Top Secret ASCII-encoded message dated: 4/20/2006

Under no circumstances may this information get into the hands of hotels or nervous exhibitors.

It is only through the utmost care and stealth, and the slience of you, the reader, can the Mixhibitors live on to create uber systems out of what they consider to be the crude parodies found in rooms at high-end audio shows throughout the world.

As a reminder: The Mixibitors are a group of fanatical audiophiles who live to form sudden, temporary teams very late at night at various shows in order to, with the utmost care and subterfuge, move components from one exhibitor’s room to another’s (usually large) room, mixing and matching the very best components to create Ulimate Systems and, thereby, the Ultimate Listening Experiences. Finally, in the wee hours, they must, with their last ounces of strength, return everything to their original rooms and systems, verifying that everything works as well as it did the previous day, as well as appears the same (this year, they almost ran out of the synthetic dust they use to sprinkle over everything to replace the dust that was displaced during all the moving - it was a dusty show).

Exact numbers of the Mixibitor membership are only available on a need to know basis. And since nobody does need to know this, nobody knows just how many there are in the world. There have been cases when groups of them, unbeknownst to each other, have hit a show at the same time. In cases like this there have been only minor dissagreements about what uber systems to build - it being obvious to everyone but the exhibitors themselves - and it has often been observed that more substance abuse than normal occurs under these circumstances.

This show was a nice change for Mixibitors, as there were not an excessive number of widely unbalanced systems in Montreal. But Mixibitors will be Mixibitors, so the itinerary went like this:

The big WAVACs from the big Verity Lohengrin room went down to the big Avalon Eidolon Diamond room, replacing the VTL amps. To replace the WAVACs there was a fight to see if it would be the new Berning monoblocks or the Nagra solid-state amps. As usual when there is a tie like this in the voting, the lightest component wins - so Berning it was. Not to take this lying down, the Nagra contingent moved the Nagra amps down to drive the gigantic Pierre Gabriel speakers.

And, well, that was it! It only took about 20 minutes for these senior system-swapping experts - with a lot of milling around of the Mixibitors who had nothing to lug from one system to another. And the results, they say, were mixed, but if it is one thing they tell me over and over - if you don’t pay the price of having to move these hernia-indiucing works of art - you don’t get to hear, or hear about, how they sound.

Hey, I just wonder how they don’t get caught lugging someone elses mega-buck equipment to and fro late at night. Or maybe it is when they do get caught that they decide to recruit the catchers as new members. Guess I might just start strolling shows late at night, seeing if *I* can be the one to catch them in the act and get to hear these Ultimate Systems.

About 1150 pictures.

Each in 3 resolutions.

Of about 60 rooms (which should be at least 95%+ of the show)

Commentary and impressions of 21 of the best sounding and/or most expensive rooms.

Quick links:

Low Resolution (500 pixels wide)

Low Resolution (1000 pixels wide)

High Resolution (1500 pixels wide)

Enjoy!

The photos of FSI 2006 Are *Almost* all up on the website. There are 1000+ photos up already, of a little more than 45 rooms. Still have about 10 rooms to go.

The Report: So far only photos.

Each of the 2400 photos is checked for focus and clarity and content. The ones that make it past this check are each Photoshop’ed. by hand.

The Photoshop’ing process involves cropping most photos to remove extra stuff that doesn’t add to the picture while leaving in context. Sometimes this is just ceilings and empty walls, sometimes it is eclipsed components or someone’s face who may not want to be embarrased by having their mug shot plastered all over the web. This reduces the size of the photo so saves dwnloading time by people viewing the photo.

Then the lighting situation in the photo is then modified a little, if necessary.

The photo is then saved in the high-resolution format: usually 1500 pixels wide for landscape and 1400 picxels tall for portrait orientations.

The photos for each room are then arranged in order: room pictures, speaker pictures, rack pictures, component pictures, and finally static display pictures.

They are then added to a HTML page and given the once over to remove photos that are too similar to each other.

