A Capital Audiofest 2012 thread

Planning to head down tomorrow morn.

Any impressions from attendees so far?

I was there yesterday, and found it most disappointing on a variety of fronts. Few rooms, poor attendance, and the sound in most rooms was below par.

Hopefully, the show attendance will be better when you make it today. When you return, let's compare notes regarding the individual exhibitors.

Just got back. Spent 4 hours or so there earlier today.

My skinny, FWIW, in that I have never attended any other show to compare other than the initial CAF two years ago, is it was worthwhile and I would like to have had more time to soak it all in. Overall, the sound quality of the rigs on display in the various rooms was more consistent than two years ago. Probably due to more typical hotel venue rather than a 19th century mansion.

I heard a lot of good sound that I could possibly live with but not enough time to assess each well. Overall, most of the vendors did a good job tuning their systems into the rooms, most of which were not particularly large, so I found that to be a good thing.

I'm not quite sure I heard anything revolutionary or that stuck way out in the crowd, but lots of very solid finds nonetheless that would warrant further investigation.

So I heard some new good stuff that sounded like it had potential.

Attendance today did not seem large. There were people there but few crowds snd fairly low key overall. Not a bad thing for one trying to fit a lot of listening into a few hours.

More details soon when I have a chance.

I heard a few things on my to-hear list for the first time:

Daedelus: i was impressed and these lived up to my expectations in a
short limited audition with nice acoustic jazz recording.

Classic Audio Reproductions (with the field coil drivers + Atmasphere
amps: i was expecting benchmark level sound and tnis setup did not
disappoint. Would have liked to hear some good rock recordings but
acoustic jazz ruled here also as it seemed to in general at the show. The
sound was spot on and darn near perfect.

Zu - Missed the boat somewhat. Flea power amps used were nice but
seemingly could not get these hopping for more demanding rock cuts.

GT Audio Works - now here was a new discovery of note with meat on the
bones that sounded great and offered great value at 3k a pair including 2
subs. "There Will Be Changes Made" by Atkins+ Knopfler
packed the room and got my feet a tapping. Modest Bryston digital
source and amp showed they belonged in a high end audio show as well.

DIY Room: A pair of 10" full range drivers mounted in a large square open
back baffle sitting at floor level slightly angled up about 2/3 into a hotel
room run off a diy class a amp of low wattage was the shocker of the day.
How did what looked like a bean bag toss arcade game sound so full and
lifelike for $800 diy? Kinda made me feel sorry for all the megabuck
systems there competing. And they did everything extremely well from
Green Day to classical. Eye opener of the day!

Tidal: Both larger and smaller rigs sounded very good but size did matter
and did not come cheap. The DCS Dac in the one rig certainly helped
make that one shine as the DCS gear always seems to do. The smaller
Tidals sounded good but dynamics with those small drivers was noticably
compressed.

Legacy Whispers in a larger salon room showed some chops but I need to
hear more.

As an infrequent visitor to high end audio events, other than this site, these are may main takeaway observations from Capital Audiofest.

- events like this are perhaps not big enough in scale for the hardcore audiophile audience and much but not all that was there was out of reach financially for many so where does that leave an event like this? Hopefully in a good enough position to have at least a fourth annual event next year I would hope.

- the DIY guys in many ways made a statement about what it REALLY takes to make good sound, and stole the show for me in that regard.

- most of the setups sounded very good to quite excellent to the extent that the venue and rooms allowed. There was not a lot of room for products to differentiate themselves. The sound of most rooms was still very good though. Does it really make any sense to demonstrate megagear like gigantic horns in that kind of environment? Cool looking, yes, but in this case the performance was laughable for the scale of the sound solution attempted.

- Its not so hard to find good sounding gear these days. Its a lot harder to get it to sound good at home.

- Digital fared very well at this show. There was both very good digital and vinyl and very mediocre digital and vinyl demos. This might be the first event I could say that the good sounding digital was more apparent than the good sounding vinyl.

- these shows are worth it just to go shooping for cheap vinyl and reasonable priced CDs. There were a lot of good software values even if the hardware values were harder to come by.

- Nothing says "high end audio" like a SOTA ultrasonic record cleaner for sale in the lobby for the special show price of still over $3000. YEs, people, cleaning all that cheap vinyl ain't cheap. And lets not forget about the audiophile Hifi Tuning fuses. FOr those wondering, no there were no fancy fuse demos at least when I was there.

- the guys there seemed to enjoy it and looked interested. The wives, girlfriends, daughters and others they dragged along with them mostly had that bored soap opera look in their eyes.