Montral Festival Son Image – FSI 2008 Show Gossip
The rumor is that show attendance was down from about 11,000 to 8,000 and the number of rooms down 20% year over year.
Considering that the Canada economy is doing well (oil, the Olympics, their dollar vis-a-vis what is left of ours) one can only think that it is those of us from the lower 50 states that decided to stay home this year.
It also augers perhaps a lean year at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest this fall.
As almost everyone now knows, the Kharmas did not get put out of action by a static electricity discharge as Stereophile reported, but were instead rendered inoperable by user piloting error [hmmmm.. so sound? Turn up the volume all the way. Still no sound? Oh, forgot to press play. Blam! Oh, hmmm… no sound]. No, I’m not saying who it was – but it wasn’t us, thankfully.
Other than that, nothing much to report from afar.
It was not “user error” but juts crappy speakers that use crappy drivers. Nothing else.
Hi Romy,
Good to ‘see’ you here again…
Well, sometimes speakers do fail, those with and without ceramic drivers, but in this case, with the pre-amp at full volume, we can assume that 1) I forget which pre it was, but it is likely generating a lot of distortion at that setting and 2) it is likely to be over-driving the 300 [I presume it was their larger amps] watt Tenor amps at what 7? 10? volts.
Kind of would like the amps to blow a tube or a fuse – but I think those amps are largely solid-state, i.e. not using tubes for the output stage. Even so, I know the Edge solid-state amps will shut down if they are generating excessive output [we know, it saved us once with the big Acapella Triolons 🙂 And in that case it was also user error – though not mine and not Neli’s ;-)].
Anyway, it seems to me that I wouldn’t want any speaker *I owned* to be on the receiving end of what the Kharma speakers were getting at that point. I guess we can ask all Kharma detractors to put their own speakers up for a similar test to see if they survive a similar situation 🙂 Naw, that would be mean of us… 😉
Take care,
Mike.