What were the best and worst rooms at RMAF 2009?

Last year, Guido and I watched Sumiko and Soundings try to set up their De Muzik Vienna Acoustic speakers in a small room. It was painstaking, backbreaking work, in the end dealing with fractions of inches. After all this work, tweaking continued into the night and into the next morning. The speakers were impressive, but they really didn't show their true potential at the 2008 show.

This year Soundings elected to have a table at RMAF and steer interested parties over to their shop just two-blocks away. The De Muzik's had been tweaked for over a year. Despite this, Guido and I heard some sloppyness in the upper bass, particularly when driven with the massive Boulder 2060. The owner of Soundings and the Sony speaker designer worked further on placement and fixed the issue and greatly improved the top to bottom smoothness and integration before guests started showing up in volume on Friday.

That just shows you how tough the issue is, even in your home. Mike Lavigne even talked about how he's refining his bass absorbtion in his dedicated room that he's been in for years and seems overdamped. One last comment, Lars, the GamuT designer told us after we complained that he knew how to fix our complaint and asked us to come back in a little bit on Sunday. When we came back, the bloom in the bass was replaced by bottom to top coherancy and great inner detail, in that HUGE room. Lars said that he moved each speaker about 2-inches!!!

It's really tough for the exhibitors. At one show, I think it was CES in early 2008, Jeff Rowland struggled with his room for hours and finally elected to do a static display. Maybe more people should do that, but it's easy to understand their reluctance at such an event.

Dave

Vintage Sansui sp-5500 (made in Japan) "Some say speakers made in the late 60's to mid 70's were the best sounding speakers ever made... period!"..... "Speakers made (TODAY) are made mostly for Home Theater".......

Maybe we haven't come too far in speakers since the '70s, but such older speakers are not to be revered, except for Quad 57s.

The main difference between speakers back then and now is that well built speakers that are large and solid enough to deliver full or near full range sound clearly with muscle behind it in larger rooms in particular will cost a lot more new these days in general.

hifi, tbg and mapman, maybe there have not been a lot of changes to improve certain quantitative aspects of sound reproduction but there are many that have improved the qualitative aspects. to mention a few, internal wire technology, capacitors types, resistor types, solders, inductor and driver technology. so although the last few posts have a degree of merit, imho i cannot totally agree.

best, bobby at merlin