Robert Schryer

Next up was another great-sounding room (it felt so good to be back!). Hosted by Mark Elias, owner of retailer Soundstage Fine Audio, this room boasted some high-grade gear, starting with Vandersteen’s new, dark, and handsome KĒNTO Carbon speakers ($49,000/pair), which Vandersteen representative Brad O’Toole seemed rightly proud of, as well as of the company’s 150Wpc solid state, zero feedback M5-HPA High-Pass monoblocks, which were powering the KĒNTO's higher-frequency drivers.

What would it be like to attend an audio show?

It's a reasonable question coming at the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel tail-end (fingers crossed) of a worldwide pandemic.

I'm about to find out because I'm at the 2021 Toronto Audiofest, held at the Westin Toronto Airport Hotel from October 22–24.

The first image that pops into my mind when I think of Focal is of the iconic Grande Utopias and how at one Montreal audio show I couldn't believe that the gentlest, sweetest music I'd heard all day was coming out of those massive speakers. I saw it as a paradox of sorts.

Founded in the City of Lights, Focal has been around since 1979, the year Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now received the Palme d'Or at Cannes and when the average annual income in America was $17,500. Focal started as a twinkle in the eye of engineer and technology journalist Jacques Mahul, who believed he'd built a speaker that would appeal to hi-fi enthusiasts: the DB13. Fast-forward half a century, and Focal, designated "entreprise du patrimoine vivant" (living heritage company) by the French government, employs some 230 people at its large, stylish, multilevel digs.

I was doing my press beat for Stereophile in the hallway of Montreal's 2019 Audiofest when I glimpsed something that stopped me in my tracks. It was a marketing slogan, across the room on importer/exhibitor Goerner Audio's floorstanding banner: "Tubes or semiconductors? Magneto-solid technology amplifies emotions."