Quote Originally Posted by RGA
The problem with all shows is that at any given point the sound may not be as good as it could be so sometimes it's not completely fair to judge. I auditioned a lot of rooms (in retrospect I covered too many). Still at some point money has to factor in. The Magico Technical Brain sounded good on Cello when I went in but here's the thing - it sounded no better than Audio Note's cheap room which still wasn't cheap but it comprised of Art Dudley's AN E/SPE HE speakers ($7600), the Jinro which Art Dudley just reviewed ($20,000+) integrated amp and a one box CD player 3.1 or 4.1 can't remember). So maybe ~$30k room. The Magico speakers were something like $60,000 and the TB gear over $70,000 and the source was a computer high digitial bit rate (top bit rate available if memory serves).

So many things are going on here - can you pare one room down and still retain most of the quality in sound. The Magico room didn't allow me to play my music. So was it playing only to its strengths. Lots of systems can be made to do "some" thing very well. Terry at Soundhounds says it all the time - this one is good for this music so they play a set of music on it and rotate but throw on something else and it sounds rather dreadful.

Some of the expensive SS amps make little sense to me - they still come across as brute force sound and not very subtle (the audiofederation did an interesting series comparing most of the top high power amplifiers). Oddly relatively low powered inexpensive ones seem to get the subtlety better - the Sugden A21a and even the Creek Audio integrateds and Heed amps all under $3,000 do some things better than big powerful and expensive amps. Less feedback maybe.
One of the salesmen in the Audio Note room claimed that the J would have sounded better in that small (under 300 square feet?) room than the E. My office is small at under 150 square feet, and the J looks promising.