They were stunningly dynamic and not shouty at all—at least on the acoustic vocal music I was listening to. I walked back in a few minutes later and they were pumping out amplified music, which was not to my taste at all.
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Barque & Consonance's Opera Consonance M15 mates a 15" woofer with a unique multicell horn tweeter. Sensitivity is 98dB (!) and frequency range is rate at 30Hz–20kHz. The tweeter handles everything above 500Hz. Price would be around $10,000/pair USD, not including distribution costs.
After my first few days wandering through the show, I began to wonder where all the Chinese speakers were—the relatively normal ones, I mean.
This is YiZhen Yao, standing next to his Elite Performance 10s. It's a one-box cabinet, even though it looks like two, and it sports a Morel D-29 tweeter, and kevlar sandwich 6.5" midrange and 10" woofers—both manufactured by Elite.
Driven by Jimmy Yu's Classic components, they delivered relaxed, natural sound that was a real oasis at the show.
NuForce's S-9 was pretty interesting, too. The cabinet is constructed of birch plywood laminations, which creates both the inner and outer profiles. The tweeter is mounted into a fairly deep horn and flanked by the twin midrange/woofers. There's a built-in switchable Zobel filter and an external crossover, which can be purchased as active or passive. Speaker wire is included in the S-9's $5500/pair (USD) price.
With quiet acoustic music and vocals, I was quite impressed by the S-9's clarity and natural, extended harmonic overtones. Based on the steep flare of the horn surrounding…
Zhou Yi of W'inner is kind of a crazy guy—audiophile crazy. His stuff is all big, and so are his aspirations. He really likes class-A, too.
He's squatting next to his $2300 (USD—although it is not distributed in the US) AD-9800B, which is sort of a multichannel integrated. He also likes multichannel high-rez, so he built a 7.1 integrated with an LCD display for navigating SACD and DVD-A programs.
He was just playing two of the 150W channels and the Dynaudio Countour 1.4s were singing mighty prettily.
Dussun was showing a line of power conditioners (500W, 800W, and 1200W) that offered waveform shaping, regulation, isolation, and DC suppression. Oh yeah, and they offer 85% efficiency. The X-1200 retails for $2500.
But what's that little thing on top? That's the CT-1, a line tester that Dussun will loan to customers who buy the conditioners.
Plug the CT-1 into an outlet and it will measure the THD+N noise carried on your line. You can plug headphones into the output to hear the noise pollution, or you can measure it with a test instrument. The CT-1 will also alert you to DC on your line.
We went to the "audio district" of GuangZhou—in China, all shops of similar character tend to group together, so the audio district is where all the hi-fi shops are. Actually, they're there twice: many store have display showrooms in the central mall and listening rooms ranked along a nearby alley.
EMG, or Elegant Music Garden, was probably the fanciest of the lot. It had an illuminated display floor and various bits of gear displayed like museum pieces all about the lobby. The listening rooms were up a grand staircase.
We were there in the middle of the afternoon and the…
Down the street, we found a store running an active demo that had these strange devices flanking the loudspeakers. Seated on their own speaker stands, they had thin wires connecting on the positive inputs of both loudpseaker and super tweeter.
"What do they do?" I asked.
"They are soundfield enhancers."
"How do they work?"
"They are passive."
"If they are passive, why are they connected in line to the speaker inputs?"
A long explanation in Mandarin followed, which my translator declined to translate. I think it was, in essence, "Run along kid…
Actually, I have no idea what Sheng Ya means, but at the Sheng Ya showroom, I felt right at home. There were audiophiles hanging out, listening, and, of course, yakking when we walked in. The sales guy was really into what he was doing and immediately began playing these interesting looking speakers made by Consonance.
Wow. I don't think I've ever heard saxophone reproduced better. Was it the horn loaded tweeter? No clue, but I could have camped on that sofa for hours.
A side note to American dealers: This store subtly used what appeared to be decorative embellishments (…