RMAF 2009

My attention was caught by the USB flash drive sticking out of the side of the Aura Premier CD player/receiver/headphone amplifier ($2595) in one of the April Music/May Audio rooms. And so it should have caught my attention, because it was styled by noted English industrial designer Kenneth Grange, responsible for some of ther classic B&W designs on the 1970s and '80s. The Premier will play MP3, WMA, and Ogg Vorbbis files from its USB-B input and it also has a USB-A port that will accept data sampled at up to 48kHz with 16-bit resolution.

Since the demise of of its own Show, Stereophile has been supporting North American audio Shows, which was why you can find us at RMAF in Denver and SSI in Montreal. Next March, we are partnering with the Axpona Show in Florida, which had a booth at RMAF. The booth was manned, er, personed by two beautiful girls but, of course, when I went back with my camera, they had left for the day.

As expected, Bel Canto Design's complement of components fully lived up to their reputation for affordable excellence. The top-of-the-line e.One CD2 CD transport/player ($2995), prototype DAC 3.5 (price not yet set), two REF500M Balanced mono amplifiers ($1995/each), REF VBS1 Virtual Battery Supply, which can power up to three front-end products ($1495), USB Link 24/96 USB to /SPDIF link ($495), and new USB Lightlink High Speed Optical ST glass-fiber link (price not supplied) were fed by an Airport Express-equipped computer server. As Bel Canto President Michael McCormick explained, "The DAC 3.5's excellent jitter rejection is at the center of the system." A Running Springs Power Conditioner completed the chain… except for one major component, the speakers.

Cable manufacturers Nordost and Vertex AQ had good reason to present their joint seminar, "New Approach to Audio Measurement: Why Cables Really Matter," no less than five times during the show. As Art Dudley will report at length in his December "Listening" column, their groundbreaking new approach to measurement, developed by Nordost and Vertex AQ in collaboration with military electronic-engineering consultant Gareth Humphrey Jones, has produced an entirely new method for measuring the audible effects of components on sound. We're talking not only cables, support platforms, and the like, all of which can now be unequivocally shown to affect a system's sound quality, but also CD players, amplifiers, and speakers.

Tube amp designer Roger Modjeski (Music Reference) toasts Gordon Holt with a Martini.

I thought I was seeing a familiar sight when I went into the RMAF room shared by Dynaudio, Wadia, and XLO. The loudspeakers, driven by humongous Octave monoblocks, appeared to be larger versions of the Accent 3 that Dick Olsher reviewed for Stereophile in the 1980s. There were more drive-units but as in the earlier design, the tweeter was placed at the bottom of the front baffle. This is the Consequence Ultimate Edition ($70,000/pair) explained Dynaudio president Wilfried Ehrenholz. The original Consequence was launched as the Danish company's flagship 25 years ago at the then astronomical price of 30,000DM/pair and has sold some 2500 pieces since then, even though it was not promoted in any major way after the mid-1990s.