[Yes, I know I posted this also on FaceBook. But I just thought that this status / update needed to be in both places]

The RMAF 2009 Show Report is about 60% – about 2/3 – done with over 1500 photos so far. Trying to keep the show report lively and informative. This is a little difficult.

I can talk about how so-and-so was friendly and knowledgeable, which some reports do, but that starts playing the ‘praise our friends rooms’ game that many zines play, and frankly, just about everyone is friendly and knowledgeable, but I just don’t quite remember all of their names… all 400+ of them.

We tried talking about the sound – but the vast majority of audiophiles have been lied to so long that they wither don’t believe anything they read, or they believe sound quality is all in the ‘ear of the beholder’ and nothing is any better than anything else. Ugh.

So we post facts and try to be helpful, trying to provide an overview of this very large number of products that we are going to be showing several thousand photos of.

3700 attendees, 470 exhibitors, 150+ rooms… wonder how many see the high-end audio part of CES? My guess is that it would be about the same number of attendees per room… but CES has over 200 rooms.

Sometimes I hate show reports. Usually about now in fact. I am about 60% done and get so tired of Photoshop and, boy, do I take too many photos or what.

Hope people are liking the background story on the rooms at RMAF on Spintricity. Still working on trying to make it interesting to all you experts as well as to the newbie who is kind of trying to scope out what is what in this kind of complex hobby we have here.

There have been a few rooms that I have heard in the past that… were in previous years far from the mainstream preferences in terms of their sound… but this year sounded quite musical.

These were the Rethm, the Daedalus and the Affirm Audio (previously Maxxhorn) rooms.

For me, the sharp rolloff and lack of harmonics typical of the Rethm speakers were just not going to be enjoyable by most people after lengthy listening. But this year, and perhaps it was because of the use of the AMR digital being a very laid back type of digital playback component, it had enough harmonics and roundedness to the notes that, in addition to the Rethm’s natural midi-dynamics strengths, made it quite a nice sounding system.

In past years, I would go into the Daedalus room and the system would be blasting and the room would be empty and the eXemplar CD player would be playing and it would sound bright and uneven and disconnected…

This year, not sure what they did, but the sound was much more melodic and mainstream. Still big sounding, still capable of rocking out, but there was flow and top-to-bottom coherency and even-handedness. This was a system where, if someone told me they fell in love with it, I could with a clear conscious tell them to go buy it, knowing that they were not going to be doing their spouses and housemates in, ear first.

Last year, I thought one of the Feastrex driver speakers sounded quite good, and the other 2 did not. That these other two had the same problems that the Rethm speaker typically has, described above. One of these, the Affirm Audio (previously Maxxhorn) speakers, however this year sounded much more tuneful and melodic. Again, like the other 2 rooms above, I feel that if a system puts out a more mainstream sound, but keeps its inherent strengths [in this case, single driver coherency] then it is a win-win for everybody.

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Although there are those who will put up with the deficiencies of a non-mainstream sound, like sliced-off notes and harmonic deserts [:-)], in order to have access to the strengths they perceive of a sound [perhaps midi-dynamics and single-driver coherency, or perhaps a big big big sound], I think even they [these crazy people obsessed with a specific aspect of sound above all others :-)] would be happier if the system sounded more like real music [or, if ‘real’ is too strong a word, then ‘more enjoyable and accessible’].

And I can’t help but think that their friends and family would agree with me.