This one's for Herb Reichert: the booth outside the huge room where Solen Electronique was demming what they described as "The Ultimate Experience" system (CDN$115,435) featured parts and components from Solen and The Parts Connection/Dayton Audio. This box of NOS tubes would have had Herb drooling!
Inside the room, the 4-way, 97dB-sensitive Ultimate Experience IV v4 loudspeakers (CDN$9995/pair) were being driven all-Bryston electronics—BDP-3 server BDA-3 DAC, BP173 preamp, pairs of 28B and 7B3 monoblocks—all hooked up with Solen cables. A track by bassist Marcus Miller filled…
A few years ago, the Hotel Bonaventure (formerly the Hilton Bonaventure), long the site of the Montreal Audio Fest (formerly Salon Son et Image), turned its sprawling restaurant into a sprawling ballroom called the Ville-Marie salon. For the 2019 Montreal Audio Fest, that room was home to Focal Naim Canada (formerly the distributor known in Canada as Plurison, and in the US as Audio Plus Services.) Daniel Jacques (on the left, with me, in the photo above), who founded Plurison/Audio Plus in 1983, has now sold that company to Vervent Audio Group, which owns Focal and Naim; those brands,…
What would a Montreal show be without snow? The first day of the Montreal Audio Fest was bright and sunny, but as walked from my sleeping room to the ballroom to continue my reporting on Saturday morning, this is the sight that greeted me. "That's nothing," snorted native Quebeçois! (And I still find it weird to see trees growing on the top of a tower block—show venue the Hotel Bonaventure is 12 floors off the ground.)
First stop Saturday was the Audio by Mark Jones room, which was featuring the world premiere of Magico's M2 loudspeaker ($57,000/pair plus $7600/pair for the…
"Got a match?" ("Uh-uh")
"It's a fabulous party! . . . Look at all the fabulous people."
"You wanna dance?" ("Yes I'd love to . . .")
"Let's party a little bit." ("All right . . .")
And off we go with what this camp intro promises will be just another computer-produced piece of disco music that doesn't reach any parts of the body higher than the feet. And yes, the ingredients are all present in the right proportion: four-in-the-bar bass drum and snare; "aerosol" offbeat hi-hat; liberal helpings of synthesizer, repeat echo, bass guitar tied to walking—or, rather,…
The world's a place of horrors
Because each man thinks he's right—Loudon Wainwright III
As a teen, I loved spending time in musical-instrument shops. Now, with exceptions, the experience is reliably depressing.
Last Saturday was exemplary: I walked into my local supermarket of sound to buy a set of guitar strings, and was at once assaulted by the racket of two gunslingers trying to outshoot each other. Combatant No.1, a fiftysomething male with an elaborate dye job, had hold of a new Martin dreadnought acoustic guitar, on which he aggressively demonstrated his repertoire of…
Nothing, that is, except for me to hold Julia and her mother, Janet, hostage to my crank-literary whims: We drove to a friend's house in Troy, New York, and put our chicken in their oven. Then I got out my computer and went directly to the source with the following questions about women and their relationships with domestic audio. (For the record, Janet owns a Rega Planar 3 turntable in Union Jack finish, Julia a Thorens TD 124 Mk.II turntable in cream enamel. Both collect and regularly buy LPs.) Here is a transcript of our conversation:
ART: Do you consider yourselves to be feminists…
Magico's three-way A3 speakers ($CD13,000) were the first things I spotted when I entered Sonor-Filtronique's third room. I fondly remembered them from last year—in my 2018 report, I gushed over the sound of the A3s, then driven by Ayre electronics. Magico's most affordable model, the A3 has an enclosure made of 6061 T6 aircraft-grade aluminum, while their drivers boast diaphragms made of beryllium and graphene.
Driven by Luxman's solid-state, class-A, 30Wpc, phono stage-equipped L-590AXII integrated amplifier ($CD11,695), the same company's DSD-compatible DA-06 USB DAC ($CD6495…
As well as live music, the Montreal show offered a full schedule of seminars. Roon's Steve Silberman presented two seminars to packed houses on Saturday on getting the best from the Roon music app and the Roon Nucleus servers, including how to take advantage of the system's powerful DSP engine.
While the Roon seminars were held in the large St-Laurent 7 room, most of the other seminars took place in the smaller Outremont 3 room. Presenters included VTL's Luke Manley answering the question "Why Tubes?" and VPI's founder Harry Weisfeld talking turntables. I took in Elac's Andrew…
At the Montreal Audio Fest, Graham Audio's North American distributor, On A Higher Note, brought along the British speaker manufacturer's latest variation on the BBC-monitor theme: the LS5/9f ($US7995/pair in oak, as shown), described as a floorstanding version of the BBC-designed LS5/9 stand-mounter. According to On A Higher Note's Philip O'Hanlon, seen above, the LS5/9f was created by Derek Hughes, the son of the founders of Spendor (themselves once a BBC licensee—this is slightly complicated). Hughes reportedly intended the extra cabinetry to support the speaker without adding to its…
The first and only time I heard a live performance of Mahler's five-movement Symphony No.7, from Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, I left Davies Symphony Hall confused. The bad press that the 70+ minute work has received for over a century, mainly for its innate ambiguity, convinced me that it was, at best, a problematic work—one that Mahler might have eventually revised had he lived long enough. But after listening to DSD128 files of Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra's new recording of the symphony for Channel Classics, released March 29 in SACD format, I'…