Finally some text describing the brands of the components in the room is added and a thumbnail photo is created and added to the master ‘table of contents’ page.

Still to do:

Adding some text for each picture in place of the placeholders ‘The’ ,'’This’ etc. The placeholders were there because setting the default text color in Frontpage is not always sucessful and black text on black background is awful hard to edit, much less read.

Writing a script to automatically generate the lower resolution photos from the high resolution photos, and their associated web pages. This requires some manual labor with Photoshop, because it is a little stupid, but it does the best job quality-wise of rescaling images of any tool that I am aware of. Certainly better than Java.

Then… finally… the real show report with the… commentary.

This year the hard-hitting comments will be outside the main photo montage pages. This is because some manufacturers like to link to our pictures - and the pictures are meant to be of archival quality, so we are good with that. And it is not their fault that the person setting up the room with their stuff made noises instead of music. Then again, maybe their stuff sucks…

In any case - this is the apprach we will take this time. It is the approach we have taken before - and I guess we will see if people (you!) like this approach or the CES 2006 approach better.

OK, back to work!

For those that can’t wait, we are steadily putting up the pictures now - but there is no commentary to speak of and the photos are in a very high-resolution format. These pages will take some time to load. Some pictures may be removed, some added as the report evolves.

After most of the pictures are up we will then add commentary.

Finally we will make a average resolution format version (like the CES 2006 show report) and a low resolution version. We might make these lower res versions earlier if I get a chance to automate the process a little bit better than what Photoshop offers.

Many thanks to Dave Clark at Positive Feedback for pointing out the Photoshop batch processing feature. Just wish the feature worked better….but that’s photoshop for you.

Oh, the high-res report starts here.

Please, everyone, show goers as well as exhibitors, you are welcome to submit your room equipment details and whatever other comments along with the Photo ID number of the picture the comments are associated with. Either post it to the blog or email us directly. Some exhbitors have helped us out with equipment details in previous reports and we are happy to post equipment lists. Commentary in the past has only been Neli’s and mine… but we are willing to try something new (other people’s comments will be clearly marked).

To determine a photo ID number right click on the picture(s) of the room’s picture in Internet Explorer and select Properties from the menu. The photo ID number is the “IMG_xxxx” number at the end of the Adress (URL).

Our show reports focus on sound and pictures. The names of equipment and their prices is of lessor priority to us (we consider it to be more or less brochureware) - but many of our guests do enjoy that stuff too.

Thanks,
Mike.

“The Music’s over. Turn out the lights.”

The truth is even more bizarre than just ‘lights out’.

We woke up this morning, packed up, and left Montreal for home. As we left, we glanced into the rooms and hallways that for the last 3 days contained Brinkmanns and Kharmas and ELACs and 100s of avid audiophiles - playing all kinds of wonderful music - now sitting stark quiet, empty, and with beds and dressers looking for all intents and purposes like empty hallways and ordinary hotel rooms. Shoulda taken a photo just to show you all just how weird and dead things looked - but we were packed and it was time to ‘vacate the premises’.

The show report should be done in a few days, …we hope. We took 2400 photos (13 CDROMs worth), about the same as for CES 2006, but this show was, I *guestimate*, only about 1/3 the size of CES. So hopefully we will be able to go into more depth on a room by room basis.

We’ll see.,,,

Yesterday I used the 50mm f1.4 lens for shooting for most of the day. It is a pain to have to stand accorss the room to take pictures with the thing - but when a picture is taken with it, correctly I mean, it is amazingly sharp and just stands out of the monitor like it was ‘real’ or something.

A good number of those 50mm pictures were a little too dark - I am still learning to use that lens (well, the camera too. I really am an avid audiophile with the desire to take pictures of what I think is really cool and beautful - but little skill at this point). But some look pretty good…

Spent too much time at diner at the La Baguette D’ivoire ‘Fine Asian Cuisine’ about 5 blocks from the hotel. Very good mix of Thai and Vietnamese and Chinese. Yummy. No website, (514) 932-7099.

