Sealed
02-22-2004, 08:37 AM
Disappointments:
I will cut to the chase: Wilson-Benesch had a wide-open setup in a huge Mariott lobby area. They were playing a Led zeppelin LP. The sound was unspeakably flabby, boomy, zingy. In short, totally horrible. Other music sounded the same way. B&W had some kind of drug-induced display concept going in the VIP lounge. They had ten randomly placed nautilus 805 bookshelves. They were simply making atmospheric sounds. This was a dumb display.
Meridian, had a ₤100,000+ sound system set up consisting of three ₤26,000 dsp8000 speakers, with four dsp-5000 speakers and a stack of processors, transports etc. You’d expect to be at least amazed. But the bass far overwhelmed the room. The bass sounded boomy, flabby, slow, disjointed and the whole setup sucked. The Meridian was easily the most elaborate and expensive setup. This was an unforgivably inept demonstration of what should be an ultimate high-end experience. I thought the Naim speakers as well as kef, Mordaunt short, and most if the HT setups sounded like boom and sizzle. I was not sure Naim could make decent speakers. Now I am convinced they cannot.
I wanted to like seventh veil, but alas, on a lot of material there was a strident bite to the upper midrange. Otherwise, they did a lot of things right. Eclipse wasn’t too big of a thrill for me, they sounded “incomplete.” There were a few flat, designer speakers that failed to impress. The new JM labs diva sounded pretty good, except I could hear a definite “pipe organ” effect around 40hz. It was no doubt that front port coloring the low bass. The diva did not impress me for a speaker costing the better part of $7k. That bass colouration ruined it for me. I detected a bit of it from the Alto utopia also. My philosophy on ports is summed up by PMC. PMC points out that vented designs have very poor bass control below the tuned resonance of the port. In this case, many ports are tuned to 30 or 40hz. Give me sealed, passive radiator or TL designs over ports any day.
The ribbons on display (some from Australia) had a bit of an upper mid suck out where they cross over to the ribbons. They were lossy in the xover region, but did well otherwise. The Totem rainmaker display was kind of blah. But vendors seem to be playing too much crappy hip-hop, pop and other lousy recordings because they are popular. Once again, B&W showed to me that the 700 series is dreck. That tweeter was hopelessly bad sounding. It was obvious the N805 were in a different league than the 700 series.
The best sound of show? No one system sounded the best. But those that had killer sound include:
PMC- the GB-1’s knocked my socks off. They had snappy dynamics, excellent detail, bone-crunching low bass. The snap of a standing bass was awesome. These speakers do it all. They were mated to the Bryston B-60 integrated. All this from 60 watts! Bryston gear does sound great, especially the new SST series amps. The bigger PMC OB1 are a force to be reckoned with and a good contender for ATC scm-35’s. I think among new Brit speakers, PMC and ATC are my favorite. Kudos also go to EPOS, living voice and ProAc.
Exposure: Understated company with Vandersteen 2Ce signatures made incredibly good music! When I convinced them to quit playing that pop rubbish and put on some acoustic jazz… everyone simply shut up and listened! It was great!
EPOS: the ultimate giant killers! The flagship EPOS tower goes for $1500. The little ES 12’s sell for under $1000. Yet they equaled or bettered much more expensive speakers. The floor standers for $1500 blew the Monitor Audio GR60’s away for over $1000 less. These are the best inexpensive speakers I have ever listened to. Acoustic energy has nothing on EPOS.
Living Voice: MTM floor standers were superb! These speakers were smooth, musical, dynamic and very transparent. Nice decay.
WA audio: these guys painstakingly carve out blocks of limestone to make incredibly heavy and inert speakers. They use top-quality parts like seas millennia, Scan speak revelator and ATC mid domes. They sound fantastic! Alas, they are painfully expensive. The small models go for ₤4000+
Jm labs: the Alto Utopia were quite nice, but insanely expensive. Something almost affordable: the micro utopia BE demonstrated that the new beryllium tweeter outclasses the focal tioxid predecessor in every way. There are killer bookshelf speakers. Very smooth and musical.
Km acoustics KMS190/290 were quite good. The surprising thing is that they use metal cone woofers and focal tioxid tweeters. This red flags “warning…brightness ahead” not so! These were punchy, detailed, airy, low coloration and not overly bright at all.
Dynaudio: the small Dynaudio contour and confidence were great little speakers. I like dynaudio’s 2 way speakers, but am not a fan of the multi way speakers they make. They had a nice sounding set up.
Proac: the new d38 are drop-dead gorgeous and sound excellent. Alas, they are very close to $10k. Proac makes music with an ever-so-gentle mid.
The Nordost/Audiopax room was very nice also.
That’s pretty much it for the outstanding rooms. The other rooms were good, fair, and poor. Most of the HT rooms were crappy for music.
I passed up what could have been a killer deal. Rega Planar 25 with RB 300 arm and cart was on sale for about $950 USD, or just under ½ price.
Dali had the most beautiful looking speakers of the show! Knock out gorgeous! I had very limited listening time with them due to the crowds.
Arcam had the best looking marketing rep…what a beauty!
Vibe had a dual 15” subwoofer. That thing is HHHHUUUUUGE! Probably the biggest sub made in the UK…ever. It has 8 4” ports that are actually quasi-TL labyrinth. Made the biggest REL sub look portable.
I won a set of Ecosse Ic’s. The guys in one of the demo rooms was playing some female vocals. They asked what language was being sung. I just said “NORSK!!!” and they said ! “Norwegian! He’s right!...give him the wires!”
