What were the best and worst rooms at RMAF 2009?

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.

Having been there in the 1970's, let me tell you there were a lot more poor sounding speakers then than now.
Some of todays cheaper speakers are much better than those from "good old days"
Hey, the Japanese were buying and listening to 1960 Altecs and not buying Japanese 1970's speakers.

The last thing I would ever contemplate is that good old 70's sound.
Now what coast did you prefer, East or West?

The speakers were so coloured that East coast were for light jazz, folk, classical(AR,)and the West coast rocked hard to JBL.

I think we have come a long ways .

What amps were driving the Ref 3A Grand Veena?

Worst sound was Tocaro speakers driven by EMM electronics. The speaker is a full range, single driver design from Germany priced at about $8,000. The sound was dreadful, tinny, and annoying.

The Ref 3A Grand Vs were driven by 30 wpc Belles amps and sounded very nice.

an interesting aside the all the equipment opinions (which is to be expected) is 'the biggest change of allin sound'...the demographic of the consumer..way older ears ,perhaps more affluent, predominately male, lots of free time....honestly, a completely different 'target' audience than 2 channel stereo was trying to attract 20 years ago or 30 years ago. The hi end portion of CES is looking like 'gods waiting room'....yes I'm an older fart too.