The Second Day
      Was the Montreal show as well attended as usual? By the standards of most audio/video consumer shows, the crowds were great. As good as last year? Apparently it depended where you were, and perhaps what you were expecting.
     There were some firsts, for this show at least. This Festival marked what we believe to be the first Canadian appearance of the ELP turntable. There it is at right. No, not the one on top, which is a familiar Japanese direct drive model, but the one on the shelf below. The ELP looks like a giant CD player, whose drawer takes an LP. It reads the (very clean) groove with a laser. We had heard this expensive table (starting around $17K) in Las Vegas, and the impression here was the same. Very clean highs, somewhat lean bottom end. By the way, the ELP was driving 500 watt Manley monoblocks and Totem Mani-2 speakers.
     But now let's get to loudspeakers, and we mean unusual loudspeakers.
     It should be evident that extremely large, unusually styled speakers have a WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) way below room temperature. But are there buyers for them? You bet!
          A case in point: the Odaiko speaker, shown at left. Wood, and lots of it. The two large woofers are in an open baffle, with a natural rolloff in the bass, and they are therefore equalized to bring the bass up again. The (scarcely smaller) midrange is in a sealed box. Also present are an Edgarhorn (the round thing on the left) and a ribbon tweeter. A number of amplifiers were driving it, including a Transcendent tube amp of extremely low power and a pair of Art Audio Jota single-ended amps. The sound? Well, the source was a good one, namely a Linn Sondek. The overall sound was very good for such a large speaker, most of which suffer from severe phase problems. The dynamics were superb. The WFA? We didn't dare hasard a guess!
     Robert Lamarre's RL Acoustics, which is about 20 minutes drive from our offices, was showing its now familiar single-driver highly-efficient (98 dB) horn-loaded speaker. The new version has a new driver, with a cone made of...wait for it, hemp! The horns themselves are C$7250 complete, but dedicated do-it-yourselfers intent on optimum reproduction of music of the Sixties will be able to buy the hemp drivers for $500 the pair.
     The new speaker is shown below. Our feeling was that the Tektron-Italia tube amplifiers were not handling the speaker right, though it should be easy enough to drive.
    By the way, a single-driver speaker has a single pair or connectors, as you might expect, but Lamarre says one customer asked how he could biwire them!
     Over at Pierre Gabriel, a Jadis Orchestra amplifier and Symphonia CD player were feeding a pair of familiar Pierre Gabriel speakers. No surprise there, except for the fact that the whole system was available at a special show price: $5988 Canadian!
     Slightly more conventional is the new Mordaunt-Short Performance 6 speaker. The price for this high-tech speaker will be over $7K, not what we've associated Mordaunt-Short with in the past. The molded monocoque cabinet is backed by a rigid "spine" to which the drivers are attacked from the rear. Oh...all except for the tweeter, which looks back into a series of small tuned tubes.
     We heard a complaint about the paucity of home theatre displays...odd, because usually we hear the opposite complaint. We could complain about the quality of the demos, especially on the video side. Poorly set-up TV monitors had excessive contrast and poor details. In three cases, we saw films that were stretched horizontally. The room boasting of a "3-D Sound Generator" making surround out of two channels, was especially awful-looking. Awful-sounding too. Dolby Labs can rest easy!
     Yet one of the most amazing demos we saw was amazing precisely because of sound.
     The room was that of the now-independent Mission. The company's original owner, Verity Group, went off to make flat-panel speakers with a technology called NXT. Mission has used the same technology to make amazingly small speakers (at left) employed for an entire 5.1-channel system...well, all but the "point one," handled by a regular sub. The front panel is the driver, and the things play loud and clean. Nothing to do with "Home Theatre in a Box"!
     The Living Voice Avatar OBX-R speakers are not exactly unfamiliar, since we use a pair in our Alpha reference system. It sounded nice at the show too, driven by Exposure Classic series CD player, preamplifier and power amplifier.
     Much more surprising--and we weren't the only ones surprised, were the Austrian WLM speakers (shown at right). It doesn't look like much, with little to justify its five-digit price tag. Nor do you get much info for your money. The tweeter on top? It's called the PAC, anything else you need to ask? Hmm, yes, can we hear another recording? And another? And another, please?
     The larger version, the Lyra, is shown at left further down this page. true, it was driven by a vast array of tube gear, most of it from Audio Aero, but that couldn't be the whole story. It was the buzz of the show.
     By the way, WLM stands for "Wiener Lautsprecher Manufaktur," or "Viennese Loudspeaker Factory."
      At a nearby room, we spent a bit of time listening to a pair of Monitor Audio GR60 floorstanding speakers, with Musical Fidelity associated gear. We were surprised to see that this decidedly upscale stuff was being helped out by a subwoofer. We couldn't argue with the results, however.
     We also spent a bit ot time with the Verity Parsifal Ovation, a rejig of this familiar and expensive ($24.5K) Canadian luxury speaker. The new Scanspeak annular tweeter has a 95 dB efficiency, and some other changes have been made too. Certainly the associated gear was helping: dCS player and Nagra electronics. However it was done, the sound was natural and relaxing...two of our favorite adjectives at any show. ("Noisy" and "harrying" are the ones most people are more likely to bring up spontaneously.
     After three straight days of break-in time, we dared listen to the Harmonix CD player running in our own room. It's coming along. We'll get a longer listen on the third and final day.
     We leave you with yet another CD player, technically less exotic than the Harmonix, though you couldn't easily convince casual visitors of that. Remember the Shanling CD player that was on the cover of UHF No. 66 (visit The Reading Room if you've forgotten)? There was a newer model on display this time. Exotic? We'd say so. Yes, it's a tube model. Yes, it's from China. We'll tell you more when we can get a good listen.
     Onward to Sunday, which is the day we tear down. Expect the final report to be on line Monday morning.

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