Pwinson, we couldn’t agree with you more, very astute commentary!
One common issue was rooms with gigantic speakers that were too small and gigantic rooms with speakers that are too small!
In a few rooms that were a bit small there was still good sound. These tended to be speakers with good low frequency response but not crazy deep bass response.
Rooms that sounded really good which matched speaker output to room size:
1: Paradigm Person 3F sounded fantastic and was a compelling demonstration of the power of room correction. The bass was tight and powerful and worked well in the room.
2: Muriaudio, the panels are fantastic and they produced enough bass to work in the room and program material and not too much to overload the room.
3: T+A Compact Metal speakers bass was impressive for the room size and they sounded very good, T+A electronics are amazing.
There were tons of other rooms these were a few of the standouts
4: Vimberg great sound and even though the room was a bit big the speakers sounded fantastic.
Rooms which didn’t work:
1: All Von Schweikert demos, rooms were way too big no room lock.
When you get deep bass to pressurize the room you feel it, even the $300k Von Schweikerts don’t have enough bass for such a huge room.
2: Vandersteen’s way too far apart, not enough bass for such a big room not a great showing.
There were a lot of good sounding rooms but very few standouts.
The Borretson setup was very interesting the image was poor way too spread out, and the bass response in the room was very uneven, the clarity was awesome and the system was setup weird, $90k worth of Avik electronics with a Naim CD player?
Also why does their class D amplifiers have the right to cost $100k? Class D generally costs a lot less to produce than linear amplification.
First time heard a Rahido variation that wasn’t too artificial in the top end.
Stunning looking speakers their pricing is obscene for the lower models $30k for a two way monitor.
Surprising was how good the Wilsons were sounding in a few setups mostly the big rooms. The combo of ARC with Sasha DW was very impressive, way better than the Dagastino setups.
The Magicos were universally just boring and lifeless.
The giant F1 step did capture scale beautifully except there was no magic in the midrange and the sound was uninvolving.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Paradigm, T+A dealers