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At an early morning press conference at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, presented jointly by Sony and Acoustic Sounds, the latter company's Chad Kassem announced that of the 5000 stereo copies pressed of the company's new UHQR LP reissue of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Axis: Bold as Love, only 1000 remain. (The 1500 mono copies pressed are already sold out.) Hand-pressed, one-at-a-time, on 200 gm clarity vinyl that has no incline, the $100/each stereo copies are housed in an expensive Teflon jacket, and come with lots of documentation. Copies can be ordered online from Acoustic Sounds.
The RMAF T-Shirt Award of 2018 goes to Denver's own Chris Hoffman, whom I spied on the ground floor of the Denver Marriott Tech Center. "I'd been threatening to make this T-shirt for a couple of years," he confessed after being caught in the act. (For more on this subject, please see my piece "Don't Play it Again, Sam!" from the September 2016 Stereophile).
At the press conference sponsored by Sony Corporation and Acoustic Sounds, Marc Finer, Director of Communication Research, Inc., introduced speakers Hayami Robise, Acoustic Engineer, Sony Corp., Chad Kassem of Acoustic Sounds,…
The large, superb-sounding system in the High Fidelity Services room left me deeply impressed. The system was headlined by the debut of the Verity Audio Monsalvat speaker system with its included Pro-6 six-channel crossover ($675,000 total) and three of Verity Audio's Monsalvat Amp-60 stereo amps ($58,000/each). Together with a TW-Acustic Raven phono preamplifier ($18,000), TW-Acustic Raven Black Knight turntable ($42,000) with debut Raven 12 and 10.5 tonearms ($11,500 total) and debut Ortofon MC Century cartridge ($12,000), Melco N1ZH MK1 music server ($4995), debut Signal Projects cables,…
A few hours before Friday evening's Rocky Mountain International HiFi Press Awards 2018 got underway, Jeremy Bryan of MBL North America once again blew me away with the sound of his company's system. Capped by the mbl 101 E MKII Radialstrahler four-way omnidirectional loudspeaker ($70,500/pair), the combination of Wireworld cabling with mbl's N31 DAC–CD player ($15,400), N11 stereo preamplifier ($14,600), and two N15 mono power amplifiers ($17,800/each) created an extremely wide, solid, and deep soundstage in which music flowed naturally and with great beauty. Rodion Shchedrin's sometimes…
That title will surely get a rise out of some folks!
Be that as it may, the aforementioned company ran two MQA Live events at RMAF, during which high-resolution (24/192) MQA streams of live jazz ensembles were streamed in real time to various rooms at the show. MQA claims that the streams were essentially analog to analog, right off the desk.
Having missed Friday morning's private media event, presented by Bluesound, which featured Zara McFarlane and band streaming to audiences in London, NYC, and Denver—I was covering press events elsewhere—I began my Saturday by heading to the…
I almost missed the huge EMM Labs exhibit on the ground floor until John Atkinson told me that he had visited it, and the sound was exceptional. Don't quote me on the adjective, please. Instead, I'll own it for myself. When a system makes a recording of a 9' concert grand—in this case, Murray Perahia's instrument—sounds like it really is a 9' grand, color me very, very impressed. As one should be, given a system price tag of near $1,000,000.
When I entered the room, a recording of Dave Brubeck's Take Five delivered an extremely neutral presentation, ideal life on top, and near-ideal bass…
Have JVS's critical faculties failed him? Judging from his recently penned performance reviews, and his most recent recording review for Stereophile.com, no. But when room after room at RMAF yields fine to superb sound, he doesn't hesitate to wax ecstatic.
Hurriedly returning to the first person before the dreaded men in white coats come to carry me away, I ended Day 2 carried away by the sound in the Musical Surroundings room, located on the Marriott's mezzanine. There I discovered a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence: a system that contained four products that were reviewed or used in…
Here's a switch: Instead of a million-dollar system, we begin with a bargain-priced powered-speaker system, the Vanatoo Transparent One Encore ($599/pair). Designed near me, in Seattle, and manufactured in China, this successor to Vanatoo's original model, which was released six years ago, has a new 1" aluminum dome tweeter, more powerful 100W, four-channel amplifier with "much better" DSP-based L/R crossover, remote control, Bluetooth with aptX, and four more "automatically sensed" inputs for analog, USB, Toslink optical, and coaxial digital, the last three accepting up to 24/96 but…
Although most rooms I visited at the end of RMAF 2018 offered fine sound, I single out the new Dragonfire Acoustics Mini Dragon self-powered desktop system ($10,000 total) for two reasons: a) its designer, Dragoslav Colich (aka Dr. C), who continues to design every Audeze headphone, calls these first desktop planar speakers from his new company his "life achievement
the finest transducer I have built," and, b) they sound fantastic.
This "totally absolutely impressive" system, to quote from my ultra-articulate show note scribble, includes digital volume control and room correction.…
I was hosting a seminar on the Friday afternoon of the show—"50 Years of Being an Audiophile," where I examined how my system and tastes in music and sound quality has evolved since I bought my first audio components five decades ago—and was starting my drive home to Brooklyn Sunday morning, which left me Saturday to visit exhibitors' rooms. My apologies, therefore, to those I wasn't able to get to.
I started my tour in the ground-floor room next to the restaurant hosted by Colorado dealer ListenUp. There I did a double-take—wasn't that a JBL Century L100 three-way loudspeaker, with its…