Bristol S&V - My Views.....

[Alec]

Vimeous: I was impressed by Dali giving the Lektor 1 and 2 their own room.
In fact I am now seriously questioning if my future speaker config as those tiny boxes give a very special performance for the price.
If that were the case then my B&W's would be ousted

Said it before, but have to agree about those Dalis. Would probably go for the bigger ones, but they were both great.

 

[Anonymous]

I made it to my very 1st Bristol Show!!

First up, the journey from London in the old Saab got interesting after the car started to develop some loud noise (well, louder than usual). I stopped roadside and REALLY feared about not making it at all. In the end got there about 1h30 later than planned.

The venue was easy enough to find and "adequate" I thought. Thank god for being a weekday it wasn't too crowded overall. Although some demo rooms were a bit cramped/stuffy/hot at times.

First good impression was the The Chord Company stand with some bargains to be had (on all sorts of cables from HDMI to B-grade interconnects) where I managed to grab a pair of 2m runs of Odissey 4 + 3m HDMI + XLR for £100 all in. I didn't expect the credit card to be in action so quickly but it was a bargain I thought.

From there I went upstairs to listen to the demo of some Chord speaker cables and the new £1K interconnects (Indigo Plus?). Some of the more expensive cables didn't sound "that" expensive to my ears, although the Signature sounded nice and rounded as expected.

Checked out lots of other rooms from Arcam, Cyrus, Naim, Dynaudio. One system that stood out for me was the Plinius amp+CD connected to a pair of Excite X32. WOW! THAT was nice!!!

Moved on to Tannoy/Carat, Marantz, Dali, Spendor and PMC later on, before going to the WHF S&V demo with the loud Meridian sound system.

Overall I really really enjoyed myself. I wish I could have stayed for 2 days or that the show would have run later than 5pm.

Also I found that sometimes it was hard to get anything out of the reps there in terms of interesting/useful information. All I got were lots of systems played really really loud all day long. (and a lot of "The Dark Knight" to watch... Favourite BD movie of the year with the industry no doubt

)

Will definitely be back on Friday next year! (with a bigger wallet maybe)

and

to the people involved in running this event.

 

[VoodooDoctor]

Did any one see the Monitor Audio stand? Did they have the Platinum subwoofer?

 

[Anonymous]

VoodooDoctor:Did any one see the Monitor Audio stand? Did they have the Platinum subwoofer?

Monitor Audio had 2 rooms on the 2nd floor, one with a Radius home cinema system, the other with stereo setups with the PL100 and PL300 on show/play (and possibly that sub too).

Very impressed by the PL300, but then I should be at £5,000 a pair...

 

[Messiah]

The Sub was there. It is quite a size!

However, given the music that was playing there was not much chance to hear it's impact. I went in again whilst some Pink Floyd (I think) was playing and it sounded quite bad but I think that was down to a poorly mastered album. (At least I hope so!)

So, unfortunately I can give you no assesment of the sub. The whole setup in the room was impressive though!

 

[VoodooDoctor]

Hmmm, the pictures on the MA website are quite deceptive when it comes to size. The large centre speaker is truly enormous when seen in the flesh. The sub also doesn't look that big. Guess I'll be waiting until we move house before I go for the full setup. Was hoping to gradually get the full 5.1 setup but I think room constraints are going to stop me. Doh!

 

[Messiah]

It's hard to give actual sizes now as I did not look at the sub for too long but I would say it was no smaller than a 12" driver but probably more like 15". The cabinet was maybe about 2-2.5ft cubed?? (This sizes are really rough). Certainly bigger than the RSW12.

 

[Anonymous]

Here is my view from my visit to the show yesterday.

My disapointments.
The Denon demo was very good, although wanted to see/hear the HD transport in action, got the next Gen kit instead. I was disapointed with Pioneer as nothing was going on there regarding Demo's, I wanted to experience how good my receiver could be and was interested in the lx71 BD player. I was hopeing to listen to the Tannoy revolution signiture speakers, no joy.

My highlights were.
I did enjoy PMC/Bryston, Dali, The waterfall speakers were nice, the Adam Audio Tensors put a smile on my face.
But for me the Sim2 demo was my highlight of the day, also got to the Denon Transport demo I wanted.
The WHF Demo was good also.
I also got a bargain as well, 15m of QED HDMI-P for half price, I tested it last night and as far as the debate goes I now know the answer.

 

[Anonymous]

I must say, the thing I missed the most at the show was last year I heard this system in a room; no-one else was in there. I've no idea what manafacturer it was, maybe you can help. The speakers were triangle shaped at the top (or sloped in anyway) and were quite big, wide floorstanders. The amps driving them were big floorstanding, but very narrow valve amps and you could see the valves inside. The sound was the best sound I have ever heard and I desperatly want to hear it again. It was beautiful.

 

[Anonymous]

I went on the Saturday afternoon not realising that it closed at 5:00 pm, so didn't have that much time to peruse the Show. I was very impressed by the WHFSV AV demo (I would say that, wouldn't I!) and also the KEF demo where the room actually shook under me, mmm... I talked for a while with a rep on the Meridian stand about the 'soolloos' product - he was very helpful and knowledgeable. In contrast I have to say that in a number of quiet rooms (there were quite a few of those) reps didn't seem very quick in pouncing on would-be punters/buyers - have they ever had any sales training by any chance? So, I simply wandered out. So, the net damage to my pocket was £40+ (entry ticket and 3 NAIM discs), that was it.