I will cut to the chase: Wilson-Benesch had a wide-open setup in a huge Mariott lobby area. They were playing a Led zeppelin LP. The sound was unspeakably flabby, boomy, zingy. In short, totally horrible. Other music sounded the same way. B&W had some kind of drug-induced display concept going in the VIP lounge. They had ten randomly placed nautilus 805 bookshelves. They were simply making atmospheric sounds. This was a dumb display.
Meridian, had a ₤100,000+ sound system set up consisting of three ₤26,000 dsp8000 speakers, with four dsp-5000 speakers and a stack of processors, transports etc. You’d expect to be at least amazed. But the bass far overwhelmed the room. The bass sounded boomy, flabby, slow, disjointed and the whole setup sucked. The Meridian was easily the most elaborate and expensive setup. This was an unforgivably inept demonstration of what should be an ultimate high-end experience. I thought the Naim speakers as well as kef, Mordaunt short, and most if the HT setups sounded like boom and sizzle. I was not sure Naim could make decent speakers. Now I am convinced they cannot.
I wanted to like seventh veil, but alas, on a lot of material there was a strident bite to the upper midrange. Otherwise, they did a lot of things right. Eclipse wasn’t too big of a thrill for me, they sounded “incomplete.” There were a few flat, designer speakers that failed to impress. The new JM labs diva sounded pretty good, except I could hear a definite “pipe organ” effect around 40hz. It was no doubt that front port coloring the low bass. The diva did not impress me for a speaker costing the better part of $7k. That bass colouration ruined it for me. I detected a bit of it from the Alto utopia also. My philosophy on ports is summed up by PMC. PMC points out that vented designs have very poor bass control below the tuned resonance of the port. In this case, many ports are tuned to 30 or 40hz. Give me sealed, passive radiator or TL designs over ports any day.
The ribbons on display (some from Australia) had a bit of an upper mid suck out where they cross over to the ribbons. They were lossy in the xover region, but did well otherwise. The Totem rainmaker display was kind of blah. But vendors seem to be playing too much crappy hip-hop, pop and other lousy recordings because they are popular. Once again, B&W showed to me that the 700 series is dreck. That tweeter was hopelessly bad sounding. It was obvious the N805 were in a different league than the 700 series.
The best sound of show? No one system sounded the best. But those that had killer sound include:
PMC- the GB-1’s knocked my socks off. They had snappy dynamics, excellent detail, bone-crunching low bass. The snap of a standing bass was awesome. These speakers do it all. They were mated to the Bryston B-60 integrated. All this from 60 watts! Bryston gear does sound great, especially the new SST series amps. The bigger PMC OB1 are a force to be reckoned with and a good contender for ATC scm-35’s. I think among new Brit speakers, PMC and ATC are my favorite. Kudos also go to EPOS, living voice and ProAc.
Exposure: Understated company with Vandersteen 2Ce signatures made incredibly good music! When I convinced them to quit playing that pop rubbish and put on some acoustic jazz… everyone simply shut up and listened! It was great!
EPOS: the ultimate giant killers! The flagship EPOS tower goes for $1500. The little ES 12’s sell for under $1000. Yet they equaled or bettered much more expensive speakers. The floor standers for $1500 blew the Monitor Audio GR60’s away for over $1000 less. These are the best inexpensive speakers I have ever listened to. Acoustic energy has nothing on EPOS.
Living Voice: MTM floor standers were superb! These speakers were smooth, musical, dynamic and very transparent. Nice decay.
WA audio: these guys painstakingly carve out blocks of limestone to make incredibly heavy and inert speakers. They use top-quality parts like seas millennia, Scan speak revelator and ATC mid domes. They sound fantastic! Alas, they are painfully expensive. The small models go for ₤4000+
Jm labs: the Alto Utopia were quite nice, but insanely expensive. Something almost affordable: the micro utopia BE demonstrated that the new beryllium tweeter outclasses the focal tioxid predecessor in every way. There are killer bookshelf speakers. Very smooth and musical.
Km acoustics KMS190/290 were quite good. The surprising thing is that they use metal cone woofers and focal tioxid tweeters. This red flags “warning…brightness ahead” not so! These were punchy, detailed, airy, low coloration and not overly bright at all.
Dynaudio: the small Dynaudio contour and confidence were great little speakers. I like dynaudio’s 2 way speakers, but am not a fan of the multi way speakers they make. They had a nice sounding set up.
Proac: the new d38 are drop-dead gorgeous and sound excellent. Alas, they are very close to $10k. Proac makes music with an ever-so-gentle mid.
The Nordost/Audiopax room was very nice also.
That’s pretty much it for the outstanding rooms. The other rooms were good, fair, and poor. Most of the HT rooms were crappy for music.
I passed up what could have been a killer deal. Rega Planar 25 with RB 300 arm and cart was on sale for about $950 USD, or just under ½ price.
Dali had the most beautiful looking speakers of the show! Knock out gorgeous! I had very limited listening time with them due to the crowds.
Arcam had the best looking marketing rep…what a beauty!
Vibe had a dual 15” subwoofer. That thing is HHHHUUUUUGE! Probably the biggest sub made in the UK…ever. It has 8 4” ports that are actually quasi-TL labyrinth. Made the biggest REL sub look portable.
I won a set of Ecosse Ic’s. The guys in one of the demo rooms was playing some female vocals. They asked what language was being sung. I just said “NORSK!!!” and they said ! “Norwegian! He’s right!...give him the wires!”