, in this case, they were paired with TAD’s visually understated M600 amplifiers ($68,000, presumably for the pair), C600 preamp ($42,000), and D600 (CD/SACD) disc player ($32,000), as well as Ron LaPorte’s forthcoming Blue Smoke Entertainment Systems’ Black Box II digital music server/client ($3995) and USB to 384/32 digital output ($2995—both expected late 2013).
When I entered, Count Basie was making wonderful music, with the horns especially rewarding. Next came…
Lovely, warm and delicate sound, unmistakable tube bloom, and fantastic percussive impact distinguished my brief time in this room. Danny Richie of GR-Research’s open-baffle, line-source LS-X loudspeaker system ($39,000/pair), which includes two integrated servo-controlled subwoofer towers, mated extremely well with Dodd Audio’s battery-powered 34Wpc monoblock power amplifiers ($2900/pair plus battery and charger) and tube amplifier ($1199 plus battery, charger, and tweaks), and a Mac-based computer source feeding a not-yet-released dB Audio Labs Evolution DAC ($1495 or higher). Cabling was…
Dennis Fraker of Serious Stereo was having a ball playing his favorite Eagles Farewell 1 Tour–Live from Melbourne Blu-ray on an older Pioneer Elite Blu-ray player, Serious Stereo Ultra-Dynamic Attenuator ($2800 FOB), a pair of Serious Stereo 2-stage direct-coupled amplifiers ($15,750 shipped), and Serious Stereo loudspeakers boasting Altec 604 duplex 15” point-source transducers ($13,800/pair FOB). I wouldn’t call the sound audiophile nirvana, but it sure was a fun change of pace. Would have loved to have heard the components with the latest Oppo.
In the first of MIT’s two adjacent rooms, Steven Holt, in his last appearance with the company before moving on to Light Harmonic, showed off MIT’s newest Z-Plug 3 ($199) and Z-Plug 6 ($399) AC noise traps. Demonstrated with Audio Prism’s noise-sniffing device, these parallel power filters seemed to do a fine job of quieting things down. Also new are two power cables, the SL-Z-Cord3Fp AC Noise trap ($349) and SL-Matrix Z-Cord 6 AC Filter power cord ($699), both of which incorporate Z-series power filtration. Don’t you love these ridiculously long names that make you feel like you’ve bought…
If you’re going to spend time scrubbing records, the task might as well be made fun and easy. That seems to have been Jonathan Monks’ goal when he designed the new discOveryOne record-cleaning machine ($2495, base price).
“Dad’s machine was designed in the 1960s, and it was very tweaky,” Jonathan told me. At the time, users had a basic understanding of how turntables worked and were more comfortable than today’s users with the hands-on relationship dictated by the old-style cleaning machine. “We wanted to make the process as simple and intuitive as possible. And we also wanted to get…
Wandering into the Blackbird Audio room, whom do I encounter but audiophile legend Dean Peer giving Trenner & Friedl’s Pharoah loudspeakers ($13,000/pair) a major run for the money. While learning that the speaker’s plywood cabinet is bottom-ported, and that it has a horn-loaded compression tweeter and 8" paper-cone woofer, Dean played various impossibly deep runs, leaps, and scales to discover that the speakers in fact react quite fast, and extend down to the subsonic level. Very very cool. I’m afraid I didn’t hear much else in the system—apologies to Heed Audio, Cardas Audio, Profundo,…
Taiwanese speaker manufacturer used an 400Wpc/8 ohms Jeff Rowland Design Group 825 stereo amplifier and Aeris DAC to demonstrate its new Double Bass loudspeaker ($28,000/pair), with audio data sourced from a Bryston BDP-1. The Double Bass combines an MTM ribbon array with an 8" sandwich-cone mid-woofer and 12" sandwich-cone woofer in a vented enclosure that resembles, yes, a double bass.
Initially, with the system playing an orchestral version of a Brahms Hungarian Rhapsody, the sound was both bright and lacking image depth. I was not impressed. But then the Lawrence staffer replaced his…