What were the best and worst rooms at RMAF 2009?

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

I'm with 76doublebass. The best room I heard - and by a stunningly wide margin - was the Win Analog room. Not sure if it's coincidence or not, but it was also the only room I entered with the speakers more than a quarter of the way in to the room.

I was pleasantly surprised by the small Esoteric room, which also featured the Esoteric speakers. I did not hear any leanness in that room, and it actually led me to more strongly consider an Esoteric CD player as a SS alternative to the Ayon CD-2 I enjoy so much.

I thought that as usual, most of the cost no object rooms with full range speakers, YG acoustics, Focal, were as usual, stymied by room problems, as others have described. The only exception was the Gamut room, which I liked a lot.
I agree with many remarks about other rooms:

TW Accustic Tron was excellent
Daedalus Da-Rama/Modwright were very nice
LSA, which nowone has mentioned, was very good for a low cost set up
The contrast with the Wilson Sassha'a and Duette was interesting. I did'nt like the former at all, they seemed to have a hard edge to them, but the smaller speakers were one of the nicest set ups I heard.
Moscode Von Scheikert were very good indeed. I understand there mmay be a synergy between them.

I second (or third) the Esoteric room. . . I was particularly taken by comparing on X-01 D2 playback of redbook tracks as PCM, and then repeating listening with conversion to DSD. . . very convincing to my ears and my musical prefs. G.