Got back at midnight and had time to process and put up only a few new pictures on Day Two’s dailies. Try to put some more up now….

It was much busier here yesterday. By 11:00 am you had to wait to get into most (90%)rooms, waiting until the next swell of pople left and you can swqueez in,to slowly move your way to the top as more people left.

For the impatient this doesn’t work very well. You really have to pick and chose a room(s) you want to hear and ’stake them out’ - spending the time to nab that center seat in the sweet spot.

The sound of most rooms has settle down to what it is going to be (except for the rooms where they plan on switching speakers - for examle I was tld that one of the larger rooms will switch the Rockports in for the Avalon Eidolon Viision speakers).

THAT room, …had difficulties, apparently trying to make Avaon sound ‘Impressive’ b rnning them with a BIG VTL amp, and amp whch IMHO has no purpose but to put out large amounts of power, incapable of handliing microdynamics, or more than a few notes at a time for that matter - so the overall effect is one of a ‘compressed and muddled shouting of music’. These people carry excellent product lines - wish they had used a different amp here. These are great speakers - and I guess it is good to know just how bad they CAN sound.

The BIG all McIntosh room, with the lovely big amps and towering linearray speakers, also had difficulties. Tonality is way off here and over there, dynamics are uneven, most notes are starting early or late, and ending in simlar dissarry. Sounded MUUUUCH better in LAs Vegas on the big Dali Megalie speakers.

The other two big rooms downstairs we dissagree on. Neli is more forgivving of he faults of the Jadis-driven Pierre Gabrial speakers room, and I of the Sim Audio Moon-driven Dynaudio room. So more later on this maritial disagreement we we return to iron out this discrepency in good judgement on her part…

Got to hear and take pictures of most of the rooms today. I think we missed about two rooms per floor - mostly because they were too crowded to get into right then. Quite heavy traffic for the first day, seems to me.

The day started at 10:00 am and finished at 9:00pm, but we were pooped at 7:00pm and decided to go eat. Tonight we walked over (no huffing this time, it was only 3 blocks) to Cuisine Indienne. If you like Indian food, this is an excellent restaurant - we have had Indian food at literally 100s of places across the country. Not spicey, unfortunately, but very good.

The sound today was pretty good, but most systems were still just warming up. My expectation now is that there will be a number of ‘good’ sounding systems, but nothing ground breaking or magical.

Key points from the first day’s ‘dailies’: It sounds like the Fidelio people really know how to set up a great show system. The Berning amps can really drive difficult speakers. Little Cabasse speakers seem to be quite good. The Vivid Audio speakers are yet another speaker to join (well, join is not the right word, but it is late) the ranks of speakers that have very, very little box coloration that I can hear.

Sleep. Uh… After the city police and fireengine sirens calm down yet again….Sleep

Make that an hour and 15 minutes. Still have to go down and get our baaaAAAAaaadges.

We hear that ths s the first year that this show is headquartered in the Le Centre Sheraton here in Montreal. It was in the 40s last night, though breezy, as we huffed it to China Town for an… OK… dinner - next time we hopeflly won’t be so hungry that we go into almost the first place we find.

On our walk back we got to wade through a number of hockey fans leaving last night’s game. Maybe Canadians are just more polite than us Yanks, or maybe the $250+ price tags for tickets leaves no money for the consumption of alchohol, or maybe they won the game, but everybody seemed in a very nice mood.

They put us on floor 8, where quite a lot of the exhibits are. Cool! During the night we could hear first one system start up and then another. Seems like once a system is up and functioning, they want to ‘blow out the exhast pipes’ so to speak, and see what the SPL boundries are. [Our room at RMAF is so large, I think the SPLs to ‘blow out the exhaust pipes’ of our system there are way above the SPL limits the Denver Mariot hotel sets. But hey, this is the big city, real estate, and large rooms, is expensive here!]

Which gets me to the next point, these rooms are pretty small. If they are anything like our hotel room, most of them will be about 12 feet by 15 feet plus the entry way. The walls are pretty thick, though, as none kept us up all night with their rock and/or roll…