Other rooms I thought were great:
- The big Von Schweikert room was awesome just like last year.
- Legacy Room.
- Harbeth 40.2 speakers.
- I totally agree with the statement about Aerial 7t but I was probably more impressed with the 5t’s in the same room. Very full, natural and spacious sound from a small speaker. Those might be my next speakers.
- Martin Logan Impressions with Benchmark electronics in a relatively small room were holographic. OK maybe those are my next speakers.
- Dynaudio Special 40s with Octave tube integrated were surprising with the bass response from such a small speaker. In fact, I’m really surprised with the overall sound quality and bass response from small speakers in general. (BTW thanks to the Octave rep for playing my requests.)
- Raidho monitors were fantastic. But boy the price.
- The Neat speakers were, well, neat. Tiny little things making really good bass but I wanted to play with placement. I felt like they were too close to the wall.
- I too liked the ELAC Adantes, maybe just a tad too sharp sounding but for 2500 bucks I thought these had great promise.
- Primaluna room was big and vivid with the Golden Ear Triton References. I’ve heard the Golden Ears at my local dealer and there I wasn’t impressed at all. But at the show with Primaluna they were great. Go figure.
- Jeff Joseph room with the reel to reel had a presence to the sound that was unmatched.
- Plus a bunch of others that I just don’t remember.
In my opinion, musical bliss is not reliant on price. There was a lot of great stuff that was relatively affordable and there was some mega expensive stuff that just didn’t do much for me. My one criticism would be the music being played in many of the rooms but this isn’t new. A little too polite mellow jazzy kind of stuff. Don’t get me wrong I like that too but I would prefer to hear more of a range. But again it was great fun, plus getting to talk to all kinds of folks about this stuff. Hope to do it again next year.