Random thoughts from an audio show.

[jaxwired]

Hi everyone. A good sized high end audio show is being held in my city this weekend and I've just returned from the day 1. Thought I'd share some of my impressions. Sorry, I forgot to bring my camera. This was an American show, so most of the products are American, but many are available in the UK, and some have UK or European origins. I spent about 5 hours there and easily heard 20 systems. Many very expensive systems. Lots of tube equipment. Some of the brands names off the top of my head were: Krell, YG Acoustics, Legacy, Creek, Epos, Roksan, Davone, Peachtree, Thiel, Rega, Wadia, dozens more.

1. I was blown away by a 4 speaker audio demonstration of blue ray audio playing. This was recorded at twice the sample rate of redbook CDs. It was amazing. They used 4 Theil CS3.7s and a wolf projector to show the video of the artists playing. Wow! Talked with the company rep and I think I'm going to buy an oppo universal player and explore this hi def music. Really the only thing at the entire show that just blew me away. I've never heard anything so lifelike and clean. I was truly hypnotized by it.

2. But regarding all these other high end 2 channel systems, I was happy to find out that these 50k and 100k systems just didn't sound much better than my system. In fact, quite a few of them I found irritatingly bright or even shrill. And apparently most people listen much louder than I do. WAY too loud in my opinion. I was truly not impressed. Of all the super high dollar systems only the Krell/YG acoustics combo was superb. As for the rest of them, I kid you not, I wouldn't trade my kit for any of them. And most of them were very big and ugly.

3. There's definately no "best" or "perfect" system. The one thing that amazed me was how different all these high dollar systems sounded. It's not like as you go up in price it just keeps getting better. Nope it just get's different, not better.

4. The Epos/Creek system was terrific. I've never heard Epos before and I really enjoyed the sound. I would not call it neutral though. It was very detailed and forward sounding which might be tiring long term, but for my demo I found them to be excellent and musical (Epos M22i).

5. To be honest, I really enjoyed the lower end systems (like the creek/epos) more than the expensive systems.

6. This show really deflated any desire I would ever have to get nuts and spend crazy money on this stuff. I just didn't see the value in these super high end systems. I'm not talking about a 10k system, I'm talking about 40k or 80k systems.

7. By far, my favorite room at the show was a company called madisound out of madison wisconson. They sell speaker kits. They had a speaker kit for $600 a pair which includes everything including cabinets, crossovers, drivers, post plate, damping material, wire, etc. If you had told me these speaker cost $3000 I would not have blinked. They call them the "Loki". And they use a seas coincident driver with the tweeter mounted in the middle of the woofer like a KEF speaker. These sounded good, I mean really really good. And once I heard the price I was drooling. The speaker cabinet is a real wood veneer too.

 

[Messiah]

When I went to the Bristol Show for the first time I had a similar experience with some of the more expensive systems. I also did not feel they offered enough increase in performance at all to justify the extra expense.

The good point though is that it has saved me a lot of many as I can see that future upgrades are not going to bring many benefits.

But saying that, if I could afford some Meridian DSP 8000s, hmmm.........

 

[Frank Harvey]

No wonder the sales of 2 channel is declining in the US.....

 

[jaxwired]

Something else this show highlighted for me. I listen to real music. I buy lots of music and I buy current artists. For a lot of people that get obsessed with the audiophile hobby, they either forget about the music they love or they let the hobby change their tastes. Instead of buying great music, they start buying music that makes their HiFi sound great. These are not the same thing at all. I can't tell you how many of these 50k and 100k systems that used freakish music to demo their gear. I mean really bizarre stuff. Sure it had amazing dynamic range and the recoding was spectacular, but it wasn't good music, it was generally awful music. I made a compilation CD of CD quality tracks that I took with me and most rooms at the show were willing to play it. This allowed me to assess each system with the same few tracks. One guy told me how surprised he was that more people don't do this. I guess people are afraid to ask.

 

[Clare Newsome]

At the very first hi-fi show I went to - before I worked on WHF - I got fed up of hearing 'demo' tracks and asked to hear a system 'with some more mainstream music'. You'd have thought i'd asked if I could murder their children....

This is why on WHF we always buy a range of new, real-world CDs every month - all sorts of genres, all sorts of recording quality - and use them (along with a range of our favourite music) to test kit.

 

[jaxwired]

Clare Newsome:

At the very first hi-fi show I went to - before I worked on WHF - I got fed up of hearing 'demo' tracks and asked to hear a system 'with some more mainstream music'. You'd have thought i'd asked if I could murder their children....

This is why on WHF we always buy a range of new, real-world CDs every month - all sorts of genres, all sorts of recording quality - and use them (along with a range of our favourite music) to test kit.

Right on. I realy like that about WHF. Your reviews reference current music and how it sounds. Sometimes I even get a music tip out of it.

When I made the CD for the show, I did try and select tracks that are clean and dynamic, but I used regular main stream music. That's what I listen to. I mean, the noise a whiperwill makes when mating in a petrified tree stump is cool, but I tend not to have much of that in my collection.