For those of us who walk back and forth to the Flamingo, or, in fact, anyone who enters the Venetian from the Las Vegas Strip, this is the entrance we, uh, enter. About 1/4 mile of various moving walkways…

This quarter mile… seriously it is boring, so most people look out over the Strip…

This is a photo taken around 6:15pm after the end of the 1st day, from the moving walkway. Colorful, huh? 🙂

This is outside the press registration / pickup on the 4th floor of the Venetian conference center. There used to be some exhibits to see on the 2nd floor. I think there may also have been a couple of mainstream home audio exhibits, however, there was only one room down here this year that I could find that might be considered high-end audio [fine line, I know]

And so we start our journey there…

Lots of photos, about 4000 I think [we will have an exact number sometime later today] and most will go up on the site: in the Show Galleries if not in this blog.

Stereophile is doing a post for every component – Google likes this sort of thing. But if we do that then this show report will be about 1000 to 1500 posts long. So…. maybe just one post per room?

Yes, I will talk about the sound. And Neli heard a lot of these rooms this year, so I’ll try and include her observations when they do not exactly coincide with mine.

You know, the way I think of the sound of a system is as a list of attributes where the system falls short of ‘perfection’, how far an attribute is from perfection, and in what ways it manifests this imperfection. Sometimes, hopefully, some attributes may be better than ‘perfect’, i.e. they are exceeding the expectations one might have for a mythical perfect system [usually this starts taking into account emotional aspects, or the inherent technological limitations being overcome in some way, etc] .

Problem is that posting the list of attributes where the system falls short of perfection – which is all one can say about 90%+ of the rooms, comes off as being more negative than I would like.

Jonathan Valin’s approach [who is the only other person who talks about the sound] consists of finding something good to say [usually] no matter how vacuous, and then a couple of general negatives [unless he likes the sound in which case it seems it has no negatives]. Besides the fact that his idea of perfection does not attribute as much weight to the subtleties of the sound as mine does, I am just not a person who can make up vacuous positives for bad sounding systems and ignore negatives of the good sounding ones. It’s a curse, I know 🙂

I’ve already tried the film noir detective approach – which came off badly for most people [it was fun for me tho :-)]. And here I am reading another detective novel. And unfortunately this one isn’t Stephanie Plum or Lisa Lutz’s Izzy Spellman, which might be kind of fun to intersect with a show report. 🙂

All this is to say that I will indeed talk about the sound, however, I am just not sure how I am going to put it all yet… 🙂

… because I do not have time and think I already know in which ways they are good…

Over on 30, the $50K 50 watt Audio Power Labs on the Von Schweikert VR5 Signature… very nicely dynamic, very well controlled, good harmonic color and detail. Very nice and open in a large-scale-from-4-foot-tall speaker kind of way.

On floor 30 too, CH Precision electronics on the Magico Q3. This is the epitome of that very controlled, dynamic, detailed, fairly linear responses, fairly soulless presentation we called the ‘gee-whiz’ sound a few shows ago [and still do], but the CH Precision amps [no, apparently this was the Luxman M-600A stereo amp] are able to control these hard to drive Q3 speakers better, I think, than any other amps I have heard with these speakers [several], especially in terms of the control over the speakers [not running out of steam] and with sufficient micro-dynamics so that it comes off sounding much closer to real music. Thing about the gee-whiz sound is that they are fun, I think, although lacking in emotional involvement and kind of bereft of any kind of drug-like out-of-body experience potential. I thought it was a lot of fun, in fact.