The final day of the Festival
     Time to wrap up, to tear down and pack up (well, for those who, unlike us, exhibited), and also time to sum up the Festival.
     Is it just our imagination, or was there less to hear this time? On Saturday evening Albert and Gerard discussed this, and both thought that they had already seen pretty much everything. Sunday, then, would be dedicated to listening again to the best rooms. And of course to avoiding the worst ones (the majority) like the Avian Flu.
     There was less in the way of high end video than usual, we thought, but the best video room was a dazzler. Check out the Vidikron Vision 150 projector at right (we deliberately left the hand in the picture to give you an idea of how big it is). And check out the hunk of glass at the front! Backed with a Blu-Ray player, it threw a decidedly film-like image across a large curved screen. It felt like a real cinema, and that was despite the fact that the film shown, Casino Royale, had a terrific amount of movement of the sort that triggers memorably strange artifacts. Not in this case.
     But we should mention the sound, and it was more than ordinary. At left is one of the Adam Tensor speakers used in the front channels. Like the Vidikron, it would benefit from having a human next to it to provide an indication of scale. Did we mention it's big? It's heavy too, with built-in crossover networks and individual Ice Power amplifiers. The tweeter and super tweeter are corrugated ribbons deriveed from the famous Heil tweeter.
     In video mode the sound was certainly...ah, involving! However we also got a private demonstration with music, and the indication was that these speakers (in pure two-channel mode) can fill a huge room with very good sound. You'll need to save up, though, because they cost C$60,000 for the pair. Also save up for the home to put them in.
     The other major video room was that of Niro. A couple of years back the company showed a surround sound system using just two speakers, one at the front, one at the rear. Now designer Niro Nakamichi (yes, the one who designed those famous cassette decks named after him) has gone to a single speaker at the front plus a subwoofer. The system was shown in the big hall, where you could hear only an ear-busting cacophony, but also in one of the hotel rooms. Both demos were done with the attack scene from Pearl Harbor, which has no dialog, never mind music or anything else interesting. Does it work? If it does, it should have been noticeable in the scene where the Japanese planes zoom in from behind us. It sort of worked if one is willing to contribute a little imagination, but full surround this isn't, at least not the way it was set up.
     The show included several very large speakers other than the Adam Tensor. We have already mentioned the two KEF Reference speakers, both of which delighted us. The Gershman Black Swan was there too, though it was in a room much too small for its more than generous proportions, and as a result its thunder(!) was stolen by Gershman's new economy Sonogram speaker next door (a number of visitors mentioned it to us).
     Among the truly jumbo speakers was the Herald, from China, shown at right. At one time its curved, aerodynamic surfaces would have made it seem outlandish, but of course B&W long ago popularized the more fluid shapes like those of the Herald. (By the way, the company motto, "Lord of Tone," sounds as though it was translated by Google.) We weren't sure what to make of it. On a technical level it seemed encouragingly competent. However it was used with a panoply of gear, some of it tube equipment not known to us, and we would like to hear it in a different system. The truly startling aspect is the price. We might have guessed it would sell for well into five digits, but the introductory price is just US$5550. We hope to get another listen, perhaps under better conditions.
     Pierre Gabriel had its largest speaker at the show, and fortunately it was in a room large enough to handle it. It was of course operating with Jadis tube gear. This was one of the better big rooms, and but for one period when the level was cranked up way too much, it sounded gratifyingly musical.
     Another huge speaker was the Verity Audio Lohengrin II, which was driven by Artemis Labs tube monoblocks (unknown to us), and one of the sources was a Nagra portable recorder, running copies of master tapes. Was it the fault of the amplifiers? Some musical passages were impressive for the reproduction of brass instruments in all their roundness, but transients were disturbingly pushy. We liked much more Verity's smaller Rienzi (at left...someone at Verity clearly likes Wagner operas) in a smaller room. These are not mini speakers by any means, but they seemed at ease in this more human room.
     They were, to be sure, backed by an entire rack of Ayre equipment, which you can see at right. The result was that this was one of the more restful rooms, and we mean that in the very best sense.
     Ayre's new little MX-R monoblocks were playing in another room. We had of course seen them at CES, and mentioned them in our Vegas report in UHF No. 79. They are rather small for their power (200 watts each!), and some visitors in Vegas assumed they must be class T switching amplifiers. They're not. Several visitors to the Festival mentioned the Ayres as a high spot. No surprise.
     There was a room with a set of Atoll products: electronics and CD player. It sounded quite good, feeding loudspeakers that are new to us, tall, slim speakers from Highland. They left us with mixed feelings: a slight honkiness, but a very good image and a more than satisfactory tonal range. It may be worth looking at some other models.
     And before we leave the topic of large speakers, we should mention the Sonus Faber Elipsa (at left). Sonus Faber loudspeakers are always noted for their high style (they are, of course, Italian, but that's not always a guarantee of anything). They are also noted for their sound, which is not "high tech," but is gently musical, veering toward emotional. The Elipsa is a somewhat smaller version of the Stradivarius, the flagship of the marque, with the same smooth, attractive, non-threatening sound. Several people mentioned it to us in favorable terms, and we can understand why.
     As the show ended we concentrated on getting our hands on products we had scheduled for review in our next issue. The ModWright 9.0SE is one such product. It's not an expensive preamplifier, but people have been telling us all about it for some time. We also got its matching phono stage (a last-moment addition). Interestingly enough, it is heavier and more expensive than the main preamplifier itself, but that makes more sense than you might think.
     We also prepared to make room for much of the contents of the Linn room: the Artikulat 350A speakers, the Klimax Control preamplifier, the Linto phono stage, and the new LP12 turntable with the Keel subchassis. The part we didn't take was the Linn Unidisk player...and that's because we already own one.
     In all there were six of us touring around to hear the various rooms. One unanimous finding: there were some truly superb rooms, but the bad ones were downright evil. Were they worse than in previous years, or are we just getting less tolerant of ignorance, ineptitude, and indifference ranging on downright malevolance?
     Here's something else we heard from several people: an opinion that it would be terrific if the next show could return to the Delta hotel, where it was for the greater part of two decades. The rooms were larger and less rectangular, and the walls were stiffer, because the hotel was originally designed to be a condo tower. Of course there's a big down side, which is why the show moved: the Delta is short on big rooms to accommodate deep-pocketed exhibitors. And its elevators are so poor some exhibitors preferred to take the stairs, even when they were carrying large amplifiers.
     One person told us there should be a course one could take on how to set up a hi-fi room and run it through a weekend. Not a bad idea, but wait a minute... Did he mean us?

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