Anyone going to the NY Audio show today to Sunday

I went for a total of 14 hours listening to every room in contention for my
personal best of show at least 3x over 2 days:

Top tier in alphabetical order:
Burmester/Genesis
Coincident Technology
D'agostino/Alexia/MBL (and with no room treatments!)
TAD with Viola electronics and Feickert turntable
Zellaton

Runners up:
Joseph Audio Pulsars
Sanders
VPI room with VPI table, Joseph Audio Pearls and VAC Citation amps

Rooms that I expected to sound good but did not:
Vivid room
KEF Blades in Audio Doctor room (although the Kronos table looked great and
I bet would sound better with the proper set up)

Room that I could not get to and therefore cannot pass judgment:
MBL

Best value
KEF LS50 ----tremendous value @$1,500

Hi Chayro,

Yes, I'm Jeff Joseph. It's too bad you weren't able to get a seat, judging the sound balance from a standing position is unpredictable. Perhaps you were stuck in a bass null. The bass in the seats was excellent, I had many ask me if we were using a subwoofer ! We weren't.

I have the Charlie Daniels album too, I bought it on Harry Weisfeld's recommendation, along with Frankie Laine and the Zubin Mehta interpretation of The Planets.

In short, disappointed. Being an enthusiast, I love to look at components and admire craftsmanship, but sound-wise, not much "wowed" me. 80-85% of what I heard left me saying, "I want to go home and listen to my system".

Best sounds, in no particular order:

Harbeth, Red Wine, Bricasti
Brodmann
Martin Logan CLX
Innersound

Biggest disappointments:

KEF Blade, Chord, some 'table that had counter-rotating platters. (considering the $, worst sound at show).
Coincident speakers/amplification.
Raidho.
Many others as escaping me at this time. I'll chime in
if I remember.

Also, one major disappointment that MANY rooms were guilty of: LOUSY MUSIC PLAYED TOO LOUDLY. Nothing chases me out of a room faster than anything electronic. This includes guitar, bass guitar or anything synthesized (i.e. "club" music). This is not how to determine if a system can accurately reproduce recorded acoustic sounds. IMO.

One thing i noticed about the Dan D'Agostino Momentum Preamplifier, it has tone controls.
It has a bass and treble control and a tone defeat control if you dont want to use them.

I agree that the vast majority of rooms were very expensive yet mediocre. The only room that really stood out for me was the LessLoss room, where I felt I was listening to and really enjoying music.

I also felt the Coincident room was creating music, although it did not sound on par with the Kaiser Kaweros in the LessLoss room. (Nor should it have -- the Coincident equipment is substantially less expensive and was stuffed into a smaller room.)

In most other rooms, I felt like I was hearing audio systems being put through their paces. This applied to the Wilson rooms, the Audio Doctor/KEF Blade room, and the Woodbridge Audio/GamuT room. By the way, I did not like the Sound by Singer room. I used to own VAC gear and love it. Maybe the Raidho speakers were the issue, but the VAC/Raidho system Singer had on display sounded very artificial and "plasticky" to me both times I heard it.

That said, I assume that room acoustics were partly to blame in some rooms. There were quite a few rooms with speakers that were clearly too big for the space. Those massive GamuT speakers in the small Woodbridge Audio room looked and sounded ridiculous in that space. The Vivids also seemed way too big for the room they were in.