October 12, 2013 by Michael

RMAF 2013 Day 2 highlights

Yesterday I took the elevator up to the 11th floor in the tower and visited and took photos of all the rooms except our wonderful old room 9030 [too… let’s just say depressing], the old jtinn room [long boring story], and the VTL room [they do not want me photographing their room] on floors 11,10,9,8, 2 and 1. Used the stairs on the way down, of course 🙂 [see previous post a few days ago]. Neli did floors 4 and 5 over at the atrium.

Today we immediately walked over to the 3 rooms in the Hyatt. The rooms had a little bit more of an upscale vibe over there, but spent most of our time at the Wilson Alexandria XLF demo. Then back we walked and after a little farting [for like an hour?] around I visited and photographed all the room on floors 4 and 5 over at the atrium and most of the Mezzanine – and this time it was Neli who searched the tower for good music and good sound.

Whereas yesterday there were two rooms I kind of enjoyed:

The EMM Labs / Sony / IsoMike room
The Magico S1 / Krell room [I Knoooow!?]

Today I enjoyed a few more:

The NVS [modified YG Acoustics, McCormack] room
The PranaFidelity room
The Zu Speakers, Peachtree room

Taking price into account [of course] I thought these rooms had high performance/price ratios.

The theme this year for me was reasonably good sounding solid-state. How weird is that? 🙂

As Thom Mackris (Galibier turntables) sagely mentioned, almost anybody can make a decent sounding tube amp. But it takes real effort and skill to make a decent sounding solid-state amp.

Traffic at this show i.e. the number of audiophiles attended seems to me to be quite a bit less than last year [my guess is half, though most people I talked to were more cautious about the number], but of a higher quality / more interested in actually listening to things as opposed to quickly surfing rooms.

Wilson Alexandria XLF speakers with a pair of their Thor’s Hammer subwoofers on VTL, dCS, and Transparent over at the Hyatt.