2010 RMAF Analog Reports + Meet and Greet

Tbg. I could not agree more. The Beat plus Reed plus either the A90 or the Puritas cartridge plus Allnic electronics plus MBL spkrs was one of the nicest systems I heard. I actually preferred the Allnic Puritas over the A90 (slightly). It just seemed a bit less mechanical. Perhaps we were in the Dobbins room at the same time. I would have enjoyed meeting you. In future, A'goners should have a secret handshake or wear a certain flower in their lapels, so as to be identified to each other.

The TW Acustics room was similarly wonderful to experience.

Tbg

The Thales was setup for Friday, but it was setup with the wrong block under it, Jeff could not get the correct VTA range, so I think he decided it was better to not show it for the rest of the weekend.

I liked Steve's room too. He handled it all very well, and his sound was very good.

Tbg and Lewm,

I completely agree with you that the Dobbins/MBL room was extremely good. Steve was kind enough to play two of my LPs while I sat front row, center. I went back to that room four times. I slightly preferred the A90 on "This one's for Blanton" bass/piano and female vocals. The "Beat" sounded awfully good, though it was tough to identify/isolate which components contributed most to the tremendous sound.

The other outstanding room for me was the Walker/TAD CR-1 room but that table just had another big price jump.

What did you guys think of the Durand Talea arm in the Galibier room down the hall?

Name tags should include Audiogon monikers to identify us to each other.

Pcosta, I was told that the Thales was damaged from the beginning and that he had sought to make it sound as good as possible but decided it was far short of what was normal.

Hi Dev,

I'm just beginning to recover from the sleep deprivation we call the Audiofest.

I think it's more appropriate that others chime in on this topic, but my take is exactly what I expected to occur - no clear winner, and how could there really be? This wasn't a shootout after all, and we used two different phono stages in order to accommodate the Soundsmith Sussuro cartridge that Frank brought to the party.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the day was the (scheduled for export only) Artemis Labs phono stage. One could hear all of that great Intact Audio iron in this LCR phono stage. Note that I'm not an Artemis dealer, and also that I'm a big fan of the iron that Dave Slagle winds.

Due to other responsibilites, Frank wasn't able to bring this phono stage to the room before starting time, and everyone worked up a healthy sweat in a room heated by Atma-sphere OTL's, while we worked out the equipment placement in order to eliminate hum from this iron rich phono stage.

It was a matter of shuffling equipment around to keep the Artemis away from the power supply of the Atma-sphere MP-1 preamp - not a trivial task with thick power cords and inconvenient outlet locations.

While working through this, Wally Malewicz gave us a short talk on cartridge quality control. He's been studying sample to sample variance on SRA in various cartridge brands - yet one more reason why I argued against using "identical" cartridges in a session like this. It might lead to conclusions based on false assumptions of cartridge samples being identical.

So, the end result? Quite a bit of beer and Tequilla flowed thanks to Dave Slagle of Intact Audio, new and old friends met, and two very fine tonearms strutted their stuff.

I am honored that I was able to provide the platform for this session. I need to reiterate (especially since I sell both of these arms), that we could easily have included quite a few other arms in this session ... IF we had 6 or 8 hours for this. More than two arms in a three hour session is an unrealistic goal, and I think that the attendees would agree.

We're talking about perhaps doing a phono stage comparison next year.

Lessons learned for next year - nothing shows up on Saturday night that hasn't been fully vetted by Friday night. Time is short, and we need to be ready for show time.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier