Lots of people have written to ask why our big room wasn’t covered in the other show reports.
First, thanks to everyone who did cover the room and is yet to cover the room. We live on the net. We see it. We appreciate it. (And we still read the print zines too of course :-))
Our room, for the first time this year, was packed on Friday and Sunday [the slow days], as well as Saturday. So at least a lot of people there were interested – and many spontaneously went out of their way to complement the system sound [not in the polite “thank you” way but in the “Oh Fudge, You’ve spoiled me!” kind of way]. Just doing our job ma’am and/or sir.
Looking at the lineup of show reporting suspects … We have:
Enjoy the Music only covers a certain number of rooms and they covered our Audio Note room, figuring that their readership is more interested in a $15K System than, and I just now added it up for this post, a $480K system. Well, yeah…. I can see that. Make perfect sense. Darn! 🙂
Stereophile graciously covered our Audio Note Room and our large room. They like the Audio Note room (everybody does, especially when they hear the price) they thought the large room did not, essentially, have enough ‘air’, mentioning cables or positioning as a potential culprit. Well, we had all Jorma Design Prime cables (except on the bass towers) for the digital, which are some of the best cables in the world, if not the best, so that probably wasn’t it. But maybe they had just heard the Nordost ODIN cable demo downstairs and wondered, ‘Hmmmmm…. How can we encourage Audio Federation to put ODIN cables on the system next year so we can hear THAT?’. 🙂
[Seriously, the positioning was also fine but perhaps they noticed that the bass was sometimes turned up a wee bit too high, making the highs seem a little attenuated? It is pretty subtle. We talked about this issue in the report and previous blog post(s) and I think Neli has finally torn up the divorce papers because I convinced her that, although this setup and therefore the concomitant problems, were largely my fault, I could have done stupider things and so she should save the papers for a time when I do something REALLY stupid. Probably won’t have long to wait…[but I can always claim that I will do something even stupider yet, so this defense is flawless :-)]].
OK, as you can see, my ability to be serious is seriously in trouble here today.
Dagogo will probably cover the both rooms. Or at least I think they were in our room. I saw them everywhere – all over the show. Everywhere I looked. Everywhere I didn’t look.
SonicFlare will probably cover at least the large room. They were in the room play cuts of this and cuts of that – one of the more fun times during the show for me.
The Absolute Sound was there in force. We are hoping for a positive report from them.
6moons was there, but I got distracted and I am not sure they got to hear enough, or something familiar enough, to form an impression.
Positive Feedback may have been there – I didn’t see them but I often seem to be out of the room doing our show report when many of our friends choose to stop by.
HiFi+ was there and charmed Neli [it must be that British accent, and I bloody well better start doing it too, hip hip. Oh, who am I foolin’…]. But I do not think they were there in a show reporting capacity.
Well, of course, these are not institutions, but real people, and often just a single person. Steve, Constantine, Jason, Marja, Henk, Bob, Josh, Roy, Dave, Carol, Danny, and a lot more whose camera shots I flub up when my flash goes off right before theirs… and whose writing I read and learn from and try to incorporate (or not incorporate) into my show reports and posts on this Blog. And most of them add commercial marketing information to their show reports, which takes a lot of effort, and, while it can quite boring, can be quite useful because for some reason many, many manufacturers like to keep information secret (stuff, like, oh, the PRICE! for example) unless it is in a show report, in which case it is OK to blab it to the world.
And before I forget, the reports on the forums, which have taken a severe hit when Trelja stopped reporting, seem to be by people who only visited the 1st and 2nd floors. At least it seems that way if you go by the things they are talking about. I think there was a incorrect assumption on their part that this was where the best rooms were. Don’t they know that this show always, in tribute to the White Album, one of the best albums of all times, puts the best stuff on floor Number 9? Apparently not. So everybody, …everybody! Please fill your neighbor in on this. White Album. 9th Floor. Got it.
But seriously, they are hearing things like big MBL amps on big MBL speakers, big BAT amps on Big Wilson,… for the first time. They seem to having a blast, and which of us didn’t when we first heard those big boys? [Well, you know what I mean. And some of them are big boys, aren’t they. Much yang. [ Maybe the key to a great system is balancing yin and yang? [ Or, after 3 days of too loud rooms at a show, maybe it is the removal of all yang. :-)]]].
You just know when you start typing triple-nested levels of narration and jokes it is time to End This Blog Post.
