MBL 101E:

MBL 101E loudspeaker up close with colored spotlight

The MBLs were being played WAY LOUD (what? What did you say? I can’t hear you at all!), as usual. The bass seemed a little detached from the rest of the music, and still with the trademark inner-detail-less sound - but also still quite impressive.

Have taken about 2300 photos, comprising 19GB on disk, using two lenses.

Can barely string two words together….. luckily my fingers are able to continue to function normally… [well, depending on your point of view - maybe that isn’t so lucky ]

Metronome’s new ‘Gaia’ turntable in the Lamm / Wilson room

People always ask me what sounds good. I always presume this to mean “… besides the Lamm room.” Their rooms always sound good, and sometimes soundgreat. It must be kind of monotonous, winninig best of show all the time…

To beat the crowds expected tomorrow, we think we’ll sneak over to the VTV show which is a couple of blocks away. Audio Note is there and hopefully a few other systems that we can hear…

OK. Time to process and upload the daily pictures: Day 2 of the Stereophile 2006 Home Entertainment Show

Continuum turntable

Berning amplifier

Peak Consult speakers

Like Montreal, the Berning sounded really nice on the Peak Consult - in control, harmonics, even top to bottom… not a heckuva lot of inner detail though. But it was music!

For awhile we were having concerns about this show… but today things are sounding a lot better. More later.

It was relatively quiet.

That was good for me - I could take lots of photos without disturbing too many people.

We wanted to get through each and every room the first day of the HE 2006 Show - and did except for two arms of three up on the 4th floor, and let’s see, the IsoMike room and another room which was holding formal demos (they had the Kuzma table, not sure what else). I’d say we covered around 80% of the rooms.

A lot of rooms weren’t completely done setting up, even by the end of the day.

The sound was really mixed, nothing overwhelmingly good or bad.

The best rooms so far were the likely suspects…

Lamm / Wilson
Audio Aero / WLM
MBL / MBL
Sonics / Connoisseur
Venture / Concert Fidelity
…
A lot of rooms might start sounding great… or they might putter out and crash into a bizzarro world of weird timbres, awful discontinutities, spectral warps and bright lights on a contagious hangover.

We’ll see!

I mean hear! of course.

Well…, both.

But everything was so cold….

The rooms are a little small here at the show’s Sheraton Gateway Hotel - at least the one we are sleeping in, with unusual accoustics in both upper mids and upper bass areas.

Nice art-deco color scheme though…

It is very cloe to the airport. Out the window of this side of the building, and there are only, really, two sides being tall, wide and thin like this, you can see the airport on the other side of a large parking garage or two:

In the distance there, one can see planes, and planes taking off… rrrrrrrummmmmmbbbbbllllleeeeee

Yep, just like the Alexis Park at CES in Las Vegas…

Except a little more humid and less trees

And LAX is a wee bit busier than the Las Vegas airport….

Noise floor? We don’t need no stinkin’ noise floor. “We got the rrrrrrrrumble baby!” [spoken in Telly Savalas’ voice (Kojak, the Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Hereos…). No? Then try Vin Diesel’s voice ]

It is in L.A. this year.

We will attend. We will listen. We will photograph. We will report.

The HE 2006 show report home page is already setup.

We will, as always, try to post a bunch of pictures and commentary daily during the show.

After the show it will take a few days, but we will try, as always, to continue to make the Audio Federation show reports bigger, better and more honest than any other show report on or off the net:

* The largest number of photos, in 3 different resolutions (500 x 500, 1000 x 800 and 1500 x 1000), each with an animated and/or manual slideshow option… and more.

* Like both room-by-room photo montages as well as long, floor-by-floor marathons.

* Like more commentary on what things actually sounded like - not through rose-colored ear muffs, but what the roomsreally sounded like.

* Like more about what it felt like to be at the show - the emotion, the smells (not usually so good), the crowds….

We want the show report to be the next best thing to being there yourself!

Stereophile has graciously offered our readers a $5 off deal on tickets to the HE 2006 show. To save the 5 bucks, go to Home Entertainment 2006 to register and enter the super secret passcode “audiofederation” when you sign up for tickets online.

While checking out the location of the hotel, it appears to be right next to the airport…

PRO: We will be able to get to the hotel, from the airport, in finite time, i.e. before the show is supposed to be over

CON: The cultural amenities near most airports is necessarily, uh, minimal.

PRO: We will likely be able to locate the hotel just fine, even in the midst of one of the biggest cities in the world

CON: Depending on wind direction, it will either smell of airplane exhaust or we will hear the music only between airliner take offs (Hey! Shades of Alexis Park at CES in Las Vegas, may she rest in peace).

OK, I exaggerate.

I think.

Just being a small town boy, myself, these big cities are both more intimidating and more exciting than they are for many people who are more used to them.

[Stereophile has graciously offered our readers a $5 off deal on tickets to the HE 2006 show. To save the 5 bucks, go to Home Entertainment 2006 to register and enter the super secret passcode “audiofederation” when you sign up for tickets online. ]

Well, it looks like Audio Federation is scheduled to attend the Stereophile Show in L.A. in June. [yes, now that we’ve started to speak of ourselves in the third person - we KNOW we’ve made the big time ]

“I hope it doesn’t suck.”

OK, I just had to get that out of the way.

Stereophile shows are pretty consistant from one to the other. So I think we all know what to expect. [Details? You want details? OK. As a consumer oriented show there are the local dealers who bring in their best stuff and from what I can tell make it sound way better than it does in their showrooms, but that few dealers have either the product lines or the skill or the patience to make these systems really sound great. The manufacturers and distributors who do attend tend to not bring their top-of-the-line stuff because it is a consumer show, and not all consumers are millionaires - which is really kind of too bad from our perspective and we wish the govt. would get back to work on the economy and remedy this, toot sweet].

And as for locale, nothing against L.A. per se, but NYC and San Francisco, previous venues for HE shows, certainly have more glam and more culture from this small town boy’s perspective.

We are still working on the structure of the reports, trying to get to that Ultimate Format. Both the Montreal style and the CES style have some things in their favor. As is typical in my experience, the solution probably involves even more work: perhaps a long flowing textual report [like putting the Montreal Commentaries into one long commnetary, and commenting on every room, and having bookmarkable links to each rooms commentary in this big, long report - kind of like CES but with fewer photos] along with a room by room photo montage, each room on a separate webpage, like Montreal’s room-by-room photo pages.

Hmmmm… was that confusing?

Anyway, nothing is set in bits and bytes until the day after the show, so…. so you’ll have to stay clicked in to see what really happens! [And if you have an opinion about all this one way or the other, or perhaps for something complety different, please let us know].

Hey, Dr. John is supposed to play there! Let’s see, uploading the days’s best photos or seeing Dr. John play? Uh oh.

Though, you know, I haven’t bought a Dr. John album for over 20 years…wonder what he sounds like these days? OK, bye for now, its off to Amazon and who knows where to see what he is up to these last few decades….