I have not and will not be going to all the rooms. But the most impressive small rooms to me, in more order,were the AGD GaN room, the Playback Designs/Tannoy room, The Border Patrol DAC room, the GTT audio room with that Kronos turntable.
The best big rooms so far were the Synergistic Reaearch/Magico demo room (amazing and like magic!), the Audio Experience/Estelon/Krell room, and the Quintessence big Wilson room.
the Quintessence Sonus Fabet room was good. The big Boulder amp in that room certainly demonstrates excellence in dynamics and transients. Soundstage was good. But not as good as their Wilson room in terms of detail and imaging.
The Klipsch Jubilee room was horrible unless you want your listening room to be an arena and lose your hearing. Just no concern for demonstrating any details, soundstage or imaging. Just blasting you out of the room with death metal. What are they thinking?
I was disappointed that the SVS room is dedicated to home theater as I was interested to see how it would do with music and a demo in that regard with their app, which is a feature that REL doesn’t have.
Special mention to Magnepan. I met Wendell and Galina again and he demos the LRS+. Again very impressive as the original LRS was 3 years ago. A big bargain by itself IF you have proper power, subwoofers and can pull them away from the wall. Using aftermarket stands and the Mike Powell silver fuse and jumper upgrade is a plus too.
Also, met Kevin Deal from Upscale. Nice talk with him about the Russian tube situation He told me that there is no embargo on Russian made tubes being sent over to the US and reiterated that that those factories are US company owned. So he doesn’t see (so far?) a situation when the supply of tubes made in Russia by the US based company will end .
Met Bill Parrish at GTT Audio. A pleasure to meet and talk to him!
I did go to the Atma-Sphere room. It was good. Not at the top of my list. But I may revisit that room today/Sunday.
Today I will wrap up and go to the Avant-garde room and back to some of the big rooms again.
