Capital Audiofest Coming Up!

Almost forgot — best “low-cost” sound for me was the local pairing of Eastern Bay Speakers with LTA electronics (644).  LTA was featured in several rooms.  The newish LTA DAC and other gear sounded great in each of the different systems I heard. 
 

Also, this seems the be the year of sound effects, eg, lots of rooms playing percussion or vocal oddities to show off PRAT.  At one point, we skipped several rooms with systems I would have liked to have heard had they been playing music, just to avoid being annoyed.  Did anyone else notice this?  Or maybe I’m just easily annoyed this weekend — I mean, more so than usual. 

@disc  what system was being used by Burmester?

anyone else see/hear anything from Burmester or accuphase?

Standouts a CAF:

Odyssey Audio top of the line floor standers driven by Stratos mono blocks

MBL room

Focal Grand Utopia Evo

9 ft tall Soundlabs driven by LTA amps

@ckr1969 Burmester 232 Integrated Amp.  It sounded great.  Reminded me of my Boulder 866 — very clean and engaging, great soundstage and accurately conveyed instrumental and vocal timbres.  

I also heard the Accuphase E-800 and E-5000 integrated amps.  Also impressive.  
 

Another standout for me was Songer Audio. In addition to one of my favorite sounds I heard, they did it with a beefy yet supposed 4 watt SET amp driving their modest-in-size custom full range field coil driver in a somewhat pricey yet performant design. Hats off! How did he do that?